1. Introduction

In modern-day eyes, we tend to view sheep as stupid and meek, or, at best, innocent and passive. However, the sheep is a very resourceful animal. The individuals flock together as their protection is in their numbers. The flock can be led by one of their own members (and not solely by dog or shepherd) – and, contrary to one’s own prejudice – by the mature ewe. The sheep direct their gaze at anyone approaching to warn other members of the flock of danger and are capable of communicating with each other by a variety of signals through their movements. They possess a scientifically proven facial recognition ability, which is by far superior to other farm animals. Tests reveal that sheep can correctly recognize photographs of sheep faces and human faces. The ewe is particularly fond of her lamb and good at caring for it, providing a behavioral pattern for other members of the flock to follow. In the economic domain, the proper management of sheep leads to a successful herd, bringing prosperity to its owner. Thus, in metaphorical terms, the early Mesopotamian ruler became to be thought of as the ‘faithful shepherd’ (rē’û kīnu), and the people of the alluvium were nicknamed ‘black-headed’ ((nišū) ṣalmāt qaqqadi, ‘(people) black of head’) – a metaphoric term for humans borrowing its imagery from the black-headed sheep. To fully spell out the metaphor, the king, as a shepherd, took care of the people – a flock of sheep, for the benefit of its owners – the gods.

2. The Origins of Sacrifice

The qualities of the animal and its close relations with humans have led, one can conclude, to the symbolic identification of the animal with humans. This may even have stood at the core of the raison d’être of the sacrifice, if we subscribe to the view that the sacrificial animal serves as a surrogate for the human, without necessarily assuming a reality of actual human sacrifice. To Isaac’s question, “Where is the offering lamb?” (איה השה לעלה), Abraham answers “God himself will provide the lamb for the offering” (אלהים יראה לו השה לעלה; Genesis 22, 8). This proves, so one can argue, the very point.

We need to understand, however, that animal sacrifice in Mesopotamia, is very much a practice that is related to divination, in contradistinction to Jewish animal sacrifice. Hence, we need to devote some discussion to Babylonian divination.

The need for knowing the future is universal, but the ways of revealing it are culture specific. In Mesopotamia, the oracle question, ‘What will the future hold for me?’ is usually formulated as a question regarding the well-being of the seeker of the answer and it is related to the immediate future. The oracle question could relate to various interests, such as the well-being of the king and his army, as well as concerns of the ‘everyman.’

3. The Art of Babylonian Extispicy

The answer to the question is primarily revealed by four types of divination techniques,

which are: 1.) astronomical omens, 2.) terrestrial omens, 3.) teratology (which dealt with the form and special features of defect or miscarried births of various animals and formed the material out of which the omen series šumma izbu, ‘If a (miscarried) foetus’ was made), and 4.) extispicy. The omens of these all were written and collected over the centuries of cuneiform civilization.

But how did extispicy omens come about? The interest in the sheep as a medium of divination may lie at the very start of the domestication of the animal. As we have discussed above, life among the herds brought about an intimacy with the habits of the sheep. Because the sheep earned a livelihood for many a family in Mesopotamia, its well-being was of acute concern. The shepherd was on a constant lookout for predators and aware of any diseases that infected the herd. Attention was given to the proliferation of the herd. The number of lambs lost was probably very high and much higher than today.

In modern UK flocks, up to 15% of the lambs may be lost, born dead, or dead within a few days. There can also be a loss of up to 50% if the weather conditions are harsh. The loss of lambs at prepartum or postpartum was closely followed, with the numbers of the herd tallied. This close observation of animal life, coupled with a religious significance attributed to a life-form, which seemingly miraculously arrives from the womb, is what probably led to consider the phenomenon of still-born lambs (and other births) as ominous. We can assume that even before the omens were committed to writing (the šumma izbu omens), the fetus of the animal (Akkadian izbu), as well as that of the human (also izbu, but sometimes designated as kūbu), was considered to carry a message from the gods because it was the product of the divine forces. The fetus was planted in the womb by the gods, an inner dark place, conveying a message from beyond to the present. By very similar reasoning, in specific ritual proceedings – which culminated in the sacrifice of the sheep – the liver of the sacrificial animal was granted an ominous meaning: the largest organ in the body, and hence of obvious importance, was situated deep in the body, hidden by other organs. After the ritual slaughter and the question put before the gods, once exposed to the eye, the liver revealed its dark secret: a divine response sent by the gods.

To conclude, the purpose of extispicy was to reveal the liver and other organs in order to view and “read” signs, so as to gain an understanding of what stands for the seeker of the answer in the future.

