Foresight in ancient Mesopotamia, by Francesca Rochberg

so good evening and welcome to this evenings Darwin College lecture the fall of empire is a fearful matter can one foresee the overthrow of a great and ancient Society this is proper meat for us in Cambridge at the height of the British power our very own mad bad and dangerous to know Trinity College product Lord Byron wrote on the fall of sardanapalus the legendary last king of Assyria and to quake Byron he said he sweats in palan pleasures dulls his soul and saps his goodly strength besieged in his palace orgies and corruption were the norm for the King until he met a spectacular death as his flaming Palace crumbled into the Euphrates eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die the great long-lived Assyrian Empire finally fell and her ally Egypt the other superpower of that period also departed the world stage the Babylonians were victorious though not for long and the Book of Daniel tells that tale as King Belshazzar feasted and drank from holy vessels taken from the Temple in Jerusalem writing appeared on his palace wall thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians in Babylon fell all empires fall but from Assyria to the Soviet Union I can only think of one great Empire in all history with the foresight not to fall by catastrophic conquest or at least revolt dissension and slaughter eating drinking marry making not with Gandhi actly around I don't know if a clean new baron sat sardanapalus but I expect he did instead of catastrophe we here inherit the Commonwealth physically so weak as to be almost invisible but a cultural superpower Mandela - too young saeng Sookie and who knows how many Nobel Prizes in literature foresight does help now tonight it gives me very great pleasure to welcome professor Francesca Rosberg from the Near Eastern Studies at the University of California in Berkeley she's been a Guggenheim Fellow a visiting fellow at Moreland College Oxford and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and fallen empires are her speciality she's also your expert should you need to write a letter to someone who only reads Sumerian or Arcadian I don't know how many of those there are around she's written extensively on the extraordinary Babylonian knowledge of astronomy and astrology the basis of so much science that came later there's great Babylonian efforts were all about foresight the Magi of the Epiphany professor Washburn [Applause] thank you very very much professor Fowler for that wonderful introduction can everyone hear me all right yes it is simply an honor to be here I want to thank professor Fowler as well for hosting me in the beautiful Darwin College and I also want to thank the former master professor William Brown for the invitation to speak here today and as well professor Lawrence Sherman for the friendly phone call that started the whole ball rolling mostly I just want to say what a pleasure it is to be here and a privilege to be able to round off this 28th annual Darwin College lecture series a serious place among ancient states of the Near East has been secured for modern historians by its imperial achievement from the 8th to the end of the 7th centuries BC Assyria organized under one rule an area encompassing southwestern Iran - southeastern Turkey it engulfed the Levant Egypt and Babylonia gaining access to the Persian Gulf the Mediterranean Sea and the rich trade routes through the Zagros Mountains East to Afghanistan and north into Urartu or modern-day Armenia as the first and architect of all later empires Assyria is known principally from the many monuments to its own sovereignty and power that survived in the form of exquisite inscribed stone BA relief representations of the exploits of war conquest and cruelty to its enemies this drawing shows the king heroic drawing his bow as he led the siege on his chariot like the onset of a raging storm as Sennacherib animals put it one of the most famous Assyrian sieges is that of Sennacherib at la Hache in ancient Judah shown here from the reliefs at the Nineveh palace of that King in the next panel we see preparations for the flaying of rebels at lucky Sh and we have verbal testimony to such actions from the annals of Ashura now sir pol ii describing his treatment of rebels in the taking of the city suru in northern Mesopotamia he said I erected a pile in front of his gate I flayed as many Nobles as had rebelled against me and draped their skins over the pile some I spread out within the pile some I erected on stakes upon the pile and some I placed on stakes around the pile these images both visual and verbal uncovered from the splendid palaces at Nineveh as we see reconstructed in these modern drawings these images the ancient images coupled with vivid accounts in the Bible where Assyria was reviled by the prophet Isaiah give us something of the face Assyria presented to the outside world a more behind-the-scenes look at the internal workings of this first of all empires however takes us directly to the subject of the present lecture series to the systemic institutional implementation of foresight in this case for the achievement management and maximization of the future power and security of the state of Assyria a passage from a 7th century BC diviners guide recovered from the Library of Assurbanipal in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh contains the following question when you know the sign and they ask you to save the city the king and his population from the hands of the enemy from pestilence from famine what will you say they will say to you how will you make the evil consequences of omens pass by the diviners of the royal court well-trained literati expert in the identification and interpretation of ominous