More than a century after their discovery, scholars have finally decoded inscriptions on a set of 4,000-year-old tablets. The texts contain ominous predictions warning of disasters such as famine, disease, invasions—and even the death of a king.
In ancient Mesopotamia, lunar eclipses were often interpreted as signs of impending misfortune. One chilling inscription bluntly states, “A king will die”—hardly reassuring news for a superstitious ruler.
In a study published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, researchers translated 73 cuneiform omens from ancient Babylonia. Cuneiform, a logo-syllabic script in which symbols represent words or sounds, was widely used across the Ancient Near East, a region corresponding broadly to today’s Middle East.
