CHAPTER 1

(ca. 770 B.C. ) or by his counsellor, the priest Petosiris, and carried to Babylon a generation later, when the Ethiopians invaded Egypt and many Egyptians escaped to that town.^
Mesopotamian beginnings
However, when men learned to read cuneiform writings and hieroglyphs, Babylonian priority in the field was established beyond dispute, and orientalists were able to antedate the real beginnings of astrology by many thousands of years. Astrology originated in Babylonia and Assyria, was handed on to Egypt and from there to Greece, Persia, India and the Far East. The Chinese, too, are indebted to the Babylonians, and the astrolo- gical prophecies discovered in China seem to be mere copies from the library of the Assyrian King Assurbanipal in Nineveh.^ Those of us who have driven through the Syrian desert at night or have visited the ruins of Babylon, will not find it difficult to
believe that Babylonia was and is the ideal country for star- gazing. Nowhere in the North- ern hemisphere is the sky clearer or more beautiful, and not even the profusion of the Southern sky is nearly as enticing (see Plate III).
True, the oldest extant Baby- lonian prophecies were dream interpretations rather than as- trological predictions. They are contained in the glorious Gilga- mesh epic, which is believed to have been written in about 4000 B.c.^ In this epic, Gilgamesh
9. Head of the giant Hum- baba, formed of intestines (British Museum). Humbaba played a great role in Assyrian divination.
1 William Tucker: Principes d'astrologie scientifique (Paris 1939), pp. 11-12.
2 Paul Couderc: L'Astrologie (Paris 1951 ) p. 91.
' Alfred Guillaume: Prophetie et Divination chez les Semites (Paris 1950) p. 12.
SHORT HISTORY OF THE ART OF PROPHECY 53
prepares himself for the final struggle against his enemy Enkidu, whose approach he has seen in a dream. His mother prophesies that their struggle will result in inseparable friendship, and this is what eventually happens. The real point of the story is, no doubt, to stress the value of peaceful co-existence between the Sumerians, the ancient rulers of the country, and the Semites from the desert who had taken up residence in Akkad (Plate V).
The Babylonians looked upon the legendary Sumerian King Enmenduranna or Enmeduranki, who was said to have lived before the Flood, as the real founder of the art of divination. He was regarded not only as a great law giver who codified the rules of prophecy, but as a leading prophet in his own right. Interpreters of signs were called the "sons of Enmeduranki". Detailed prophecies have been known since the First Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2500 b.c.) by which time the art of prophecy had become highly developed. These prophecies generally bear the name of the king under whom they were made, and it seems likely that the kings themselves acted as prophets, particularly since most of the prophecies deal with their own persons. Still, all kings had their sages to assist them — men of action need men of thought to support them. But though the gods themselves inspired the prophets, there was no real reliance on them. The future could only be probed objectively according to fixed rules.
Hepatoscopy
The most common method used was hepatoscopy, literally the inspection of the liver. The Babylonians used the liver — and in fact the liver of sheep — rather than the heart or other organs for divination, simply because they looked upon it as the seat of life. Evidently this large and highly vascular organ impressed them more than any other. Similar ideas are still held by primitive races in Borneo, Burma, Uganda, who also use the livers of pigs, goats, and chickens to divine favourable or unfavourable omens for the future.^ The Babylonians were apparently not so much interested in the quantity of the hepatic blood as in its quality,
^ G. Contenau: La Divination chez les Assyriens et les Babyloniens (Paris 1940) p. 237.
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