signs forecast the future on behalf of as the text says the city the king and his population according to letters from these diviners preserved from the reigns of the last two great Assyrian monarchs Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal important decisions concerning military cultic and personal matters were gauged in accordance with forecasts from ominous signs ever since the mid 19th century decipherment of cuneiform the wedge writing for which Sumerians Babylonians Assyrians and the Achaemenid Persians are now famed modern asuri ologists have worked to reconstruct the history of the Assyrian Empire our modern reconstruction focuses on its formation exploitation of conquered territories and final fall this history has been reconstructed from excavated artifacts and images testifying to the geographical extent of Assyria influence and from data extracted from extent Assyrian accounts of Wars rebellions and conquest but the story of the Assyrian Empire the one that the Assyrians told themselves their descendants and the gods is one of quite different focus and employment this internal version or master narrative is the story that underpins the annalistic inscriptions of Assyrian Kings it gives the reportage of campaigns sieges and victories over rebels a framework revealing the importance of foresight as a central strategy for the conduct of Imperial business that narrative not unlike what we see in the Biblical histories featured the gods as historical actors and focused on the intimate relationship between the king and his gods in the assyrian understanding of both the historic go past and the imagined future of the empire the gods figured as prominently as did the Kings own royal ancestors and descendants as represented in this Stila of Ashur no sir pol ii found at nimrod or ancient calhoun the king gestures reverently toward the symbols of the assyrian national god sure and the astral gods shamash the sun-sin the moon and Ishtar the planet Venus the annalistic royal inscriptions telling of the achievements of the Assyrian Kings are as though reports directed to these gods proving the dedication of the King and carrying out the Divine Will for him to rule to expand his lands and amass wealth with which to adorn temples and Divine statues most important in the present context the means used by the crown to make significant decisions were divinatory techniques designed to gather knowledge of the future by communication with the gods modern scholars have mined Assyrian royal inscriptions for historical information but the purpose of those inscriptions and of many other sources that shed light on a Syrian political and military action was not to render a historical account of events but to legitimate the Imperial agenda and project its security into the future by claims to divine approval today the institutional variety of foresight is associated with various collectives corporations or polities entities that need to make informed decisions about the future specifically about how they might see their own success maximized in the future scenarios and narratives visions and alternatives are part of the terminology of institutional foresight as we try to understand the perspective from inside the Assyrian royal court itself a complex collective entity spearheaded by the reigning monarch these concepts are entirely unrelated of course the premise on which foresight was institutionalized in Assyria stemmed from a worldview and a metaphysics that do not translate into those of Western modernity the impulse to project an image of the future into which it could see its own growth and success however is certainly kindred and for this to happen the Assyrian King needed a large complement of experts in techniques of divination as an aside perhaps I should not presume such a radical difference between ancients and moderns after all an American president from the 1980s or his wife anyway similarly employed well an expert in astrology as a matter of strategic foresight but perhaps testifying precisely to this divide between ancient and modern metaphysics and worldview the White House astrologer was kept secret until she was outed the year prior to that president's last year in office turning back to the seventh century BC celestial diviners and her uu species who inspected the liver of a sacrificed sheep each made forecasts of political and economic events on behalf of the king these diviners constituted an elite among scribes in the employ of the Assyrian Kings they made reports in writing to the king who took the results of their liver inspection or celestial observation into account before undertaking many activities it was not enough to know the signs and make forecasts from them or even to predict in the case of celestial signs the very phenomena whose appearances were ominous it was also necessary as indicated in the passage from the diviners handbook just quoted for the scribal specialists to make the evil pass by foresight in ancient Assyria therefore not only involved forecasting and prediction but also for stalling by apotropaic magic that is magic Ward's off evil then as now foresight is not simply looking forward but anticipating future change and acting on that vision fundamental and essential to the system within which foresight was institutionalized by the Assyrian state was the idea that certain divinities communicated their knowledge of the future indeed there will concerning the future by producing the phenomena of the world both on earth and in the sky to function as indicators of future events this all important feature of foresight in cuneiform culture is the distant cousin to our own somewhat archaic English usage meaning providence or divine foresight contrary to Western