For all Weekly Response essays, make sure to read the instructions.docx

For all Weekly Response essays, make sure to read the
instructions carefully. I am looking for how you combine
information from all the sources assigned: lectures, Lindberg,
additional readings, films etc. You need to cite carefully where
you get your information: Author, Pg # ( for example Lindberg,
p. 13 or Rochberg, p 559), for films refer to a scene (I do not
need time hacks). You do not need to cite my lectures (I know
what I said).
Please read: Francesca Rochberg, “Empiricism in Babylonian
Omen Texts and the Classification of Mesopotamian Divination
as Science,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol.
119, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1999), pp. 559-569.
And discuss: Following Rochberg’s argument, what are the
pitfalls or difficulties that one can encounter in exploring the
history of science in the ancient world. How can we define
'science' to avoid them? What role does ‘observation’ play
in Rochberg’sargument? Are you generally convinced by her
thesis?
NOTE: Rochberg does a very good job in making her technical
terminology accessible to us. Still, it might require a bit of
patience on your part to fully understand her argument--it is
well worth the effort. Also, in your responses to the questions
above, use specific examples from her essay.
250-350 words.
require specific references and citations

Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts and the Classification of
Mesopotamian Divination as
Science
Author(s): Francesca Rochberg
Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 119, No.
4 (Oct. - Dec., 1999), pp. 559-
569
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/604834 .
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EMPIRICISM IN BABYLONIAN OMEN TEXTS AND THE
CLASSIFICATION OF
MESOPOTAMIAN DIVINATION AS SCIENCE
FRANCESCA ROCHBERG
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
This paper reevaluates the empirical content of Babylonian
omen protases in the light of more recent
discussions among philosophers of science of the relation
between observation and theory, and argues
against separating observationally derived phenomena,
understood as physical objects of ordinary
sense perception, from those derived by use of schematic
symmetries. The goal of this paper is to
ascertain the criteria of observation implied by omen texts in
order to evaluate the "empirical" nature

of Mesopotamian divination in the wider framework of the
history of science.
To the memory of John A. Phillips
INTRODUCTION: THE CLASSIFICATION OF
BABYLONIAN DIVINATION AS SCIENCE
THE STUDY OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN SCIENCE has
been largely devoted to the reading and analysis of the
many astronomical records, both observational and com-
putational, found in the southern Mesopotamian cities of
Babylon and Uruk, dating mostly from the period after
500 B.C.] Earlier texts of astronomical interest, found in
Assyrian sites such as Nineveh and Assur, provide evi-
dence of the incorporation of astronomical events within
a vast system of divination that predicted the future on the
basis of natural and other events of many kinds.2 Such
events were viewed as signs produced by the gods by
Portions of this paper were presented at the 208th meeting of
the American Oriental Society in New Orleans, April 1998. I
want to thank Sir Geoffrey Lloyd and Prof. Ernan McMullin for
their insightful and encouraging readings of the paper.
1 See 0. Neugebauer, Astronomical Cuneiform Texts, 3 vols.
(London: Lund Humphries, 1955); idem, A History of Ancient
Mathematical Astronomy, 3 vols. (Berlin: Springer Verlag,
1975),
with bibliography.

2 See S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian Scholars to the Kings
Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal, vols. I and II, Alter Orient und
Altes Testament, vol. 5.2 (Kevelaer: Verlag Butzon & Berker,
1970 and 1983); H. Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian
Kings, State Archives of Assyria, vol. 8 (Helsinki: Helsinki
Univ. Press, 1992); and S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and
Babylonian Scholars, State Archives of Assyria, vol. 10 (Hel-
sinki: Helsinki Univ. Press, 1993).
means of which humans were forewarned of future events.
Foreknowledge could therefore be obtained by systematic
consideration and interpretation of the omens.3
Assyriologists have considered the omen texts a form
of science in Mesopotamia primarily because many of
the phenomena of interest in these texts are of the phys-
ical, natural, world.4 Thus many of the omen protases of
3 For general studies of Mesopotamian divination, see A. L.
Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civiliza-
tion, rev. ed. E. Reiner (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1977);
and J. Bott6ro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning and the Gods,
tr. Z. Bahrani and M. van de Meiroop (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago
Press, 1992). Editions of Babylonian omen texts may be found
in E. Leichty, The Omen Series Summa Izbu, Texts from Cune-
iform Sources, vol. 4 (Locust Valley: J. J. Augustin Publisher,
1970); Erica Reiner and David Pingree, Babylonian Planetary
Omens, vols. I-II, Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, vols. 2.1 and 2.2
(Malibu: Undena Publications, 1975 and 1981); F Rochberg-
Halton, Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination: The Lunar
Eclipse Tablets of Enuma Anu Enlil, Archiv fur