Now all of this happened in a cultic setting at a sacrifice. The context is everything in this case. The close intimacy with the animal and its sacrifice in a cultic setting, is what gave rise to extispicy, so one can imagine, but as far as can be told, all this probably lies back in protohistory, at the Neolithic period, if this is when the sacrifice of domestic animals began. Nonetheless, and although never explicitly mentioned in our sources, the context of sacrifice may imply a relationship of projection between the seeker of the oracle question and the sacrificial animal: the animal in its death is a gift from the sacrificer and, to go one step further, the well-being of the animal’s frame and inner parts are ominous indications of a promised well-being of the client.

Note, however, that the analogy between the sacrificer and victim, cannot be pushed much further. We know that other methods of divination in Mesopotamia were utilized and

no sacrifice of any sort was involved in them. And yet they proved to be very popular (for example the šumma izbu series and the šumma ālu series) and some even superseded extispicy.

4. The Sacrificial Sheep and its Omens in the Ikribu Ritual

What happened in the ritual of sacrifice and extispicy? First the diviner himself: the bārû. As the person performing the extispicy ritual, unsurprisingly, the bārû had to fulfill the conditions of purity and sanctity. The diviner had to be devoid of physical defects and be of perfect stature, for otherwise he would not have been seen as fit to receive the true answer to his oracle question from the gods. It is said that he had to be of pure and ever-lasting descent, coming from a family of diviners, and (mythologically speaking) to be an offspring of Enmeduranki – the legendary diviner-king, who received the knowledge of divination from the gods. The diviner also had to undergo schooling in the secret arts of divination, acquiring the knowledge of different types of extispicy and divination techniques, as well as mastering the art of interpretation. Then the sheep: the sheep was not to be touched by an impure person and its way to the place of the sacrifice was not to be obstructed. The sheep was not to be handled by any person who wore soiled garments, who had eaten, drank, or anointed himself or herself with anything unclean.

The sacrificial animal itself had to be a male lamb (puḫādu) or sheep (immeru), a pure animal, free of any physical blemish, innocent of the act of mating, and upon which the human hand has not been laid. Its fleece, white, was not yet shorn.

Šamaš, lord of judgment, Adad, lord of extispicy Rituals and divination,

I bring you a ram, offspring of a ewe, a pure, tiqqu-coloured lamb, speckled/bright, a

ṣuppu-sheep, purely dressed-in-wool, which was discharged from the “behind” of a ewe.

Whose fleece on the right and the left no shepherd plucked I will pluck for you, Whose fleece

on the right and on the left I will offer you,

With resin invite the Great Gods! May resin and cedar-wood invite you(pl.)! in the extispicy

which I will do, in the ikribu ritual which I will perform, place the truth.

[In the ca]se? of so-and-so, son of so-and-so, place the truth in the lamb which I will offer…

Although there was a priority to a male lamb, female sheep were also sacrificed. Other animals were not used for the purposes of extispicy. A nice illustration for this is found in a Sumerian proverb: “Using a donkey instead of the sheep will not allow you to recognize any omens.”

The ritual was held at night – when the god Šamaš, the supreme judge of the Mesopotamian pantheon visits the netherworld to judge the dead. There he sits along with a host of netherworld deities. It is he who writes the outcome of his verdict of judgment for the client by inscribing his say on the liver and other internal organs which are located inside the sheep.

“Inside the sheep you write (the verdict), (in) the flesh you place (your) judgement.”

The omen was placed in the sheep while still alive:

tertû ina libbi immeri balṭi kī šaknat

“The omen is placed thus inside the living sheep.”

Just before sunrise a set of rituals was enacted by arranging offering tables to Šamaš and other gods. Then towards daybreak, the animal was prepared for slaughter. The sheep was slaughtered by the diviner himself. How exactly the sheep was slaughtered is not specified, but reliefs from the Neo-Assyrian palaces show us two scenes of the animal placed high on a table. In one scene, we see the animal opened with a knife, presumably by which its neck was cut. And in the second scene, in which the diviner inspects the inside of the animal with the help of his assistant, the animal is shown without its head. At the time of the slaughter, the sheep was observed and signs were taken from it – collected in a special series called šumma immeru. Once the sheep was slaughtered, the head was separated from the body and a libation was poured over it.

After the head was cut off from the animal body and the blood drained, select pieces of the animal were offered and the omentum was removed, as well as other parts of the stomach. Then the intestines were taken out in order to be inspected. Finally, lungs, heart, and liver were taken out of the body and were thoroughly inspected. The examination, so it is clear, happened at daylight when the sun was up.