assumptions about the inevitability of divine providence sometimes associated with the natural order of the world itself ancient Near Eastern gods were amenable to prayer and ritual appeasement as evidenced in the many extant prayers and apotropaic rituals against evil portents from such things as the appearance of animals snakes malformed births and lunar eclipses our same diviners handbook instructs that when you look up a sign in the omen collection be it one in the sky or one on earth and if that signs evil portent is confirmed in reference to an enemy or to a disease or to a famine check the date of that sign and should no sign have occurred to counteract that sign should no annulment have taken place one cannot make it pass by its evil cannot be removed it will happen it is clear from this passage that the epitope aook effects of magic were thought to be efficacious in counteracting signs and removing the evil they pretended if no such steps were taken the signs portended consequences were then considered inevitable this however is no fatalism the Assyrians lived in a world of future content CAES knot of immutable determinism their gods knew the future but the nature of divine foreknowledge was of a different order from that of the later Christian God about who's for knowledge and predetermination of all things medieval theologians and scholastics had difficulty reconciling with the question of freewill this was not an Assyrian problem foresight and fatalism do not sit well together and the ancient Assyrian diviners were not hampered by the by notions of the fixity of nature or the chain of physical causality nonetheless an omen functioned as an indicator of future events not as a one-time or random occurrence put there by the gods ad hoc to signal particular events in the sense of this battle or that disease as conditional statements in the form if P then Q phenomena were indicators of events in a general even abstract and regularly recurring way eclipses of a certain description portended plague or the death of a monarch the appearance of a star inside the halo of the moon signaled that the king and his troops would be surrounded and besieged and so on with it omens for thousands of phenomena celestial phenomena and their portended events did not however stand in relation to one another as cause to affect rather they stood as meaningful correlations often construed by the use of analogy as in the example of the star in the lunar halo indicating that the Kings army will be under siege ancient Mesopotamian omens reflect neither post hoc ergo propter hoc that is after this therefore because of this fallacious reasoning nor a system of mechanical causality they operated on the basis of Association and analogy or by other kinds of connections inscrutable to our way of thinking the foregoing description of omens as correlations or associations is very much a modern translation how a serial Babylonian Ullman's functioned to indicate the future to the literati trained in reading and interpreting cuneiform texts however omens were a form of writing physical phenomena either the marks and contours of the liver or the various phenomena of the celestial bodies were according to the scribes own description written messages concerning the future the gods wrote on the liver called the tablet of the Gods as seen in this inscribed clay liver model and they wrote on the sky where celestial phenomena were called heavenly writing as you see on this disk shaped tablet containing the drawings of some constellations together with their names and other scribal notations not well understood by modern scholars yet even here the constellations are drawn with similar wedge formed strokes and it seems therefore that the diviner scribes read the gods heavens and the liver in much the same manner as they read cuneiform tablets the divine writing was a compelling metaphor if indeed it was a metaphor for the intelligibility of the world both in heaven and on earth the comprehensible nature of the world as manifested in a divine orthography was just as basics to the Assyrian and Babylonian conception of the world as the later notion of the book of nature became for Western natural philosophy and science what is important here however is not just that physical phenomena were comprehensible but that their value for gauging future prospects was based upon a premise of regular recurrence regular recurrence was not understood to manifest a system of causes as already indicated but of regular and recurring associations or meanings in this way the future was bound up with the past by the logic of its own internal semantics and orthography by association P indicated Q in the past present and future whenever P was observed therefore Q was expected to occur the connection between the past and the future is undoubtedly a critical node in the logic of foresight according to Alfred Markus who has worked on the principles models and methods of foresight in business management organizations rely on master narratives to structure people's understanding of the past and the future what narratives or stories do best is lend coherence to what otherwise may be construed as random occurrences or events whose connection is sometimes difficult to see the future relates to the past by the logic of the narrative with respect to the futures dependence upon the past as Marcus put it understanding what has occurred provides an impetus for what to do next it supplies reasoning for affirming or rejecting old patterns of behavior and starting new projects that put organizations on novel trajectories the past is a critical and essential springboard for thinking about the future unquote such as the nature of Mesopotamian omen divination which in turn informed