Orientforschung,
Beiheft 22 (Horn: Verlag Ferdinand Berger & Sohne, 1988);
Wilfred H. van Soldt, Solar Omens of Enama Anu Enlil: Tablets
23 (24)-29 (30) (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch
Instituut te Istanbul, 1995); A Leo Oppenheim, The Interpreta-
tion of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, Transactions, vol. 46.3
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956); F. R.
Kraus,
Texte zur babylonischen Physiognomatik, Archiv fur Orientfor-
schung, Beiheft 3 (Osnabruck: Biblio-Verlag, 1939).
4 Note the discussion of omens under the rubric "science" in
the general overview of Mesopotamian culture by W. von
Soden,
559
Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.4 (1999)
the celestial omen series Enuma Anu Enlil, parts of
Summa alu dealing with fauna, of Summa izbu focusing
on anomalous animal and human births, of Alamdimmu,
that deal with the variable forms of the human anatomy,
and even parts of the Ziqiqu dreambook, have come to be
inspected as sources for understanding the Mesopotamian
attempt to grasp the workings of nature. Because the
diverse systems of Mesopotamian divination all stemmed
from a belief in the gods' involvement in the physical,
as well as the social worlds, and because of the close rela-
tionship of divination to apotropaic ritual magic, the body
of knowledge represented by the omen texts has not al-

ways been classified as science, particularly by historians
of science who prefer to see in this material a form of pre-
or proto-science.5
Beginning in the 1960s, however, philosophers and
anthropologists have argued about the similarities and dif-
ferences that relate or distinguish traditional (religious/
magical) and modem (scientific) thinking. As well, they
have also discussed the implications of accepting a rela-
tivism of "modes of thought" for defining both science
and the criteria of scientific truth.6 Those disposed to-
ward relativism extend the term science to divination
The Ancient Orient: An Introduction to the Study of the Ancient
Near East, tr. Donald G. Schley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William
B. Eerdmans, 1994), 153-57; celestial omens under the heading
"Astronomy in Mesopotamia," in H. W. F Saggs, Civilization
Before Greece and Rome (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989),
236-38; and the chapter entitled "Divination and the Scientific
Spirit," in J. Bottero, Mesopotamia, 125-37.
5 A. Aaboe, "Scientific Astronomy in Antiquity," in The Place
of Astronomy in the Ancient World, ed. F R. Hodson (London:
Oxford Univ. Press for The British Academy, 1974), 21-42;
O. Pedersen, Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Intro-
duction, rev. ed. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993): see ch. 1
"Science Before the Greeks," under the subheading, "The Myth-
ological Explanation of Nature," pp. 7-9.
6 See Robin Horton, "African Traditional Thought and West-
ern Science," Africa 37 (1967), reprinted as ch. 7 of Patterns of
Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion, and

Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); and
Stanley
Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of
Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), ch. 6:
"Rationality, Relativism, the Translation and Commensurability
of Cultures." See also the collection of papers edited by Bryan
R.
Wilson, Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970); the now
classic collection edited by R. Horton and Ruth Finnegan,
Modes
of Thought (London: Faber and Faber, 1973); and the more re-
cently edited collection by David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance,
Modes of Thought: Exploration in Culture and Cognition (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
and magic. This discussion becomes relevant to the study
of magical, alchemical, and astrological sources in the
history of Western science, with the result that the cri-
teria defining science "in general" established by Boyle
and the Royal Society of London in the seventeenth cen-
tury have at long last been rejected, as Barnes, Bloor,
and Henry put it, "not least because philosophers and
historians have now demonstrated repeatedly that the
contents of the accepted, authentic history of science are
not capable of being demarcated by this criterion, or
indeed by any other."7
For historians in the current post-positivistic climate,
science has ceased to be the exclusively logical and em-

pirical inquiry it once was, clearly and cleanly separable
from theology, metaphysics, and other speculative or
"mythic" forms of thought.8 The impact of this histori-
ography is such that many philosophers of science no
longer exclude all but "matters of fact and ratiocination"
from science and have even come so far as to call into
question the old demarcation game itself.9 Historical con-
siderations aside, on purely epistemological grounds some
have argued that "there is apparently no epistemic feature
or set of such features which all and only the 'sciences'
exhibit.... It is time we abandoned that lingering 'scien-
tistic' prejudice which holds that 'the sciences' and sound
knowledge are coextensive; they are not."'0
7
Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific
Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago
Press, 1996), 149.
8 The following are merely a suggestion of what is now an
enormous literature: Ron Millen, "The Manifestation of Occult
Qualities in the Scientific Revolution," in Religion, Science and
Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall, ed. M. J.
Osler and P. L. Farber (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1985), 185-216; the collection of papers edited by David C.
Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific

Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); also the
papers of Keith Hutchinson, "What Happened to Occult Quali-
ties in the Scientific Revolution," B. J. T Dobbs, "Newton's Al-
chemy and His Theory of Matter," and other papers collected in
The Scientific Enterprise in Early Modern Europe: Readings
from Isis, ed. Peter Dear (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1997).
9 See "Introductory Remarks" of Marx W. Wartofsky in Sci-
ence, Pseudo-Science and Society, ed. Marsha P Hanen,
Margaret
J. Osler, and Robert G. Weyant (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred
Laurier
Univ. Press, 1979), 1-9. See also Barnes, Bloor, and Henry,
Scientific Knowledge, ch. 6, "Drawing Boundaries,"140-68.
10 L. Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory,
Method, and Evidence (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996),
85-86.
560
ROCHBERG: Empiricism in Babylonian Omen Texts
Where ancient Mesopotamian traditions are concerned,
it would seem that the "scientistic prejudice" does linger
and old demarcations prevail. Otherwise, why do ideas
persist such as that science begins only with the Greeks
and continues to evolve to the present day?11 Or that

