'A king will die': 4,000-year-old Babylonian tablets finally deciphered to reveal disastrous omens

Researchers have finally deciphered a set of 4,000-year-old Babylonian tablets that had ominous omens of doom and destruction.

The four clay tablets dating back some 4,000 years likely originated in Sipparan — an ancient Babylonian city southwest of what is now Baghdad, Iraq.

'There will be an attack on the land by a locust swarm.'

The Babylonian tablets were written in cuneiform — the earliest system of writing that was developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia around 3,400 to 3,300 BCE. The term "cuneiform" comes from the Latin word cuneus, meaning "wedge," and forma, meaning "shape," referring to the wedge-shaped formations made by a stylus on the soft clay tablets.

The British Museum acquired the tablets between 1892 and 1914. However, the tablets have never been fully translated until now.

The translation of the ancient artifacts was recently published in a paper featured in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies. The paper was written by Andrew George, an emeritus professor of Babylonian at the University of London, and Junko Taniguchi, an independent researcher.

The paper titled "Old Babylonian Lunar-Eclipse Omen Tablets in the British Museum" declares that the artifacts are "the oldest examples of compendia of lunar-eclipse omens yet discovered and thus provide important new information about celestial divination among the peoples of southern Mesopotamia in the early second millennium BCE."

The paper reads: "They are all found to bear witness to a single text, which organizes the omens of lunar eclipse by time of night, movement of shadow, duration, and date."

The Babylonians were deeply driven by astrology and invented the 12 zodiac signs and the horoscope.

Babylonians recorded the movements of the celestial bodies, the stars, and planets and recognized patterns in them. They believed celestial phenomena were divine signs from the gods and could predict joyous and catastrophic events.

One of the most significant celestial phenomena for the ancient people was lunar eclipses — when Earth’s shadow falls on the surface of the full moon. The Babylonians were able to predict lunar eclipses with fair accuracy for the time.

Babylonians believed that "events in the sky were coded signs placed there by the gods as warnings about the future prospects of those on earth," George and Taniguchi wrote in the paper. "Those who advised the king kept watch on the night sky and would match their observations with the academic corpus of celestial-omen texts."

According to NASA, Babylonians believed lunar eclipses meant evil omens were coming that involved their kings.

The Babylonians went as far as appointing substitute kings so they would be the victims of the wrath of the gods instead of the real king. The substitute king was reportedly killed so the omen was always correct.

The tablets claim that if "an eclipse becomes obscured from its center all at once [and] clear all at once, a king will die, destruction of Elam,” referring to a region that is now located in modern-day Iran.

A prediction proclaims if there is "an eclipse begins in the south and then clears" that it will result in the "downfall of Subartu and Akkad," referring to two other regions of the time.

Another omen warns that "a dearth of straw will occur; there will be losses of cattle" if an eclipse occurs on a certain day of the month.

"There will be an attack on the land by a locust swarm," one omen reads.

The tablet text foresees that a "large army will fall" if a lunar eclipse occurs.

George told Live Science, "The origins of some of the omens may have lain in actual experience — observation of portent followed by catastrophe."

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