De'liver' the message

The future: unknown and uncertain. Many people, young and old, ancient and modern, attempt to figure out what the future has in store for them. Even the ancients tried to foresee what the gods intended, because divinities’ moods could easily change.

In ancient Mesopotamia, different divinatory methods were used. Next to astronomy, something called ‘hepatoscopy’ was one of the main methods. Hepatoscopy involved sacrificing a sheep to retrieve its liver and inspecting it to ‘read’ messages from the gods (Fig. 1, bottom left). Morris Jastrow Jr., Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (New York; London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1911), 148; 162. It is a sub branch of extispicy, whereby all entrails are studied. Texts and models concerning this practice are attested from the second millennium BC onwards. An animal, usually a sheep, was sacrificed and its entrails were examined by an inspector, called a bārû Matthew T. Rutz, “The Archaeology of Mesopotamian Extispicy: Modeling Divination in the Old Babylonian Period,” in Archaeologies of Text: Archaeology, Technology, and Ethics, eds. Matthew T. Rutz and Morag M. Kersel (Oxford; Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2014), 101-102, 105. Looking for weird parts or other idiosyncrasies, the diviners could deduce the will of the gods. Marc Van de Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East: ca. 3000-323 BC. Third Edition (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 281. It was believed that the soul of the god to whom the sacrifice was made became intertwined with the soul of the sacrificed animal. According to the Mesopotamians, the liver represented the seat of the soul and was seen as the source of blood. As blood was associated with life, the liver equated with life and soul. Morris Jastrow Jr., Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (New York; London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1911), 150. Because the soul of the god and the animal were linked, the bārû could, by inspecting the sheep’s liver, ‘read’ the soul of the god, and, in turn, deduce what kind of future the god had in store. Morris Jastrow Jr., Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (New York; London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1911), 148; 162.

For a Mesopotamian king it was important to know, for example, whether the gods were in favor of the king conquering an adjacent kingdom. Divine disapproval equaled defeat. So, kings took diviners with them on military campaigns to see whether the gods still supported the campaign (Fig. 1). Ulla Koch, “Sheep and Sky: Systems of Divinatory Interpretation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, eds. Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),461.

For example, a Mesopotamian king called Aššurnaṣirpal II (883-859 BC) once went on a military campaign. On the bottom left section of the relief depicting his military camp (figure 5), you can see that an animal has been sacrificed and its liver is being examined. Apart from political reasons, divination was also used for other events, such as the building of a temple or for educational purposes. Morris, Jastrow Jr., Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (New York; London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1911), 143.

The inspection of the liver, hepatoscopy, was not only practiced in Mesopotamia, but also in other cultures. Curious about the way the Greeks and Etruscans inspected the liver? Click below! Otherwise let’s continue with an example of a query from an indecisive Mesopotamian king.