genuine science in Babylonia begins with the mathemat-
ical astronomy at the end of the sixth century B.C.? The
reason for this surely has to do with the fact that the
cuneiform "scientific texts," whatever these are taken to
include and however they are defined, are our earliest
known historical sources for science; and so, inquiring
into Mesopotamian science carries the extra burden of
inquiring into the origins of science. To raise the question
of when science begins already implies a demarcation
between science and pre-science, or non-science, but the
"scientistic prejudice" becomes explicit when, as von
Staden said, "the quest for the 'origins' of science often
is tacitly accompanied by a search for ancient motivations
that resemble modern scientific ones."'2
If, however, classification of the omen texts is not to
be based on an argument from affinity with modern or
other known sciences, on what set of criteria is it to be
11 Despite the sizable body of work by O. Neugebauer and
A. Aaboe showing the debt to Mesopotamia of Greek astro-
nomical science, statements from the wider field of history and
philosophy of science still frequently assume, as Philip Kitcher
does, that "scientists in the tradition that extends beyond the
seventeenth century to the ancient Greeks have been moved by
the impersonal epistemic aim of fathoming the structure of the
world." See P. Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science
without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1993), 94.
12 Heinrich von Staden, "Affinities and Elisions: Helen and
Hellenocentrism," Isis 83 (1992): 588. This tendency can be

found in serious scholarship which carries over into less sophis-
ticated work, where it does even more damage because of its
wider and less knowledgeable readership. One example (there
are many) is the following from a collection of readings in an-
cient history where James Breasted is quoted as saying about
the
Edwin Smith surgical papyrus: "Here we find the first scientific
observer known to us, and in this papyrus we have the earliest
known scientific document." Breasted's comment was typical in
1930, but what follows from the editor ought now not to be:
"The
unknown author, who lived sometime during the Old Kingdom
[sic], has written a treatise on surgery in which he inductively
draws conclusions from a body of observed facts." He goes on
to
point out that magic was only used in one of the forty-eight
cases
described and he asserts that "a truly scientific attitude" is
exem-
plified for the first time by this document. See Readings in An-
cient History, ed. Nels M. Bailkey, 3rd ed. (Heath, 1987), 37.
based? We may strive not to distort ancient systems of
thought by the imposition of our own definitions and
criteria and may try to determine the content, aims, and
methods of such systems "from within." But surely if the
discipline of scholarly divination bears no relation to the
discipline we have defined and determined by our own
social and cultural concensus to be science, why do we
seek to classify the native discipline of omens as "sci-

ence" at all? Without attributing any necessary universal
criteria to science, I think a simple answer is that, cor-
rectly or incorrectly, we recognize in this Mesopotamian
tradition aspects of what we term science in our, i.e., the
Western tradition. However carefully we may try to re-
construct the terms of an "alien" system on the basis of
primary texts, the meaning of the term science is not
entirely recreated in every scholarly historical investi-
gation. Though our classification of Mesopotamian divi-
nation as "science" probably would make no sense to a
Babylonian, it serves to make comprehensible to us some
aspects of this ancient intellectual tradition by connoting
a number of features: among them, empiricism and sys-
tematization of knowledge. Within the wider framework
of assessing cuneiform sources in terms of the criteria by
which Mesopotamian divination might be classified as
science, the present paper tackles only one such criterion,
namely, the empirical character of the omens.
THE EMPIRICAL CHARACTER OF OBJECTS OF
(MESOPOTAMIAN) SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
Most would agree that the desire to comprehend natu-
ral phenomena is the common denominator for science
regardless of its cultural manifestation. However, in ref-
erence to the Mesopotamian omen texts, to equate omens
with an inquiry into such phenomena does not fairly
represent these sources and seems to lose sight of the
fact that Mesopotamian omen texts concerned signs of
many kinds, of which natural phenomena formed but
one. That Enima Anu Enlil and its companion piece,
MUL.APIN, have generally been understood as the chief

sources for Babylonian physical science before 500 B.C.
takes these astronomical sources out of their broader in-
tellectual context just to satisfy modern Western tastes.
In an effort then to appreciate the full range of interests
comprising the discipline developed for the study of
phenomena, it seems important not to limit the general
discussion of Mesopotamian divination as science to
those parts of it, such as the astronomical omens, that
have the greatest similarity to more familiar sciences.
The "Babylonian" approach seemingly makes no episte-
mological or methodological distinction between astro-
nomical omens and other items of scholarly divination,
561
as we see clearly in the letters and reports of the Neo-
Assyrian diviner-scholars.13
Beginning with Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, the dis-
cussion of scientific knowledge has taken sense perception
as fundamental to science and the basis for generaliza-
tions about the natural world:
... we cannot employ induction (irmayoyri) if we lack
sense-perception, because it is sense-perception that
apprehends particulars. It is impossible to gain scientific
knowledge ( ntcriuTil) of them, since they can neither
be apprehended from universals without induction, nor

through induction apart from sense-perception. (Posterior
Analytics, I.xviii)
Speaking strictly of the protases, the arrangement of
subjects into categorical groups within the various lists of
omens seems to point toward an empirical foundation for
the lists in general, since any sort of classification of sub-
jects would be difficult to imagine without such a founda-
tion. The study of signs, in the form of Babylonian omen
series, however, does not exhibit the same empirical
constraints as are found in the study of some natural
phenomena, particularly astronomical phenomena that be-
have in accordance with certain limited parameters. The
organization of tablets in the series Summa alu, for exam-
ple, assembles and classifies phenomena of widely dispar-
ate subjects. The omens that deal with human phenomena
would seem to be endlessly and unsystematically variable,
as in the series Summa alu, which defines its interests
rather broadly; Alamdimma, which focuses on the physi-
ognomic characteristics of people; and SA.GIG, which
studies the symptoms of the sick. Clearly there is some
overlap in what is of interest from series to series, but each
series of so-called unprovoked (or non-impetrated) omens
establishes a field of phenomena deemed appropriate for
study within its particular confines. The scope of the series
Summa alu encompasses things of "real life" relating to

