Archaeologists finally decode 4,000-year-old tablet – and it warns, ‘the king will die’

• Scholars deciphered the inscriptions on 4,000-year-old tablets 100 years after they were originally discovered.

• The signs on the tablets threaten tragedies, including famine, plagues, and invasions.

• Mesopotamian civilizations viewed lunar eclipses as a warning of impending evil.

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.

“The king will die.”

Not exactly something you want to read on an old tablet if you’re any kind of superstitious. But it’s one of the many clues a team of archaeologists is finally reading when they decipher a collection of 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets – a century after they were discovered.

In a paper published in Journal of Cuneiform StudiesExperts described and translated a total of 73 cuneiform omens originating from ancient Babylonia. Cuneiform is a logos-syllabic writing system (a system where symbols represent whole words) used by many languages ​​in a region known geographically as the modern Middle East. Ancient Near East.

Like many others throughout history, the writers of the tablets turned to the supernatural to predict the future. “It was a characteristic of the Babylonians’ attempts to understand the world,” said Andrew George, a retired Assyrian and one of the authors of the paper. Popular Mechanics in an email.

The omens themselves are linked to lunar eclipses, which are believed to warn of impending evils. Ancient astronomers may have used first-hand experience to predict what an eclipse foreshadowed, George said. direct science. “Some omens may have originated in real experience—the observation of omens after a disaster.”

However, from a modern perspective, “omens reveal specific disasters that may occur in a state and tell us about concerns. [were] In ancient Babylonia was associated with rule and governance,” George said Popular Mechanics.

Symptoms included the threat of famine, plague, drought, and the assassination of leaders. And according to the newspaper, people of the past took these warnings very seriously.

“If the prediction associated with a given omen was dire, for example, ‘the king will die’, then a verbal investigation by extispicy. [an examination of a sacrificed animal’s innards] It was conducted to determine whether the king was truly in danger,” George and Junko Taniguchi, the paper’s other authors, wrote in their study.

If a king’s advisers feel there is still danger after the ordeal, they will try to ward off the evil with special rituals, the paper explained.

Although the complete translations are new, the knowledge of the tablets themselves is not. The British Museum originally acquired three tablets in the 1890s, and completed the set with the final tablet in 1914. Soon after, the artifacts joined a collection of 150,000 cuneiform tablets. Due to the scale of the collection and the lack of researchers in the field, the tablets were only rediscovered when a scholar stumbled upon them and realized their significance in the 1970s.

Studies on the tablets have followed the standard procedure for Assyriological research: slow reading, detailed line-drawings, and lots of repetition are all part of the comprehension process, according to George. The paper states that the tablets take standard Mesopotamian prophetic list form. The language of the texts—Akkadian, the Semitic language of ancient Iraq—also proves that the tablets were Belonian.

According to George, reading the spoken and written words on cuneiform tablets can help paint an accurate picture of what life and culture looked like 2,000 to 4,500 years ago.

“In the 150 years we have known nothing about the Babylonians and Assyrians (only what the Greeks and the biblical books tell us),” he wrote, “their civilization, its history, religion, literature, social and economic history, has been reconstructed from those painstakingly published cuneiform texts to accumulate a great mountain of knowledge.

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