the internal narrative of the Assyrian Empire the signs signaled future events because the gods intended that human beings the king being the exemplary human being should know the future regularity and repetition were built into the system and in that way events followed events in a certain readable fashion lending a logical predictive structure to omen divination even though we might say that omen divination did not predict but rather indicated possibilities the practice was implemented for purposes of foresight which is to say it facilitated the Assyrian Kings desire or need to project himself and his political agenda into the future with the best chance of success the fact that magical means to avert or annul portents was possible only shows that the final arbiters of all things were the gods and because the future was imagined as bound to the Past through the repetition of signs and portents action within a world so determined by divine design depended upon the ability of the king threw his diviners to comprehend observe and interpret that design in the in the repeatable patterns the language so to say of ominous phenomena divination from omens was not the invention of the Assyrian Empire nor did it end with the Empire's fall it was already an age-old practice beginning in Babylonia during the second millennium BC a poetic text from this early date is one of the earliest attestations to the use of stars as signs it is a prayer to the gods of night the gods that is the celestial bodies include some constellations we can identify such as Canis Major called buh buh Oh T's called yolk of a plough that is and Orion called the true Shepherd of a new here in a somewhat different orientation is the same circular disk as we saw just before except the names and words have been omitted Orion as imagined by the Babylonians and Assyrians can be seen here in Sector four here and even we can recognize readily what we call the asterism of the belt of orion three bright stars among the gods of night but unfortunately not depicted on this celestial disk were also Ursa Major called the wagon and Lyra the she-goat already at the time of the prayer to the gods of night in the period of Hammurabi of Babylon in the 18th century BC celestial phenomena were compiled into lists of ominous signs focusing in that early period on the moon particularly on the lunar eclipse unlike with the Stars or moon where the celestial gods gave signs by their very appearances ecstasy or the reading of the omens in the sheep's Ecsta the liver principally required that an offering and a formal petition first be made to the patron gods shamash and odd-odd before the liver was inspected in this context the gods were conceived of and explicitly addressed as divine judges as the diviner prepared to go before the gods shaman haddad he would say I am cleansed now to the Assembly of the Gods I draw near for judgment Oh Shah Mardan o odd-odd lord of prayers and acts of divinatory inspection in the ritual I perform in the ecstasy I perform place the truth the events portended by omens from the liver as well as from the heavens applied to the king the country and the populace at large covering all manner of military and economic disasters the rising of floodwaters to destroy destroy crops plagues of locusts or disease among the herds or the population as a whole these phenomena were systematically arranged in lengthy lists some that explicitly echo the diviners guidebook in his reference to the city the king and his people an omen from the celestial omen list entitled a new law new and lyl concerns a solar eclipse occurring on the 30th day of the month lululu as you see on the slide it says if on the thirtieth day there is a solar eclipse the city king and his people will be well but lions will become wild and block passage on the road or if on the 18th day there is a solar eclipse the city king and his people will have peace but plague will destroy the herds another tablet of a new mono Enlil contains relatively detailed descriptions of lunar eclipses phenomena with portents for the various enemies of Babylonia the point of view from which the omens were originally constructed one such example reads if an eclipse occurs on the 14th day of today - and the god that is the moon in his Eclipse becomes dark on the east upper part of the disk and clears on the west lower part the west wind rises and the Eclipse begins and the last watch and does not end with the watch his cusps are the same neither one nor the other is wider or narrower you should observe his Eclipse that is of the moon in whose eclipses the cusps were the same neither one being wider or narrower and bear in mind the west wind the verdict applies to sue bar - brother will smite brother the people will suffer defeat there will be many widows the king of sue bar - will make peace with the lands thus is its sign and its verdict this passage instructs the diviner just how to interpret the lunar eclipses in question that is as pertaining to the region of sue bar - in northern Mesopotamia the region that would ultimately become Assyria what is referred to as the verdict refers to the social consequences of this eclipse as though rendered by the gods as judges in a case and evokes the same conception of the gods as judges that we heard in the prayer to be said before reading the omens in the liver celestial omens from an Ummah Anu Enlil appear in the correspondence between diviners and the Kings Esther hoddan and Ashurbanipal as mentioned before as in the following passage from one such letter from an unknown scholar the correspondence affords us a glimpse of how the experts interpreted celestial signs and explained them to the king the writer first quotes an omen if Mars appears in the month i