13 In a letter from the celestial divination expert Marduk-
sapik-zeri to king Assurbanipal, the scribe describes the breadth
of his learning: "I fully master my father's profession, the dis-
cipline of lamentation; I have studied and chanted the Series. I
am competent in [.. .], 'mouth-washing' and purification of the
palace [...] I have examined healthy and sick flesh. I have read
the (astrological omen series) Enuma Anu Enlil [. ..] and made
astronomical observations. I have read the (anomaly series)
Summa izbu, the (physiognomical works) [Kataduqqui, Alam-
dimmti and Nigdimdimmu, . . . and the (terrestrial omen series)
Sum]ma alu." Translation of S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian
and Babylonian Scholars, 122, no. 160: 36-42.
cities and houses, flora, fauna, water, fire, lights, or to an
individual's thoughts, prayers, actions of daily life (sex,
sleep, family quarrels), and his perception of demons and
ghosts.
This last subject, contained in tablets 19 and 21, raises
our primary question about the empirical nature of the
omens. What does it mean to state that a demon was seen
in a house?14 Or to construct omens from footprints of
gods or from cries of a ghost?15 The omens about super-
natural entities are constructed in precisely the same way
as are other physical appearances in omen protases, i.e.,
as subjects of the verb amdru (the basic meaning of which
is "to see") in the N-stem (nanmuru). In translations of
omen protases, the passive forms of amaru, meaning "to
be seen," are often rendered as though active, "to appear,"
as in the example: summa ina bit ameli hallulaya innamir
"if a hallulaya-demon appears (literally, "is seen") in

somebody's house...."16 When phenomena we do not
regard as "observable" in the normal way, i.e., by ordinary
sensory perception, are included in the list of omen pro-
tases, such protases necessitate a reexamination of the cri-
teria underlying observables in the Mesopotamian view.
And what of the omen protases that refer not to "super-
natural" but to purportedly natural phenomena that cannot
occur in nature? Unless we have totally misunderstood
what is said in the following examples, these few omens
may serve to illustrate such non-occurring or unobservable
phenomena:
If the sun comes out in the night and the country sees
its light everywhere: there will be disorder in the coun-
try everywhere (EAE 25 I 1).17
If the sun comes out in the night and lasts until the
morning: Enlil [.. .] the rumor of [.. .] if Erra speaks
the people of the land will be diminished, the entire
country will not [ . .] rain (EAE 25 I 2).
If the sun comes out during the evening watch: an
uprising in the land [. ..] (followed by omens for the sun
coming out in the middle and morning watches, as well
as the sun rising during various watches with other as-
tral bodies "standing in front" of it) (EAE 25 I 5-10).

14
[DIg ina E NA MA]SKIM GIM UZ IGI E.BI BIR-ah "If a
goat-like demon appears in a man's house: that house will be
dispersed" (CT 38 25).
15 See Summa alu tablet 19: 16-22 and 36-47, respectively;
see also CT 38 25 and KAR 396 dupl. lines 36-41.
16 CT 38 25b: 6 = Summa alu 19 6, also lines 7-12; see Sally
Moren, "The Omen Series 'Summa Alu': A Preliminary Inves-
tigation" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1978), 71.
17 Wilfred H. van Soldt, Solar Omens of Enuma Anu Enlil, 32.
562
If we assume that the criterion for observability is
access by ordinary sensory perception, then omens are
problematic. The editor of the above text has translated,
"If the 'sun'. .. ," in each case, implying that Samas, here,
wr. with the normal logogram 20, does not refer to the sun,
but perhaps something else we have not properly identi-
fied. This demands that the something else we have not
identified be observable by the criterion of ordinary see-
ing. But he also notes that these omens continue the topic
of the previous tablet, in which the protases of the final
section deal with the unexpected appearance of the sun.18
Another example may be found in the omens that

