Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia 15his special text corpus was designated ba ̄rûtu, an abstract noun also used
as a term for the craft of this kind of diviner. The scholar trained in the
interpretation of unprovoked omens was designated simply “scribe” or
“literatus.” By Cicero’s classifi cation of divination in De Divinatione I vi
12 (also xviii 34 and xxxiii 72), both Mesopotamian forms of divination
would qualify as “artifi cial,” as opposed to “natural.” “Natural” divina-
tion referred to the technique of communication with the gods such as
practiced by a prophet or seer, who obtained the divine word “directly”
through ecstatic trance and auditory hallucination. Indeed, such proph-
ets and ecstatics are attested in cuneiform literature as a wholly separate
group from the scholars. The distinguishing feature of divination by pro-
voked and unprovoked omens, then, was that it was an exercise in reason,
in which the diviner deduced the interpretation of signs from the schol-
arly reference works in which he specialized.
The unprovoked omens were separated by type, arranged in series,
and standardized as to tablet number and contents. The series are en-
titled by their fi rst words as: Šumma a ̄lu, “If a city” (daily life omens);
“Zaqı ̄qu, Zaqı ̄qu, dMA.MÚ, god of dreams” (dream omens); Alandimmû,
“If the form” (physiognomic omens); “When the diagnostician is on his
way to the patient’s house” (medical diagnostic omens); Šumma izbu, “If
the abnormality” (malformed fetus omens); and Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil, “When
Anu Enlil” (celestial omens), which contained four sections for lunar,
solar, planets and stars, and weather omens. These various omen series
were written, copied, and commented upon over the course of centuries,
roughly from the fourteenth century BCE to the last centuries BCE in
Hellenistic Babylonian scribal centers. Some of them have even earlier
forerunners to the later formulated and standardized versions. Though the
remainder of this discussion will focus on the celestial omens, it should be
clear that celestial divination differed from the other series just enumer-
ated only in the location of the fi eld of its phenomena, that is, the sky. The
fact that celestial phenomena turned out to be more amenable to predic-
tion than the moles on a person’s face or the appearance of lizards on the
wall of one’s house was of no consequence as far as the Mesopotamian
scribes’ view of divination was concerned.
In the complete and standardized form known from Nineveh library re-
censions, Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil comprises seventy tablets devoted to “celestial”
signs, that is, visible or anticipated phenomena occurring in the sky during
the day or night. Thus, weather phenomena, especially cloud formations
and other features of the daytime sky, also counted as celestial phenomena.
Phenomena of the moon (such as duration of lunar visibility, halos, eclipses,
and conjunctions with planets and fi xed stars) are collected in the protases