aru there will be hostilities affliction of the Ummah and Monda he then explains who man manda means the canarians and here we see the the area he refers to and he refers here to a people of unclear origins but found in Anatolia south of the Black Sea he continues the solar eclipse which occurred in the month Nisan who did not afflict the region of the Northland also the planet Jupiter retained its position meaning presumably it was at one of its stationary points it was present for fifteen days that is propitious and again he quotes an omen if the Sun rises amidst a resplendent cloud Bank the king will become angry and raised his weapons and then he explains as regards the rains which were so scanty this year that no harvest was reaped this is a good omen pertaining to the life and vigor of the king my lord the parallelism between Mesopotamian liver and astral divination underscores the fact that the signs in heaven were not causes of future happenings nor did they affect the future by stellar influence as we generally assume to be the case in astrology instead looking to the future in ancient Assyria depended upon knowledge of a pattern of events in the past regular recurrence was part of the God's design or scheme of things that the Assyrians saw the future in perpetual negotiation with the past is demonstrable precisely by the evidence for divination and it is a critical element in the Assyrian view of the world as a whole all things held together as part of a divine design whether temporally in the connection between past and future or spatially in the unity of the Imperial lands seen on this map and at least in principle the Co extension of the Empire with the entire inhabited world this divine design in a literally drawings or plans was instantiated in the MV ominous signs let us look now in more detail at the implementation of institutional foresight during the reign of esarhaddon from 681 to 669 BC he is depicted here on a victory Stila in the attitude of reverence to the gods and according to the master narrative he tells of his own appointment as crown prince by divine selection he relates how his father Sennacherib questioned the gods shamash and odd-odd by divination and they answered him with a firm yes saying he is your replacement but Esarhaddon succession was troubled as he faced the subterfuge of his own brothers and would-be usurpers he tells of his prayers to the gods Ashur sinned shamash Bale Nabu and Nergal Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbella who as he said accepted my words with their firm yes they were sending me reliable omens saying go do not hold back we will go and kill your enemies and when in fact he claimed his throne and entered Nineveh he said the south wind the breeze of the God eeeyah the wind whose blowing is favourable for exercising kingship blue upon me favourable signs came in good time to me in heaven and on earth these inscriptions establish a certain succession as the result of divine selection confirmed by divine favor in indicated by signs in heaven and on earth indeed the announcement of the omens was an essential ingredient of the master narrative the key to securing a legitimate claim one of the first of esarhaddon acts as king was his entry into babylon to establish his kingship there no assyrian overlordship of Babylonia could be successful without formal acceptance and approval of the king the Babylonian national god Marduk in order to achieve this as sir Hayden would have to restore Marduk's temple the ASA Gill which had been destroyed when Sennacherib Esarhaddon father mounted a vicious campaign against Babylonia and their elamite allies after smashing the Divine statues in the temple of the temples of Babylon and seizing their property Sennacherib described his final destruction of the city he said the city and its temples from its foundation to its walls I destroyed I devastated I burned with fire the inner wall and outer wall temples and gods the ziggurat of brick and earth as many as there were I raised and dumped them into the Arak two canal through the midst of that city I dug canals I flooded its ground with water and the very foundations thereof I destroyed I made its destruction more complete than that by a flood that in days to come the site of that city and its temples and gods might not be remembered I completely blotted it out with floods of water and made it like a meadow when in 681 Esarhaddon became King and set out to establish his own sovereignty over the beleaguered Babylonia he declared that the astral manifestation of the Babylonian God Marduk that is the planet Jupiter sent him a positive omen he said at the beginning of my kingship in my first year good signs were established for me in heaven and on earth concerning the refurbishing of the gods and the rebuilding of shrines Jupiter shone brightly and came near in the third month and stood in his place where the Sun shines he reached the place of secret where he was at his most propitious for a second time in the seventh month and stayed in his place again Jupiter was stationary without the celestial omen from the Bologna and God Marduk Esarhaddon is reopening and re-entry into the temple asa heal as king of Babylonia would have been impossible to sell he was however not deterred because as the annals continued in order to triumph and to show overpowering strength he the god Marduk revealed to me Good Omens concerning the re-entering of ASA Gill the stars of heaven stood in their positions and took the correct literally the true path and left the incorrect literally the untrue path another of the annals reiterates and expands upon this astral communication of divine approval thus in order to give the land and the people verdicts of truth and justice the gods