provide predictions for lunar eclipses "occurring" on days
17, 18, 19, 20, 21, and even istu UD.1.KAM adi UD.30.
KAM" (on any day) from the first to the thirtieth (of the
month)."19 These omens indicate a schema for eclipses
on days of the month beginning with possible days of
opposition, 14, 15, and 16, and continuing until con-
junction at the end of the month. If we think the omen
schemata refer only to what we take to be empirically
observable phenomena, such a schema, setting out days
14-30 for "observing" a lunar eclipse, does not "make
sense," but may be excused if we assume it was not yet
known that in the lunar calendar, days 17-30 (as well as
days 1-13) are excluded as possible lunar eclipse days.
Even if such limits on eclipse occurrences were not
known when the Enuma Anu Enlil series was first com-
piled, certainly by the Neo-Assyrian period the scribes
knew well what were the possible days for the occurrence
of a lunar eclipse. Many copies of Enuma Anu Enlil were
made during this period, yet the faulty omens were still
not deleted from the series.
If our goal as interpreters of this body of texts is to pre-
serve the practical rationality of the Babylonians, we may
choose to interpret these "eclipses" in accordance with
Neo-Assyrian commentaries that gloss the term AN.KUlo
"eclipse" with an explanation that clouds darken the
moon.20 But given that the same term, attali sin, seems to
be applied to astronomical, meteorological, and unob-
servable eclipses, can the idea of a universal and objective
empirical description really be a criterion for deciding
when the text means an eclipse "occurring" on a physi-
cally impossible day, or an eclipse caused by a cloud?
18 Ibid.. 32.
19 See my Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination, chs.

7-9, 11-12 (in EAE 17-18, 19, 21-22).
20 E.g., summa sin adirma istenis irim /I attalu ina erpeti sa-
limti raqqati izzizma "if the moon is dark and is totally eclipsed
(literally: covered)" (text writes salimtu raqqatu syllabically,
without indicating the genitive); see my Aspects of Babylonian
Celestial Divination, 285, appendix 2.4 rev. 3-4.
The question of such veracity was raised by Erle
Leichty in his treatment of the series Izbu. His determi-
nation was that, indeed, most of the birth anomalies de-
scribed in the protases could be identified with attested
birth abnormalities, but that some could not. He adds,
"from this we do not wish to argue that all the omens in
the series were actually observed. This is simply not
true. In addition to the cases where omens were obviously
added in an attempt to make the series all-inclusive, there
are also occasional omens where the anomaly is naturally
impossible."21 Leichty makes the point, and others (my-
self included) have as well, that in the expansion and
redaction of omen collections, additional omens were
introduced, not on an empirical basis, but on the basis of
the requirements of formal schemata into which phe-
nomena were arranged.22 Most recently, John Britton and
Christopher Walker have said that a method of "extrapo-
lation from observed experience ad absurdum"23 charac-
terizes Mesopotamian divination, citing as an example
the series of lunar eclipse omens for days 14, 15, 16, 19,
20, 21, of which only the fourteenth to sixteenth days are
possible in a lunar calendar.24
This approach, to quote Sahlins, is "a common or gar-
den variety of the classic Western sensory epistemology:
the mind as mirror of nature."25 It presumes the existence
of a distinction between fact and fiction, "real" knowl-
edge and fantasy, in the omen protases. Accordingly, the

compilers of the series worked from an "empirical" core
of actual observations of phenomena, but included phe-
nomena of their own conceptual devising for the sake of
completeness or the symmetry of certain scholastic sche-
mata. Although omen protases have been analyzed this
way, no Assyriologist has suggested that the Babylonians
could not tell the difference between "true" and "made-
up" phenomena. On the contrary, the emphasis has been
that the fabricated phenomena were later introductions
into lists of empirically established signs and that the late
introductions served scholastic purposes of comprehen-
siveness.26 Such an interpretation salvages Babylonian
21 E. Leichty, The Omen Series Summa Izbu, 20.
22 See J. Bott6ro, Mesopotamia, 134-35.
23 J. Britton and C. Walker, "Astronomy and Astrology in
Mesopotamia," in Astronomy before the Telescope, ed. C.
Walker (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 42.
24 See my Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination, 38-40.
25
Sahlins, How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For
Example (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.
26 Britton and Walker, "Astronomy and Astrology in Mesopo-
tamia," 42-43, have suggested that the absurdities in the lunar
eclipse sequence could have stemmed from a scribal error which
was then perpetuated in the canonical text.
563

practical rationality, but leaves open the question of why,
if the scribes indeed thought that some omens were
plausible and others not, all the omens were formulated
identically "if x, then y," and why all the protases appear
to be signs of equal mantic validity. The omen texts made
no distinctions between empirically true signs and "con-
ceptually fabricated" signs. As pointed out above, even
supernatural entities are formulated as "if x is observed
(innamir)."
It strikes me that to designate some omen protases as
'absurd" or "impossible" both begs the question of what
it was the diviners were trying to observe, and reduces
the criterion of empiricism in Babylonian divination (as
in all sciences) to simple sense data presupposed as hav-
ing a basis in a reality apart from the observer. Not only
can we not make this claim on the basis of any evidence,
but such a reduction reflects an approach characteristic
of a simple empirical inductivism that is no longer credi-
ble.27 Yet many of our translations of omens and our com-
ments on their meaning reflect just such an approach.28
To speak of the criterion of observability as one of untem-
27 The following represents but a small selection from the dis-
cussion of the interaction of theory and observation, ongoing
since the 1950s: N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery: An
Inquiry
into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1958), ch. 5; K. R. Popper, The Logic of
Sci-

entific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1968), appendix 10;
idem, Objective Knowledge, 341-61; T S. Kuhn, The Structure
of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970),
ch. 10; Mary Hesse, "Is There an Independent Observation-
Language?" in The Nature of Scientific Theories, ed. R.
Colodny
(Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Univ. Press, 1970), 35-77; the collection
of papers in Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiri-
cism, ed. Paul M. Churchland and Clifford A. Hooker (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985); and Philip Kitcher, The
Advance-
ment of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without
Il-
lusions (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), ch. 7 .
28 A parallel may be seen in the criticism offered by Robin
Horton in Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on
Magic, Religion and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press,
1993), 99, who points out that moder social anthropologists'
views (he names L. Levy-Bruhl, B. Malinowski, E. E. Evans-
Pritchard, M. Gluckman, R. W. Firth, E. Leach, and J. Beattie)
assume a positivistic tone when it comes to defining science as
against magical-religious thought. These anthropologists, he
says,