The many parasites that infect the sheep liver leave their marks on its surface. The various marks all received a designation, and because they appeared to resemble scribblings they were actually imagined to look like actual (archaic) cuneiform signs to be “read” by the diviner (Frahm 2010; Maul 2013: 64, 75–77). The marks are called in the literature ‘fortuitous marks’ (Leiderer 1990: 32). The šīlu, ‘hole’, caused by parasites, appeared, as an unfavourable sign on the naplaštum/manzāzu. Tapeworms may also infect the liver and cause white spots on its surface, which were called pūṣu. The mark called diḫḫu/ṣiḫḫu, ‘pustule’ was also a mark caused by parasites. The erištu, ‘Forrow/Request’, was a mark, which could bring about positive apodoses, so long as it was normally-sized and not dark. Another common mark was the kakku, ‘Weapon’: it was a peg-shaped mark in the shape of the (archaic) cuneiform sign kak.

The value of the marks (i.e., positive or negative) depended on which side of the zone they appeared and on their colour and texture. For example the ‘Weapon’ brought about apodoses concerned with war, while the ‘pustule’, because of being filled with fluids, invited apodoses dealing with rain. The areas, their zones, and the fortuitous marks were interpreted according to a complex system that still follows the rules articulated above. The duty of the diviner was to identify and correctly interpret the writings that the gods had inscribed on the organs and the various parts of the liver body.

6.

The purpose of extispicy was to reveal the liver and other organs in order to view and “read” the signs, so as to gain understanding of what stands for the client in the future, especially when his or her god was not placated.

But how was the actual omen read and understood? At the root of Babylonian divination literature, to describe it succinctly, lies a binary structure of a positive field and negative field, very often, labelled as the directions right and left (Koch 2015: 12–15 and 82). Generally, this binary structure holds by tenet that the right field is the pars familiaris, or ‘my side’ and the left field is the pars hostilis or ‘my enemy’s side’: a favourable sign on ‘my side’ is a good omen for the client but a bad omen for the enemy. And a favourable sign on ‘my enemy’s side’ is a bad omen for the client but a good omen for the enemy. However, multitude considerations could upset this neat division, and each sign or omen had to be evaluated separately: colours, sizes, and directions influenced the value of the sign (Maul 2013: 56–57 and 101–102). The sum of positive signs against the sum of negative signs is what determined the outcome of the oracle question. Consider this set of omens (YOS 10 33 iv 42–46; adapted from Winitzer 2017: 87):

šumma ina imitti ubānim šīlum šakin miqitti ummānika

šumma ina šumēl ubānim šīlum šakin miqitti nakrim

‘If in the right side of the ‘Finger’ (a feature of the liver) a hole is located, the fall of my army.’

‘If in the left side of the ‘Finger’ a hole is located, the fall of the enemy.’

In this couplet of omens, the right-left principle is at work. A negative sign––a hole in right side of one of the liver parts––on my side is bad news, but on the opposite side, is bad news for my adversary, hence positive for me.

The way that the omens were formulated remained constant throughout the entire corpus of Babylonian divination literature regardless of the genre, place or time period of the text in question. The omen sign was articulated by a bipartite conditional sentence, ‘If...then’: the first sentence, called by us nowadays the protasis, is opened by šumma, ‘If’: it is concerned with the description of the observed sign. The second sentence, the apodosis, follows directly the first sentence: it gives the result or interpretation of the sign. The interpretation is either ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, with the exception of an indication of an ambiguous omen (by special terminology).

The relation of the apodosis to the protasis is not always easy to understand: the apodosis can be seen as an interpretative statement of the protasis, sparked by a variety of associations (analogic, verbal, symbolic, metaphoric), obviously thought of as necessary and not arbitrary for the diviner (Koch 2015: 14, 83; Winitzer 2017, with many examples). I give two examples taken from omen observations of the sacrificial sheep (YOS 10 47 §§ 10 and 13):

šumma immerum isāšu ira’ubā urbāšum eli ummanī ima[qqut]

‘If a sheep – its jaws quiver, shivers of fear will fa[ll] upon my army.’

šumma immerum šinnīšu ikaṣṣaṣ aššat awīlim iniakma ˹i˺[na] bītim uṣṣi

‘If a sheep gnashes its teeth, the man’s wife will fornicate and she will leave the household.’

We see in the first omen an analogy (body part quivers > shivers of fear) and sound association (alliteration between the elements of the protasis and the apodosis). In the second omen we find a symbolic association between the protasis and the apodosis (exposing teeth > baring of the genitals).

On certain occasions, as in the examples brought above, we can understand the relationship between the protasis and the apodosis, but there are times when the link is not clear, and indeed, may not have been clear to the diviner himself, who would have resorted to the ancient commentaries for an learned explanation (Frahm 2011a). Modern scholarship has made great strides in understanding the relationship between both parts of the omen sentence, but much remains to be done, as will be explained below.

As previously noted, the main focus of the extispicy was the liver organ (amūtu or têrtu). It was usually not considered as a whole, but as a body part made up of many components, each worthy of a detailed examination down to the very minutest of details (Meyer 1987; Jeyes 1989; Leiderer 1990; Starr 1990; Koch 2000; Maul 2013; De Vos 2014).