Recently deciphered 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets used lunar eclipses to predict major events

Latest News

Reported by the Smithsonian Magazine:

“There will be an attack on the land by a locust swarm,” one omen reads. “A large army will fall,” says another. “A king will die,” a third predicts.

Ancient Babylonians made these dark prophecies based on celestial divination, linking the alignment of the stars, planets and moon to major earthly events like pestilence and destruction, according to scholars who recently made breakthroughs in translating cuneiform tablets housed at the British Museum in London.

“Imagine you’re [an ancient] farmer—you’re out there, and all of a sudden [the] sky goes dark,” Bradley Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University who was not involved in the research, told Smithsonian magazine’s Dan Falk earlier this year. “It can only be a message from the gods.”

Lunar eclipses—when Earth’s shadow falls on the surface of the full moon—were thought to be particularly important indicators of the fates that would befall ancient Babylonia and surrounding empires, often portending the death of a king. According to NASA, the Babylonians learned how to predict lunar eclipses in advance and would sometimes appoint “substitute kings … who would bear the brunt of the gods’ wrath” while the real ruler remained unharmed.

The four tablets analyzed in the new study date to the middle and late Old Babylonian periods (circa 1894 to 1595 B.C.E.), some 4,000 years ago. They are the “oldest examples of compendia of lunar-eclipse omens yet discovered,” write co-authors Andrew George, an emeritus expert on Babylonian at the University of London, and Junko Taniguchi, an independent researcher, in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.

The tablets most likely come from Sippar, an ancient city southwest of modern-day Baghdad that flourished during the Babylonian Empire, George tells Live Science’s Owen Jarus.

Read more here.