CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MESOPOTAMIAN
ASTRAL SCIENCE
David Brown
CELESTIAL DIVINATIONT
he Sun, Moon, and Venus are identified as gods in our very earliest written sources
(Brown 2000 : 246 , § 1 ). Various stars, or star groups, and the next two brightest
planets,^1 Jupiter and Mars, are alluded to as gods in Sumerian literary sources, which
broadly speaking reflect the intellectual achievements of the end of the third millennium
BCat the latest, even if attested in younger copies.^2 The stars were used in a practical
way by farmers,^3 and are referred to in the earliest incantations.^4 Mercury and Saturn
were likely to have been discovered after the bulk of the constellations had been
named (Brown 2000 : 75 – 6 ). There are no celestial omens attested from the third
millennium, although it is clear that a form of divination from the heavens was widely
accepted in scribal circles.^5 Further study of this material is desirable. It is from the
Old Babylonian period (c. 1700 BC) that our earliest celestial omens appear, for example:
‘An eclipse in its middle part; it became dark all over and cleared all over: The king
will die, destruction of Elam (a foreign land to the East).’^6
Examples, describing eclipses on days of the month upon which eclipses cannot
happen, indicate that from the earliest times astral omens were not collections of
observations, correlated with simultaneous happenings on earth, but were the literate
creations of certain scholars who embellished them with historical allusions, internal
cross-referencing, word-play, and a raft of cultural prejudices. (An analysis is offered
in Brown 2000 : Ch. 3 .) The simple associations between a planet, Mars say, and the
portending of ill, show that the linkage between celestial event and earthly prog-
nostication bore little or no relationship to observation. The planets, the constellations,
and certain phenomena had long since been categorised and assigned benefic or malefic
values. Eclipses, for example, tended to predict ill for the monarch. Indeed, virtually
all celestial phenomena were believed to provide information on the future of the
monarchy or the land. Other forms of divination catered to the needs of the private
individual. In common with all forms of divination, the prognostications were not
real predictions as to what would happen, but rather of what might happen if the
appropriate counter measures were not enacted, and a system of apotropaic rituals
ran parallel to the omen-interpreting industry.