sin and shamash the twin gods Moon and Sun took the road of truth and justice monthly they made their appearance regularly and Venus the brightest of the stars was seen in the West in the path of the AAA stars concerning the securing of the land and the reconciliation of its gods it meaning Venus reached the position where it was at its most propitious and then disappeared Mars the giver of decisions on the land a moral meaning to the west of Assyria shone brightly in the path of the AAA stars and it revealed its sign concerning the strengthening of the ruler and his land for Esarhaddon to have advanced into Babylonia without knowing the favorable ascent of the gods delivered through ominous signs in heaven would have been an arrogant sacrilege indeed the topos of the king fallen from grace for ignoring omens was known in esarhaddon his time it was perhaps best exemplified in the figure of na Ramzan the Akkadian ruler from the third millennium BC who bore on his head responsibility for the destruction of his own Empire because of his neglect of divine signs the legend of Narong sin was part of the holdings of the Assyrian royal tablet collection at Nineveh during a sir Hayden's reign similarly for other acts of political gain records of the appeal to the sun-god shamash show that nothing of any real consequence would be undertaken without first ascertaining knowledge of its outcome by divination in the text of one such query to the Sun God SR Hadden has plans for a campaign to the north of Assyria are set before the God to be followed by an ecstasy the query reads shamash Great Lord give me a firm positive answer to what I am asking you from this day the 22nd day of this month to the 21st day of next month for 30 days and nights which is the stipulated term for the performance of this ecstasy will the troops of the syph ian's which have been staying in the district of Minea to the north of assyria and are now moving out from the territory of Minea will they strive and plan will they move out and go through the passes of Howe Bush Kia to the city hiranya and the city aneesa's will they take much plunder and booty from the territory of Assyria does your great divinity know it in addition to making such queries to the sun-god to be followed by a liver divination the celestial diviners were also consulted on similar situations here is a letter from a celestial diviner one bale you schism to King Esarhaddon concerning the invasion of the same minion territory cited in the ecstasy query we just heard these minions evidently came into the region north of Assyria around Lake I'm sorry yeah around Lake Urmia here and we're occupying an area not far from the ambit of the Khmer ian's that we heard about before the letter says to the king of the lands my lord your servant Baloo Schism made bail Nabu and shamash bless the king my lord immediately bail who schism quotes an omen if a star flashes like a torch from the east and disappears in the east the main army of the enemy will fall then he begins to advise if the King has written to his army saying invade Minea the whole army should not invade only the cavalry and the professional troops should invade in a subsequent letter Bayezid reported on the fall of Minea to esarhaddon army he said I saw the crescent of the moon but the Sun was rising whether it was a crescent or whether it appeared on the 15th or whether it will appear on the 16th it is an evil portent and it concerns the minions wherever an enemy attacks a country the country will carry this evil portent now the army of the King my lord having attacked the minions has captured forts plundered towns and pillaged the open country indeed in a later version of the annals composed three years before the end of Esarhaddon reign he called himself the one who scattered the minion people the most ambitious long-distance military operation conducted in the expansion of a Esarhaddon empire was his invasion of egypt and subjugation of the 25th dynasty under the cush idea taharka here depicted as a sphinx in a monument from the sudan the heartland of ancient cush his homeland this ruler is also known to us as tear haka from the Bible in a well-known episode in the second book of Kings tear haka is the ally of Hezekiah king of Judah Esarhaddon father Sennacherib macht the Judah I came for quote relying on Egypt that broken read of a staff which will pierce the hand of any man who leans on it such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who rely on him in this instance according to the biblical writers and Lord Byron things ended badly for Assyria to borrow a bit from Byron the Assyrian may have come down like a wolf on the fold but the angel of the God Yahweh slaughtered 185 thousand Assyrians that night and left the widows of Ashura loud in their wail the defeated Sennacherib went home to Nineveh where he was promptly killed by two of his sons and esarhaddon succeeded the throne on the other hand taharka remained Pharaoh long enough to later become once again the target of a serious expansion into Egypt under esarhaddon but before esarhaddon set out on his egyptian expedition he made an ecstasy query as follows shamash great lord give me a firm positive answer to what i am asking you should Esarhaddon king of Assyria strive and plan should he take the road with his army and camp and go to the district of Egypt as he wishes should he wage war against taharka king of cush and his army in waging this war will the weapons of Esarhaddon king of Assyria and his army prevail over the weapons of taharka king of cush and the troops which he has will Esarhaddon king of Assyria returned alive and set foot on a Syrian soil does your great divinity know it be present in this ram place in it a firm positive answer