Reading Room · Fortune-Telling Methods · Method
How did Babylonian diviners read a sheep liver?
Extispicy, the reading of a sacrificed sheep's entrails, was called bārûtu when done in Babylonia. A trained bārû examined the liver's lobes, markings and blemishes, sorted each feature as favorable or unfavorable, and checked the answer with a second sheep before reporting it.
Facts checked on against 13 sources, 10 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.
Key facts
Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.
| Hellenistic period | Greek liver-reading manuals with binary right and left divisions appear, which Furley and Gysembergh tie to Mesopotamian roots.1 |
|---|---|
| 3000 BCE | Early evidence for the study and drawing of sheep organs for divination is reported in Babylonia.2 |
| Ca. 1900–1600 BCE | Old Babylonian clay liver models with inscribed omen boxes were made, and a sheep-liver model now in the British Museum belongs to this period.34 |
| Ca. 1700 BCE | The Harvard manual, an Old Babylonian tablet, sets out right-side features as auspicious and left-side features as inauspicious.5 |
| Turn of the 2nd to 1st millennium BCE | The extispicy series Bārûtu took standardized form as a collection of omens in ten chapters.65 |
| Sixth century BCE | The prophet Ezekiel refers to the Babylonian king looking in the liver.72 |
| 1st millennium BCE | Bārûtu was compiled as a large omen compendium, with Assyrian copies found in Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh.56 |
What the reader did
The procedure began with an unblemished sheep, killed with a knife, after which the intestines, gall bladder and liver were taken out and examined for irregularities.8
Per Steinkeller, the diviner sacrificed a sheep, always a white lamb, for a client and then analysed the answer written in its entrails.5
Goetze reports that the bārû read the liver in an orthodox order, and comparison with the Boğazköy liver models indicates a counterclockwise movement around the liver.9
Goetze states that the Old Babylonian and Kassite texts commonly open by naming the sacrificial lamb, a term for the ceremony and the god invoked, for example one lamb to Šamaš for a favorable omen.9
Lutz notes that the baru's liver reports on one tablet begin with the manzazu and end with the tiranu, a fixed scheme.10
Parts of the liver and their terms
In the procedure a bārû first studied the area of the manzāzu, also called naplastu, a groove on the lobus sinister.1
The Babylonian finger, ubānu, has no function like the Greek and Etruscan head checked for presence or absence.1
The finger is anatomically the processus caudatus, formed by the lobus caudatus, and is a conspicuous feature of the sheep's liver with three edges, three surfaces, and a tapering point.6
Jastrow lists the liver signs read by the diviners as the size and shape of the lobes, the gall bladder, the two appendices of the upper lobe (processus pyramidalis and processus papillaris), and the markings on the liver.11
Goetze identifies piqittum as the technical term for repeating an extispicy to confirm or correct the prior one, which is called restûm.9
Goetze proposes that tawiltum denotes the response to the original inquiry and ahûtum the confirmation by means of the follow-up.9
Deciding the answer
Per Steinkeller, the reading relied on a tradition-sanctioned understanding of organ conditions, judged good or bad by a basic left-right principle.5
Per Steinkeller, the diviner tallied positive against negative features and judged the extispicy favorable or unfavorable by whichever prevailed.5
Per Steinkeller, diviners often performed a second, control extispicy on another sheep and accepted the result only if it confirmed the first.5
Jastrow states that the right side of the liver was regarded as favorable and the left as unfavorable, so that signs were referred to the king's side or the enemy's side.122
What the tradition holds
How practitioners describe it, in their terms. Described, not endorsed.
Jastrow states that the diviners, called bârû, decided from the liver signs and by the principles of association of ideas whether the deity was favorably or unfavorably disposed.11
Jastrow states that Babylonian and Assyrian hepatoscopy rested on the identification of the sacrificial victim with the deity to whom it was offered, so that the two were attuned to one another.11
Jastrow states that Babylonian diviners believed reading the liver gave access to the workshop of the divine will, because the liver mirrored the mind of the god who accepted the animal.2
Daneshmand argues that, according to Mesopotamian texts, extispicy is the outcome of the gods' counsels in the divine assembly on a specific question, so the features on the sacrificial animal reflect the gods' views.13
What the evidence shows
What historians, scientists and controlled tests have found.
Clay liver models were recovered from Mesopotamian sites and from Tel Hazor, where a clay ox liver model dating from the 15th century BCE was found. Diviners used clay models because livers from similar animals never looked alike.3
Babylonian extispicy is attested by terracotta liver models and thousands of omen texts, including reports and compendia.1
Worked out from the evidence
Not stated outright by any one source. It is worked out from the sources cited.
- The bārû's reading combined a fixed anatomical vocabulary with a binary sort of favorable and unfavorable signs, and the clay models show that the method was taught by repeated, standardized inspection rather than improvised.315
- Accounts disagree on where the Greek liver-reading system came from: Burkert saw it carried by wandering seers, Bachvarova traced it through Anatolia, and Furley and Gysembergh tie it to Mesopotamian terms.1
Not yet confirmed
- How closely did the dub ḫa.la calculations of omen validity match what diviners did in practice?
- Did the Greek papyri's binary liver system descend directly from Mesopotamian practice, or through Anatolia?
Sources
Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. Every fact is paraphrased and nothing is copied; Wikipedia is never cited.
- bmcr.brynmawr.edu: Reading the Liver. Papyrological Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum, 94 – Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Read on · University
- gutenberg.org: The Evolution of Modern Medicine, by William Osler. Read on · Primary text
- journals.lww.com: A History of the Assessment of Liver Performance : Clinical Liver Disease. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
- pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: History of liver surgery - PMC - NIH. Read on · University
- predictionx.org: Haruspicy | PredictionX. Read on · Reference
- assyriologyphd.hcommons.org: Tag: extispicy - PhD Research in Assyriology. Read on · Reference
- journals.lww.com: History of liver surgery : Clinical Liver Disease. Read on · Peer-reviewed journal
- encyclopedia.com: Extispicy (or Extispicium) | Encyclopedia.com. Read on · Reference
- Internet Archive: Goetze 1957 Reports On Acts Of Extispicy From Old Babylonian And Kassite Times. Read on · Primary text
- Internet Archive: A Cassite Liver-Omen Text. Read on · Primary text
- gutenberg.org: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Babylonian-Assyrian Birth-Omens and Their Cultural Significance, by Morris Jastrow, Jr.. Read on · Primary text
- Internet Archive: Hepatoscopy and Astrology in Babylonia and Assyria. Read on · Primary text
- brill.com: Extispicy and Consensus Decision-Making in Ancient Mesopotamia in: DABIR Volume 9 Issue 1 (2022). Read on · Peer-reviewed journal