Enuma Anu Enlil

The series arranges the sky by divinity and phenomenon. Its first large section belongs to Sin, the moon: omens from the day of the month on which the crescent first appears, from halos and earthshine, and above all from eclipses, graded by month, day, watch of the night and the quarter of the disk where the shadow enters, each configuration matched to a forecast for one of the lands, Akkad, Elam, Subartu or Amurru.

The Shamash section reads the sun, its colour at rising, parhelia, and eclipses; the Adad section reads the weather as omen, thunder in a clear sky, rain in season and out; and the final section, under Ishtar, treats the fixed stars and planets, Venus above the rest, her risings, settings and conjunctions. Every entry keeps the same grammar, if this is seen, then this will follow, and the forecasts concern the state, the king, the harvest, war, flood and pestilence, never private persons, for the sky wrote to the realm. The scholars who used the series did not wait passively on its verdicts: an evil eclipse omen could be met with the substitute-king ritual, in which a stand-in took the danger while the true king withdrew, the sign read as warning rather than doom. Tablet sixty three, the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, preserves observation records from the Old Babylonian dynasty and has served modern scholarship, cautiously, as a chronological anchor for the second millennium.

Celestial omens were collected in Mesopotamia from at least the Old Babylonian period, eclipse omens among the earliest, and the material was shaped across the later second millennium, versions travelling as far as the Hittite capital, before the series crystallised as Enuma Anu Enlil, in the region of seventy tablets, by the early first millennium BCE.

The libraries of Nineveh, gathered by Assurbanipal in the seventh century, preserve the fullest exemplars alongside commentaries and the excerpt series that organised its use. Around it worked a profession: the tupshar Enuma Anu Enlil, the scribe of the series, was the court title of the celestial diviner, and the surviving correspondence of Assyrian kings with their scholars, hundreds of letters and reports, shows the system alive, observers across the empire writing in what the moon and Venus had done, quoting the series entry that applied, and advising the king accordingly, down to the scheduling of rituals and the political handling of eclipses. The series remained canonical in Babylonian scholarship through the Persian and Seleucid periods, copied at Babylon and Uruk while a new thing grew beside it: personal horoscopy, first attested late in the fifth century BCE, which took the old celestial vocabulary and turned it from the state to the individual. Through that turn, and through Greek transmission, the omen series stands at the head of the astrological tradition, and its modern edition proceeds tablet group by tablet group across Assyriological scholarship.