Back to school: gimme all your lobin'

Let us start with some anatomy! It was of the utmost importance for a full-fledged bārû to possess the necessary knowledge about the anatomy of a sheep’s liver (Fig. 1). Otherwise the message sent by the gods could not be ‘read’, and that would be disastrous. The Old Babylonian clay model shows a few clearly identifiable parts. Of course the liver consists of more parts than is shown on the clay model. If you are really keen on knowing all parts of a sheep’s liver there is a nice online 3D model showing the anatomy of a sheep’s liver.

To start things off, the liver consists of several lobes, among which the left and right lobe. The shape of the left lobe of the clay model is a bit thinner and longer compared to the right lobe, which is wider and shorter. In Mesopotamia the terminology was a bit different (Fig. 2) because they did not speak English or Latin, of course. The inspector (bārû) would call these lobes “the ‘right and left wings’, and the caudate lobe the ‘middle of the liver’. Antonio Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Martins, and Carolina Martins, “History of liver anatomy: Mesopotamian liver clay models”, Hepato Pancreato Biliary 15 (2013): 322-323.