"have made it plain that they regard science as an extension of
common sense; as based on induction from observables [defined
as 'occurrences in the visible, tangible world' (p. 98)]: and as
limiting itself to questions of how these observables behave.
Once
such a position has been taken up with respect to science, it is
inevitable that the magico-religious thinking of the traditional
cultures should be seen as radically contrasted with it."
pered sensory perception, mainly of "seeing," takes no
account of the role of cognition in perception and observa-
tion,29 nor the relativity of culture, history, or language in
the expression of what is observed.30 It also creates a prob-
lem by applying to Babylonian omen protases a modern
(though derived from a classical Greek) epistemological
distinction between "empirical" and "rational" phenom-
ena, a distinction that does not seem to be made in the
texts. All the signs entered in the omen lists were ostensi-
bly accepted as having equivalent mantic significance.
To have an interest in the observable effects of unob-
served phenomena is certainly not strange in science,
but in the omens, the "observable effect" refers to the
event predicted in the apodosis and has as its only con-
nection to the unobserved phenomenon the fact that it is
associated with that phenomenon in the particular line
of the text. Still, the interest in phenomena for what they
indicate about future events in the world of human
enterprise creates a context in which a range of non-

occurring, hence unobserved, phenomena can be included.
Some examples stem from a physically correct under-
standing of the phenomenon in question, for example, a
lunar eclipse that was known to occur but was not visi-
ble from the scribes' geographical reference point, such
as one occurring elsewhere, but not visible in Nineveh.
Others stem from an incorrect understanding of the
physical behavior of phenomena, for example, a lunar
eclipse in which the shadow travels across the moon the
wrong way, from west to east, a behavior extrapolated
schematically.
All omens refer to "observables," in the sense of being
phenomena of interest to the diviners, because in the
event of the actual observation of any one of them, their
mantic meaning would be known. The things formulated
as "observed" depended in part upon a conceptual (the-
oretical) framework, and reciprocally theoretical schemes
which applied to the phenomena depended, in part, upon
observations. A category of "observables," therefore, is
posited that is not limited to material things seen in the
world, but includes unobserved entities that nonetheless
could be imagined by extension or extrapolation from
observed phenomena (such as eclipses on days of the
month other than the days of syzygy, as well as demons
that look like goats). What counted as empirically valid
in the series of omens, i.e., what could or could not be an
29 Note, however, the argument (against, as he puts it "Han-

son, Kuhn, Churchland, Goodman and Co.") for the neutrality
of observation with respect to theory as well as the neutrality of
perception with respect to cognition in J. Fodor, "Observation
Reconsidered," Philosophy of Science 51 (1984): 23-43.
30 Valerie Gray Hardcastle, "The Image of Observables,"
British Journal of Philosophy of Science 45 (1994): 585-97.
564
event that presaged, stemmed from the presuppositions
of divination.
That the system of divination itself determined what
the diviner should attend to in the world of phenomena,
natural and otherwise, illustrates the by now commonly
held notion that observation is "theory-laden."3' Here,
"theory" refers to the conceptual schemes evidenced in
the omen texts that organize and systematize the diversity
of phenomena. In view of the interdependence between
observation and theory, the omen schemata become clues
to the empirical aspect of divination. In the absence of
sources making explicit what the Babylonian scribes' cri-
teria of observation were, the schemata themselves must
indicate to us what was deemed "observable." Indeed, div-
ination itself provided the framework within which pro-
tases were expressed in a certain observation language,
functioned as observation statements, and determined
what was observable. The mere inclusion of phenomena
within omen series, and the regular use of the verb "to

