4,000-year-old tablets reveal prophecy about a king's death

Lunar eclipses were omens of death, destruction and pestilence - this is what several ancient civilisations, including Babylonia and parts of Mesopotamia, believed. Now, 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets found more than 100 years ago in what is now Iraq also prove the same. They were placed in the British Museum's collection between 1892 and 1914. The four tablets have finally been deciphered and the details have been written in a paper published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. The four clay tablets "represent the oldest examples of compendia of lunar-eclipse omens yet discovered," Andrew George, an emeritus professor of Babylonian at the University of London, and Junko Taniguchi, an independent researcher, said in the paper.

The tablets delve into how omens were predicted based on the time of night, movement of shadows and the date and duration of eclipses. The predictions made included major things like the downfall of an empire and even a king's death. According to one omen, if "an eclipse becomes obscured from its center all at once [and] clear all at once: a king will die, destruction of Elam."

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Another omen predicts the downfall of Subartu and Akkad which were part of Mesopotamia at the time. According to it, if "an eclipse begins in the south and then clears: downfall of Subartu and Akkad."

Astrology predictions made in ancient times

Andrew George told LiveScience that some of the predictions made by the astrologers were likely based on their personal experiences. However, most of the predictions actually linked eclipse characteristics to various omens, he noted.

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The authors state in the paper that people in Babylonia and Mesopotamia strongly believed that celestial events were signs of something about to happen and that God had placed these signs carefully to tell people about the future. "Those who advised the king kept watch on the night sky and would match their observations with the academic corpus of celestial-omen texts," the paper says.

However, the belief wasn't blind and the kings ordered an inquiry if a grave prediction was made. "If the prediction associated with a given omen was threatening, for example, 'a king will die,' then an oracular enquiry by extispicy [inspecting the entrails of animals] was conducted to determine whether the king was in real danger," George and Taniguchi wrote.

Based on the findings, people performed rituals to ward off evil and avoidbad omen.