Researchers have finally deciphered a 4,000-year-old Babylonian clay tablet that contains ominous omens of doom and ruin.
The four clay tablets, dating back about 4,000 years, are believed to have been made in the ancient Babylonian city of Sipparan, southwest of modern-day Baghdad, Iraq.
“Swarms of locusts will ravage the land.”
The Babylonian stone tablets were written in cuneiform, the oldest known writing system, developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia around 1000 BC. 3,400 By about 3300 BCE. The term “cuneiform” comes from the Latin cuneus meaning “wedge” and forma meaning “shape,” and refers to the wedge-shaped shapes drawn with a pointed stylus on soft clay tablets.
The British Museum acquired the tablet sometime between 1892 and 1914, but it has never been fully translated until now.
Translation of ancient artifacts has been a recent Journal of Cuneiform StudiesThis paper Andrew GeorgeProfessor Emeritus of Babylonian Languages at the University of London Junko TaniguchiIndependent Researcher.
The study, titled “Ancient Babylonian eclipse omen tablets from the British Museum”, states that the artefacts “are the oldest known summary of eclipse omens yet discovered and provide important new information about astronomical divination among the peoples of southern Mesopotamia in the early second millennium BC”.
“They all turned out to attest to a single document that organized the precursors of lunar eclipses by time of night, shadow movement, duration and date,” the paper states.
The Babylonians were deeply committed to astrology. Invented 12 Zodiac Signs and Horoscopes.
The Babylonians recorded the movements of the heavens, the stars, and the planets, and recognized patterns in them: they believed that celestial phenomena were divine signs from the gods, and could predict joyous or disastrous events.
One of the most important celestial phenomena for ancient peoples was the lunar eclipse, the falling of the Earth’s shadow on the face of the full Moon. The Babylonians were able to predict lunar eclipses with a fair amount of accuracy for their time.
The Babylonians believed “events in the sky were coded signs placed there by the gods as warnings about the future prospects of people on earth,” George and Taniguchi write in their paper. “Advisers to the king monitored the night sky and cross-referenced their observations with scholarly sources on celestial omens.”
According to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)The Babylonians believed that a lunar eclipse meant that some bad omen relating to the king would occur.
The Babylonians went so far as to appoint a proxy king who would fall victim to the wrath of the gods in place of the real king, only for the proxy king to be reportedly killed so that the omens were always correct.
tablet Claim “When a solar eclipse suddenly disappears from its center, [and] “In one fell swoop the sun would shine, the king would die and Elam would be destroyed,” he said, referring to the area in present-day Iran.
According to the prophecy, if “the eclipse begins in the south and then clears,” it will lead to “the fall of Subartu and Akkad,” referring to two other regions at the time.
Another Sign Warn It was said that if a solar eclipse occurred on a certain day of the month, “there would be a shortage of straw and the loss of livestock.”
“Swarms of locusts will ravage the land,” one prophecy states.
The text on the stone tablet predicts that if a lunar eclipse occurs, “a great army will fall.”
George said Live Science“The origin of some omens may have been in actual experience, the observation that omens were followed by catastrophes.”
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