observe" (amdru) in the protases, defines the items of the
protases as observable objects, and objects of knowl-
edge, regardless of their physical status.
The use of an ancient divinatory language, whose mean-
ing reflects accepted notions of what was observable,
parallels other scientific observation languages attested
in various periods and pertaining to different "conceptual
frameworks."32 "The observable," as Wartofsky put it, is
"the index of the whole framework of science, or of the
standard beliefs of the scientific community ... if the
31 See Norwood R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, ch. 1, for
a definition of theory-ladenness. The idea has deep roots in the
history of philosophy. The logical positivist H. Reichenbach
said in 1924: "Every factual statement, even the simplest one,
contains more than an immediate perceptual experience; it is
already an interpretation and therefore a theory.... We shall
have to make use of the scientific theory itself in order to inter-
pret the indications of our measuring instruments. Thus we shall
not say, 'a pointer is moving,' but, 'the electric current is
increas-
ing.' The most elementary factual statement, therefore, contains
some measure of theory" (apud Michael Friedman, "Philosophy
and the Exact Sciences: Logical Positivism as a Case Study," in
Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the
Philosophy of Science, ed. John Earman [Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1992], 86).
32 For the construct "conceptual scheme," see Donald David-
son, "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme," Proceedings
and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47
(1974): 5-20; and the discussion in Ian Hacking, Why Does
Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 1975), ch. 12. See also his "Language Truth and Reason,"
in Rationality and Relativism, ed. M. Hollis and S. Lukes
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 48-66.
sense of observable shifts from one to another frame-
work, it may also be seen that the frameworks of science
also shift, historically, so that the standard observables of
one period are either augmented or replaced by those of
another."33 It follows from this notion that if we study
what it was that Babylonian diviners considered observ-
able, we will understand something of the "conceptual
framework" of the system of divination. The evidence for
such a study must be the omen protases, which either
state plainly that something was "observed," or which are
formulated as observation predicates, i.e., protases in the
form "if x is red," or "if x is like a goat," or "if x stands
in front of Jupiter."
OMENS ARE NOT "OBSERVATION STATEMENTS"
Although formulated frequently as observation predi-
cates, phenomena recorded in omen protases were nec-
essarily only potentially observable, because in no case
do the omens function as a record of observations of
identifiable (i.e., datable) instances.34 They represent ab-
stractions from experience and cognition, (mere) even-
tualities, "ifs."35 The diviner watched for occurrences of
33 Marx W. Wartofsky, Conceptual Foundations of Scientific
Thought: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
(London:
MacMillan, 1968), 120.
34 See P. Huber, "Dating by Lunar Eclipse Omina with Specu-
lations on the Birth of Omen Astrology," in From Ancient
Omens

to Statistical Mechanics: Essays on the Exact Sciences
Presented
to Asger Aaboe, ed. J. L. Berggren and B. R. Goldstein (Copen-
hagen: University Library, 1987), 3-13. Huber demonstrates a
statistically probable correlation between some lunar eclipses
described in omen protases and actual datable historical
eclipses.
He argues that textual "unreliability" due to transmission or
scribal manipulation will not matter if one holds as an initial
hy-
pothesis that no such correlations exist between omen eclipses
and historical eclipses. If a fit between the description of the
eclipse in the protasis and a historical datable eclipse is
"implau-
sibly good," that hypothesis must be rejected and correspond-
ingly, the claim that some omen phenomena refer to specific
historical and datable events is supported. Huber's analysis
poses
a historical dilemma in that the eclipses he has determined as
"real" date to the third millennium (2301, 2264, and 2236), long
before the occurrence of any extant textual evidence of celestial
divination or astronomy in Mesopotamia.
35 Note the occurrence of the Sumerogram SUM.MA.rME?l
"the ifs," in the summary to a catalogue of SA.GIG ND 4358 +
:93,
published by I. Finkel, "Adad-apla-iddina, Esagil-kin-apli, and
the
Series SA.GIG," in A Scientific Humanist: Studies in Memory
of
Abraham Sachs, ed. E. Leichty, M. deJ. Ellis, and P. Gerardi,
Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, no. 9
(Philadelphia: The University Museum, 1988), 152 and note 82.
565

phenomena, but the written omens in his handbook stood
for general cases of such phenomena whenever such occur.
The difference between phenomena recorded in omen
protases and observations of phenomena is made clear
in the so-called reports of the Babylonian and Assyrian
astronomers of the Neo-Assyrian kings. This corpus
spans the period from 708 to 648 B.c. and documents the
systematic observation and reporting of heavenly phe-
nomena together with the appropriate omens for the ob-
served phenomena.36 In the following report, dated to
Apr. 15, 656 B.c., a solar eclipse was observed and re-
ported, and "its interpretation (pisersu)," was included,
i.e., what such an eclipse portended according to omens
of the Enuma Anu Enlil series:
On the twenty-eighth day, at two and one-half 'double-
hou[rs' of the day....] in the west [.... ] it also cover[ed
....] two fingers towards [....] it made [an eclipse], the
east wind [....] the north wind ble[w. This is its inter-
pretation]: If the day [becomes covered] with clouds on
the north side: [famine for the king of Elam]. If the day
be[comes covered] with clouds on the south side: [famine
for the king of Akkad]. If the day is dark and r[ides] the
north wind: [devouring by Nergal; herds will diminish].
If [there is an eclip]se in Nisan (I) on the twenty-eighth
day: [the king of that land will fall ill but recover]; in his
stead, a daughter of the king, [an entu-priestess, will die];
variant: in [that] ye[ar, there will be an attack of the
enemy, and] the land will panic [....].37

As is clear in this report, an entry in an omen text
records an event which-if or when such was "observed"
(using this term to refer to all "observables" in the
Babylonian framework)-warned of another event. The
relationship between the observable phenomenon and its
predicted event was expressed in the form "if x, then y"
(summa x, y). In the astrological reports, the observa-
tions are stated declaratively, as in the following: "This
night, the moon was surrounded by a halo, [and] Jupiter
and Scorpius [stood] in [it]," which is then followed im-
mediately by a series of relevant omens, viz., "If the
moon is surrounded by a halo, and Jupiter stands in it:
the king of Akkad will be shut up. If the moon is sur-
rounded by a halo, and Neberu stands in it: fall of cattle
and wild animals."38
However their connection came to be made, the sign and
associated event, once recorded as an omen, were related
36 See Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings.
37 Hunger, ibid., no. 104: 1-rev. 1.
38 Hunger, ibid., no. 147: 1-6.
to one another in an invariant correlation.39 The omen,
expressed by "if (or, 'whenever') x then y," recorded the
recurrent invariant association of one thing with another.
Whether the omens reflect a conception of invariant se-
quence, "if x occurs first then y occurs next," or, alterna-
tively, a conception of invariant coincidence, "whenever x
occurs y also occurs simultaneously," is difficult to deter-
mine. Regardless of whether x and y were sequential or
coincident, the important element is their subsequent re-
currence, i.e., particular instances of x and y were assumed
to recur thereafter together. This must be the case because

