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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
AN INTRODUCTION TO MESOPOTAMIAN SCHOLARLY DIVINATION
The prognostication of events through signs discerned in all sorts of phenomena of the natural and human social world was practiced throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Before Hellenistic times, when the truth value of divination was first subject to philosophical and logical evaluation, divination was assumed to provide a legitimate means of determining the course of future events. Even after divination came under severe criticism in some Platonist and Stoic circles, various divinatory practices continued. Its widespread nature as well as its antiquity is well defined by Cicero in his work De Divinatione, in which he mentions both the Assyrians and the “Chaldeans” (Babylonians) as especially noted for celestial divination and nativities:
Now I am aware of no people, however refined and learned or however savage and ignorant, which does not think that signs are given of future events, and that certain persons can recognize those signs and foretell events before they occur. First of all – to seek authority from the most distant sources – the Assyrians, on account of the vast plains inhabited by them, and because of the open and unobstructed view of the heavens presented to them on every side, took observations of the paths and movements of the stars, and, having made note of them, transmitted to posterity what significance they had for each person. And in that same nation the Chaldeans – a name which they derived not from their art but their race – have, it is thought, by means of long-continued observation of the constellations, perfected a science which enables them to foretell what any man's lot will be and for what fate he was born.
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