Newly Deciphered, 4,000-Year-Old Cuneiform Tablets Used Lunar Eclipses to Predict Major Events

“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.

Although the British Musuem acquired the tablets between 1892 and 1914, this recent breakthrough marks the first time the cuneiform has been completely translated and linked to a system of astronomical predictions.

“They are all found to bear witness to a single text,” write George and Taniguchi in the study, “which organizes the omens of lunar eclipse by time of night, movement of shadow, duration and date.”

This sophisticated system of lunar analysis led to highly detailed predictions. In one example, the tablet claims that if “an eclipse becomes obscured from its center all at once [and] clear all at once, a king will die, destruction of Elam,” referring to a region that is now part of modern-day Iran.

Another omen suggests that if an eclipse occurs on a certain day of the month, “a dearth of straw will occur; there will be losses of cattle.”

As George tells Live Science, “The origins of some of the omens may have lain in actual experience—observation of portent followed by catastrophe.” But most omens were probably linked to eclipse events through a purely theoretical or speculative system.

A king or similarly elite Babylonian leader would have advisers, well versed in these astronomical systems, watch the night sky for signs. In the case of a particularly worrying omen, such as one that predicted the king’s death, they would likely turn to reading animal entrails for corroboration.

“This eclipse is … set aside for testing,” the newly translated cuneiform reads at one point, indicating the need for another round of rigorous omen-checking before the future could be foretold.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a reporting intern for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.