favorable designs favorable propitious omens by the Iraq Euler command of your great divinity and may I see them may this query go to your great divinity ocean wash and may an Oracle be given as answer we can only imagine that shamash did write a favorable answer in that liver because Esarhaddon erected a victory stele a' in 671 to commemorate his destruction of memphis this Stila found at sincerely in southern turkey shows the young son and crown prince of taharka bush ankara the smaller of the two figures in bondage on the lower right the inscribed portion of the Stila relates that after the god assure and the great gods my lords had ordered me to march far along remote roads through rugged mountains and great sand dunes where one is always thirsty I marched safely and in good spirits as for taharka the king of egypt and cush the accursed of their great divinity from the city issue pre to memphis his royal City a march of 15 days Overland I inflicted serious defeats on him daily without ceasing moreover by means of arrows I inflicted him five times with wounds from which there is no recovery and as for the city of Memphis His Royal City within half a day and by means of Mines breeches and ladders I'd besieged it conquered it demolished it destroyed it and burned it with fire the opening statement of the Stila is further testimony to the God's power to decree the future by sending signs and making judgments concerning the king and his political aspirations it reads the God uh sure father of the gods who loves my priestly service the god anew the powerful the foremost the one who called my name the god Enlil lofty lord the one who confirmed my reign the god eeya wise one knowing one who decrees my destiny the god's in shining none are the one who makes signs favorable for me the God shamash judge of heaven and netherworld the one who provide it's verdicts for me the god odd odd terrifying Lord the one who makes my troops prosper the god Marduk hero of the agigoo and Anunnaki gods the one who makes my kinship great the goddess Ishtar lady of war and battle who goes at my side the submit' II valiant gods the ones who overthrow my enemies the great gods all of them who decree destiny and give victorious might to the king their favourite reference to the gods in the opening lines of the Stila was surely to restate before them the piety of the king but the pietistic accounts of political and military triumph that we have heard illustrated in the several quotations from royal annals are consistent with the other texts I've been quoting that reflects pragmatic behind-the-scenes operations such as the ecstasy queries to the sun-god and the letters from scholar scribes concerning celestial omens these texts confirm for us that himlike rhapsodizing about the gods in annalistic texts was not merely a royal rhetorical flourish but part of the structure of the master narrative in which the gods were in charge of the future and could be called upon to let their decisions be known knowing what the gods had in store through omen divination was then the basis for action and for ensuring the security and growth of the state and of royal power those in power have perhaps the most to gain through a judicious use of foresight it is therefore not surprising that the written remains of one of the most powerful indeed the first of ancient empires trained and employed teams of experts in the art and science of looking forward the literati of ancient Assyria the scribes and scholars of royal courts and chancelleries developed an elaborate practice of foresight analyzing synthesizing and interpreting the phenomena around them in accordance with a of reading the divine language of signs the practice was both a tool for royal legitimation as well as to enable the King to make pragmatic decisions as to how to project his goals into the future ancient Assyrian Kings were invested in the art of anticipating the future in the realms of politics and economics much as we ourselves are invested in projecting and preparing for the future in our modern realms of business government and science they conducted business with an eye on the omens as we have seen from privileged glimpses within palace chambers through the correspondence between these kings and their advisors in the tablets produced by the scholars ranging from handbooks containing lists of ominous signs celestial and terrestrial to divinatory prayers queries and rituals addressed to the patron gods of divination in all these numerous and diverse texts we gain insight into the context practice and purpose of a SERO babylonian divination and its role in the earliest and most fully documented cultivation of foresight they tell of the investment in the future survival continuity and security of the Assyrian state to its fullest extent as predicated on correct behavior toward the gods and in diligent reading of the Gods written messages concerning the future essential to correct behavior toward the gods was the building and maintenance of temples indeed the annals consists both of reports on military expeditions and on the building or restoration of temples each of these activities was equally geared to future security in no uncertain terms Esarhaddon stated this when he said in reference to his restoration of the a Shara temple the temple of Ashur the national god of Assyria in the religious capital of assur he said I built it for my life for the prolongation of my days for the securing of my reign the well-being of seed the safeguarding of the throne of my priestly office I built it for the overthrowing of my enemies the prospering of the harvest of Assyria and for the well-being of Assyria and in the closing of his account of the restoration of another temple that of the goddess