Bārûtu

The Bārûtu, the “art of the diviner,” is a monumental ancient Mesopotamian compendium of the science of extispicy or sacrificial omens stretching over around a hundred cuneiform tablets which was assembled in the Neo-Assyrian/Babylonian period based upon earlier recensions. At the Assyrian 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 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 work is particularly difficult to interpret due to the extensive use 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:

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.

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