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The Bārûtu, the “art of the diviner,” is a monumental ancient
Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...
n compendium of the science of extispicy or sacrificial omens stretching over around a hundred
cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...
tablets which was assembled in the Neo-Assyrian/ Babylonian period based upon earlier recensions. At the
Assyria Assyria (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: , ''māt Aššur'') was a major ancient Mesopotamian civilization that existed as a city-state from the 21st century BC to the 14th century BC and eventually expanded into an empire from the 14th century BC t ...
n court, the term extended to encompass sacrificial prayers and rituals, commentaries and organ models. The ''ikribu'' was the name of collections of incantations to accompany the extispicy. The ''bārûtu's'' extant predecessors date back to
Old Babylonian Old Babylonian may refer to: *the period of the First Babylonian dynasty (20th to 16th centuries BC) *the historical stage of the Akkadian language Akkadian ( ; )John Huehnergard & Christopher Woods, "Akkadian and Eblaite", ''The Cambridge Enc ...
times with the liver models from Mari (pictured right) and where the order of the exta were largely fixed. The task of the ''bārû'', or diviner, was summarized as ''lipit qāti hiniq immeri naqē niqē nēpešti bārûti'', “the ‘touch of hand’, the restriction? of the sheep, the offering of the sacrifice, the performance of extispicy.” This required elaborate ritual purity, achieved through washing hands and mouth, donning fresh clothing, placing tamarisk and cedar into the diviner's ears, anointing and fumigation with sulfur – all measures to avoid the outcome of the apodosis ''lā ellu niqâ ilput'', “an unclean person has touched the sacrifice.” The autopsy then proceeded in a counter-clockwise direction, beginning with the liver, the lungs, then the breastbone, vertebrae, ribs, colon and finally the heart.


The text

The work is particularly difficult to interpret due to the extensive use of
graphemes In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...
, but included an estimated 8,000 omens. These were the accumulation of a millennium and a half of observations of political, social and private events and the divinatory signs that accompanied them but bereft of their chronological context or other identifying marker and stylistically posed in the form of a prediction. Occasionally, an attribution is made to a king, but it is generally archaic: * "Omen of Šarru-kīn whose troops were shut in by a rainstorm and exchanged weapons among themselves" (''padānu'' tablet 4), * “Omen of king Amar-Su’ena, who was gored by an ox, but died from the bite of a shoe ">.e., an infection of the foot�� (''padānu'' commentary), * “Omen of king Tiriqqan, who in the midst of his army took flight” (''pān tākalti'' tablet 6), * “Omen of king Rimuš, whom his courtiers killed with their seals” (''pān tākalti'' tablet 13), or * “Omen of the Apišalian, whom Narām-Sîn captured by tunnelling.” Some of the signs are identified as ''pitruštu'', “ambiguous,” or by another "wild card" ''nipḫu'', "unreliable," while others echo modern concerns, ''šatammu ekalla imallalu'', “the accountants will plunder the palace!” Some predict the weather: ''enūma lullik šamū ikallâni'', “whenever I want to go out rain will stop me.” Some give quite specific predictions, ''edû rākib imēru irruba'', “a famous person will arrive riding on a donkey,” while others are vague, ''ina ūmi rūqi rigmu'', “long-term forecast: lament.” Some predict ''li'ibu''-, ''masla'tu''- or ''qūqānu''-disease or other disorders: “If the pleasing word is split above and below: the man’s teeth will come loose.” The majority of the omens, however, concern royal and military affairs.


The parts of the ''bārûtu''

The ''barūtû'' is divided into ten “chapters” (summarized in the table below), each dealing with a different aspect of entrail divination, but predominantly concerned with the examination of the ''ṭuppu ša ilī'', the "tablet of the gods," or the liver (''amūtu''). The Babylonian and Assyrian versions vary slightly in arrangement due to the Babylonian predilection for sixty line tablets. Commentaries exist for each part called NÍG.PÀD.DA (''mukallimtu'') typically bringing together omens with similar protases from each chapter. The ''niṣirti bārûti'', “secret of extispicy”, texts, predating the ''multābiltu'' chapter of the ''bārûtu'' and subsequently superseded by it, endeavored to elucidate the esoteric character of the omens. Excerpts or compendia were written to make the manual more user-friendly, such as that known as KAR 423 after its primary publication reference, and it was these truncated versions of the omens that seem to have been consulted during the actual divination process. The dub ḫa.la tablets concern the “calculation of the stipulated term”, or the time and duration of the omen. The ''šumma immeru'' records observations derived from scholarly debates relating to the behavior of sacrificial lambs before and during the ritual and there were also “orientation tables” in the form of extispicy models (example pictured right) and interpretive grids to assist with the training of bārû.


The copyists

The compendium seems to have been under progressive editorship as witnessed in correspondence of the senior diviners Marduk-šumu-uṣur and Naṣiru, and Tabni, who collectively advised king
Esarhaddon Esarhaddon, also spelled Essarhaddon, Assarhaddon and Ashurhaddon (, also , meaning " Ashur has given me a brother"; Biblical Hebrew: ''ʾĒsar-Ḥaddōn'') was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 681 to 669 BC. The third king of the S ...
that In 647 BC, at least 135 writing boards of ''bārûtu'' were expropriated from private collections, many from Bīt Ibâ, the subject of a Babylonian revolt. Captive scribal labor was employed at the Assyrian capital to contribute to the local material assimilated from older libraries such as those of Nabû-zuqup-kēnu, who was recorded as the copyist of a ''manzāzu'' commentary dated to 704 BC, from
Nineveh Nineveh ( ; , ''URUNI.NU.A, Ninua''; , ''Nīnəwē''; , ''Nīnawā''; , ''Nīnwē''), was an ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia, located in the modern-day city of Mosul (itself built out of the Assyrian town of Mepsila) in northern ...
. Nabû-ušallim, son of Nabû-pašer, was a bārû whose name appears on the colophon of one ''mukallimtu'', and an individual by this name is known from amongst the authors of divinatory queries, or ''tamītu'', during the Neo-Assyrian period. By the late Hellenic period, the text of the series had become more ossified as
astrology Astrology is a range of Divination, divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that propose that information about human affairs and terrestrial events may be discerned by studying the apparent positions ...
superseded extispicy as the preferred method of divination. Exemplars include ''pān tākalti'' tablet 6, copied by Anu-aha-u šabši in 180 BC,
Uruk Uruk, the archeological site known today as Warka, was an ancient city in the Near East, located east of the current bed of the Euphrates River, on an ancient, now-dried channel of the river in Muthanna Governorate, Iraq. The site lies 93 kilo ...
, and ''pān tākalti'' tablet 15 copied by Itti-Marduk-balāṭu, son of Ša-našī-šu, from late Babylonian
Sippar Sippar (Sumerian language, Sumerian: , Zimbir) (also Sippir or Sippara) was an ancient Near Eastern Sumerian and later Babylonian city on the east bank of the Euphrates river. Its ''Tell (archaeology), tell'' is located at the site of modern Tell ...
.


Gallery

Source: British Museum.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:barutu Akkadian literature Objects used for divination