Reading Room · Fortune-Telling Methods · Method
How was oil on water read in ancient Babylon?
Lecanomancy: reading oil dropped onto water in a bowl, practised in Mesopotamia. Old Babylonian ritual tablets describe a diviner looking at oil in water while asking Shamash and Hadad. The surface patterns were interpreted as signs, and the exact reading method is still debated.
Facts checked on against 8 sources, 4 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.
| Old Babylonian period | Old Babylonian texts publishing by J. Hunger include an oil-divination text, which Daiches dates to the time of Hammurabi.1 |
|---|---|
| c. 2000 BCE | Daiches dates the Babylonian practice of oil magic to around this time, based on his dating of the Ritual Tablets.1 |
| 19th–17th centuries BC | Kitchen writes that a handbook for the technique is preserved on two cuneiform tablets from this period.2 |
| c. 1700 BC | Kitchen argues that Genesis 44:5 implies knowledge of cup-divination in Hyksos-period Egypt.2 |
| 2nd century AD | Kitchen notes that the technique recurs in papyri of this century.2 |
| 1980 | Tabor publishes an article on Babylonian lecanomancy that describes the method in detail.3 |
What the word means
The water is held in a bowl, dish or pan, which separates lecanomancy from hydromancy, the wider reading of water in general.4
Mesopotamian ritual tablets
Dynarowicz-Latka and co-authors report that an oil layer on water was read as predicting outcomes such as success, marriage, birth of a child, recovery, bad luck, sickness, or death.3
What the tradition holds
How practitioners describe it, in their terms. Described, not endorsed.
Babylonian tradition, as recorded by the author of the online essay "PGM IV 154-285: A complete Magical System" (Voces Magicae), held that the practice was taught by the antediluvian king Emmeduranki, who learned it directly from the gods. Wilfred G. Lambert's The Qualifications of Babylonian Diviners (1998) is the cited basis for this attribution.5
Richard Cassaro describes the Assyrian practice as dropping precious stones into water and reading the ripples, with a thin layer of animal fat over the oil kept in a special bowl, and the diviner dropping a consecrated stone marked with strange symbols after a question was asked.6
Rabelais, in Gargantua and Pantagruel, lists leconomancy among methods of old that were in prime request among the Assyrians.7
What the evidence shows
What historians, scientists and controlled tests have found.
Anor and Cohen published an article in 2018 in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, titled "The oil omens from Hattuša," which investigates the history and transmission of a Babylonian divination compendium.8
Jean Capart, in a 1944 summary in Chronique d'Égypte, argued that Greco-Roman Egypt practised lecanomancy, and he judged a pair of Middle Kingdom figurines to possibly depict it.2
Worked out from the evidence
Not stated outright by any one source. It is worked out from the sources cited.
Not yet confirmed
- How closely do the Old Babylonian oil tablets tie particular oil shapes to particular outcomes?
- Did the Assyrian stone-dropping method described by later writers have a direct Mesopotamian counterpart?
- How did the practice move from Mesopotamian ritual into Greek and Egyptian magical papyri?
Sources
Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. Every fact is paraphrased and nothing is copied; Wikipedia is never cited.
- archive.org: Full text of "[Babylonian oil magic in the Talmud and in the later Jewish literature](https://archive.org/details/babylonianoilmag00daicuoft)". Read on · Primary text
- armstronginstitute.org: Joseph’s Peculiar Silver Cup—in the Bible and Archaeology | ArmstrongInstitute.org. Read on · Reference
- sciencedirect.com: Babylonian lecanomancy: An ancient text on the spreading of oil on water - ScienceDirect. Read on · Reference
- web.archive.org: PGM IV. 154-285: Lecanomancy – Voces Magicae. Read on · Primary text
- web.archive.org: PGM IV 154-285: A complete Magical System – Voces Magicae. Read on · Primary text
- richardcassaro.com: Lecanomancy. Read on · Reference
- en.wiktionary.org: lecanomancy - Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Read on · Reference
- cris.tau.ac.il: The oil omens from hattuša: An investigation of the history and transmission of a babylonian divination compendium - Tel Aviv University. Read on · University