Queen of Nippur where he warned any and all who would destroy his work or his words the focus on the future could not be more clear he said if at any time in the future during the days of the reign of some future ruler this temple falls into disrepair and becomes dilapidated may that ruler seek out its original emplacement and repair its dilapidated parts the gods will then hear his prayers he will lengthen his days and enlarge his family but as for the one who by some crafty device destroys an inscription written in my name or changes its position may the goddess Queen of Nippur great lady glare at him angrily and make his name and his descendants disappear from every land because we need to read the Assyrian royal annals for details of history and to reconstruct the Empire's rise and fall we focus less on the internal Imperial narrative of the corpus which concerned itself more with the divine selection and legitimation of Assyrian Kings as well as with proving in the sight of the gods the Kings maintenance of the proper relationship between divine and King thus ensuring the future continuation of the Assyrian state the Assyrian Imperial narrative found a way to tie past present and future together into a complex of ideas with real consequences in action providing a framework within which the Assyrian royal annals as well as the documentation of contemporaneous letters omens Oracle queries and ecstasy reports all fit together that master narrative comprehended a future for which specific divinatory techniques were the mainstay of institutional foresight as a final and brief coda I want to say that neither these livers nor celestial portents would have had any contemporary significance apart from the framework provided by the Assyrian Imperial narrative geared as it was to the future and to the survival and success of of Assyria and this is one of the great puzzles of the cuneiform scholastic tradition namely that we do not know what the purpose of liver or celestial divination was after the fall of Assyria before by then we have no more access to how those kinds of divination related to a world of political or social reality without the continuation of royal correspondence annals of the deeds of kings or the queries and reports to the gods the cuneiform almond texts which were preserved for many centuries into the neo-babylonian Persian and Hellenistic periods of Mesopotamian history take on the character of a frozen remnant of foresight planning without an anchor in the real world thank you very much for your attention [Applause] so thank you very much indeed for a very fascinating account of foresight in the Assyrian world and the way that the Kings used and recorded plans and predictions there's a brutal treatment of rebels most certainly made it very clear to all that this was not a society to be meddled with I recall Lord Byron's words and the destruction of Jerusalem by Sennacherib the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold and the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea they were to be feared I mean we need foresight just as the Assyrians did but fortunately perhaps we don't use sheeps livers nor normally astrology however we can be too sort of naive in our dependence on i.t the main you know thing that we use these days the computer says so of course it must be right mustn't it and I'm left wondering how our foresight will be viewed and and studied and remembered or interpreted by future historians will we regard D regarded as being wise or not professor Rathbun thank you very much indeed for coming from California to speak to us tonight and for ending this 2013 Darwin College lecture series really so magnificently thank you [Applause] right this has been a splendid series obviously we started with Jeffrey Lloyd's lecture on foresight in ancient civilizations and then we've we've de way through journalism fiction and music via the scientific method and the amazing imagery of space weather to human self control and then finally back almost full circle to the ancient world with tonight's lecture if you missed any or you just want to watch a lecture again don't forget you can see them any of them online just follow the links on the Darwin College web page so I just like to take this opportunity to once again thank all the speakers and then especially to congratulate Jeffrey Lloyd who many of you may know has been awarded the 2013 Dan David prize which is widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of the humanities so [Applause] and almost the last thing I need to do at the end of this 28th lecture series is to announce the topic for the 2014 Darwin College lecture series haha it will be plagues so I can also announce a draft schedule of speakers and topics well that's very sedate so we will leave that up for a while so you can all all look at it to say that I'm looking forward to playing this doesn't really sound quite right does it but I certainly am looking forward to learning about the ways in which plagues operate and affect us and our societies and how we record and undi lyth them so on behalf of all the organizers for the this lecture series I just like to thank all of you for making these lectures such an enjoyable part of Friday evenings in Cambridge and I look forward to seeing an audience again next year in January 2014 for we think plagues and medicine [Applause] you you

Channel: Darwin College Lecture Series

Views: 8,134

Keywords: Darwin College, Darwin College Lecture Series, University of Cambridge, Foresight, Mesopotamia, Nineveh, Nimrud, Assyria, sacrificial sheep, Assyrian kings, cuniform tablets, Babylon, Professor Francesca Rochberg

Id: T9Y8cMpA8MQ

Length: 61min 20sec (3680 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020