Niqu (Animal Offering)

Alongside the ordinary daily meal service that Mesopotamian temples provided their resident gods, documented on this religion's page as the ritual Naptanu, animal sacrifice, niqu, marked a more occasional and more intense form of offering. A sheep was the most common victim, though other animals appear in the record as well, ritually slaughtered near the altar with portions of the meat burned as smoke rising toward the god, other portions cooked and set out as food, and the remainder often distributed to temple personnel or, on festival occasions, to a wider public.

Because it involved real bloodshed and a real, valuable domestic animal rather than the routine grain, bread and beer of the daily meal offering, niqu was reserved for occasions carrying particular weight, building dedications, treaty oaths sworn before the gods, royal ceremonies and specific festival days, when a more forceful demonstration of piety and expenditure was called for than the ordinary offering table provided.

Niqu carried a second function that had no equivalent in the daily meal service: the slaughtered animal itself became a source of divine communication. Once the sacrifice had been made, a specialist diviner called a bareu would examine the animal's liver and other internal organs for markings and irregularities believed to carry a message from the gods about future events, a practice this religion's page already documents as the ritual Barutu, Mesopotamian extispicy. In this way a single sacrificial act served two purposes at once, honoring the god with an offering and extracting from that same offering a reading of divine intention.

Francesca Rochberg's study of Mesopotamian divination situates extispicy within a much broader culture of reading omens from every available surface, the sky, oil poured on water, the behavior of animals, but treats sacrificial liver divination as among the most institutionally developed of these methods, with its own specialist training, its own technical manuals and its own place at the center, rather than the periphery, of state and temple religious life.