Natural Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia 29The sage Enmeduranki in turn shared with “the men of Nippur, Sip-
par, and Babylon” the knowledge he had obtained from the gods, and the
text continues with the promise that the scholar, the one who knows,
who guards the secrets of the great gods, will bind his son whom he loves
with an oath before Šamaš and Adad by tablet and stylus and will in-
struct him.^42
This brief look at the subject of “knowledge”—and more specifi cally
and problematically, “secret knowledge”—barely scratches the surface of
available sources with which one might more thoroughly investigate the
cuneiform scribal phenomenon. Perhaps we can observe here, however,
that the object of knowledge that seems to concern the scribes, while
ultimately referring to the phenomena of heaven and Earth, is found in
the contents of texts. Viewed in this way, what one knows is not nature,
but texts. The expressions “secret knowledge” and “belonging to the for-
bidden things of the gods” referred to the sanctity of texts, not of nature.
William Eamon has described the “secrets of nature” as “one of the most
prominent and most powerful metaphors in the history of science.”^43 In
his analysis, “secret” knowledge becomes a way of expressing not only a
deeper knowledge of the phenomena beyond our ordinary sense percep-
tions but also comments on the privileged status of the one who has come
to know the deeper meaning of nature. From a Mesopotamian point of
view, the deeper meaning would refer, I think, both to the knowledge of
the signifi cance of the phenomena as omens (that is, the material con-
tained in the texts) and the understanding of what and when to observe
phenomena deemed ominous. As shown above, Enu ̄ma Anu Enlil pre-
sented a systematic organization of celestial phenomena, refl ecting at least
a rudimentary understanding of the behavior of the moon, sun, planets,
and fi xed stars. Such privileged knowledge was clearly a cumulative prod-
uct necessitating development over time, even though it was claimed to
have originated “in the mouth of Ea.”
As seen in several examples cited above, the colophons make it clear
that access to the tablets containing secret, exclusive knowledge was lim-
ited to persons termed mu ̄dû, “the one who knows.” Contrariwise, the one
who had not entered the privileged group of the knowledgeable was la
mu ̄dû, “the one who does not know.” An interdiction against the la mu ̄dû
is further specifi ed in the colophons with the statement that for the unin-
formed to see the tablet belonged to the forbidden things of one or more
of the gods. This taboo seems to go back to Middle Babylonian times in a
text giving a list of gods and their divine symbols.^44 The latest sources in
which this interdiction is expressed are the astronomical texts of the Hel-