the essence of omens is their predictive aspect. Y may be
predicted on the basis of x because the two have been des-
ignated as invariantly associated.
If the omens recorded in the scholarly lists are inter-
preted as recurrent invariant associations, they cease to
be observations as such, becoming rather abstractions
resting upon empirical as well as theoretical foundations.
And if it is true that Babylonian diviners determined that
x and y were recurrently and invariantly associated, then
those associations were products of something like in-
ductive (or empirical) generalization, or were extrapola-
tions from such empirical generalizations. On this basis
the omen lists would represent the arrangement and codi-
fication of a wealth of past experience in which the occur-
rences making up the omen protases were "observed"
to be associated with certain human events.40 The formu-
lation "if/whenever x, then y" points to the necessity of
recurrence.
General formulations "if/whenever x then y" are a spe-
cies of causal statements. In the case of the omens, I
view this causal connection between protasis and apodo-
sis as a function merely of the relationship created by
their invariant association. Such a causal relationship is
like the statement "if/whenever the teapot whistles, the
water is boiling," without entertaining the question of
what causes the teapot to whistle or the water to boil. The
formulation itself gives the omens a lawlike appearance,
especially when it is further evident that predictions
derivable from the relation of x to y are the goal of the
inquiry into the set of x that bear predictive possibilities.
If we regard the omens as lawlike abstract statements,
39 My discussion here is influenced by M. Wartofsky, Con-

ceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought, ch. 11 (on
causality),
pp. 291-315, especially sub (a), 293-95.
40 This was termed "circumstantial association" by E. A.
Speiser, "Ancient Mesopotamia," in The Idea of History in the
Ancient Near East, ed. R. C. Dentan, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1967), 61; and see also J. J. Finkelstein,
"Mesopota-
mian Historiography," PAPS 107 (1963): 463ff.
566
however, it must be said that any actual instances of such
"laws" are limited to the unique, and as such trivial, co-
occurrence of just that particular x and y stated in the
omen. Although a formal similarity may be seen between
the omen statements and so-called scientific statements
of empirical generalization, both of which enable predic-
tion of phenomena, there is something fundamentally
different in the extreme limitation of the domain of the
omens as predictive statements.
Also to be taken into account is an aspect of the method
whereby a sign (omen protasis) was paired up with an
event (omen apodosis), which in fact undermines the
idea that the link between the sign and its prediction
necessarily involved an observation of the simultaneous
or sequential occurrence of those two elements.41 It seems
that associations between the sign and the predicted event

could be purely linguistic and independent of any obser-
vation, as, for example, in cases of paronomasia, where
the apodosis plays upon the sound of a word in the pro-
tasis. In Ziqiqu, a dream in which a man eats a raven
(arbu) portends income (irbu) for that man. Similarly, a
dream which presents fir wood (mihru) portends no rival
(mdhiru) for the dreamer. Such a method appears to be a
result of scribal imagination, presumably when the omens
were being compiled and set down. In Summa alu an
omen from tablet 15 (line 16) concerning spilled water
links the appearance of the puddle-if it looks like
"someone holding his heart"-to a prediction that the
person "will experience heartache." This indicates rather
persuasively that while empiricism was a factor in the
formation of omen protases it does not always come into
play in the decision to associate certain apodoses with
certain protases.
Another common method used in the correlation of
protasis to apodosis was that of analogy. For example:
"If someone's firstborn is short: his house will be short
(lived)." Simple analogies from form and appearance are
found in the physiognomic omens, where, for example, a
short face means a short life, and its opposite, a long face
means a long life. A clear example from Enima Anu En-
lil is the omen which correlates the "entering" (usurpa-
tion) of the king's throne by the crown prince to the
"entering" of the plant Venus within the moon, an ex-
pression used to describe the occultation of the planet by
the lunar disk.
41 This has been discussed by I. Starr, The Rituals of the Di-
viner (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1983), 8-12, who
jux-
taposes "theoretical" methods of relating protasis to apodosis
against "empirical." In Starr's analysis, the empirical method of

divination is equivalent to Speiser's "circumstantial
association,"
for which, see note 40.
Even where the connection between protasis and apo-
dosis stems from an empirical consideration, symbolic as-
sociation by analogy could be used to determine whether
the sign was to have a favorable or unfavorable predic-
tion. The lion, for example, was regarded as good, the
dog as bad. Or, for example, the predictions for the first
two omens of the series Summa alu are "if a city is sit-
uated on a high place: the inhabitants of that city will not
prosper," and "if a city is situated on low ground: the in-
habitants of that city will prosper," suggesting that from
a Mesopotamian point of view, high ground was bad, low
ground good. This may, however, be an example of per
contrariam prediction, like that in Ziqiqu tablet IX col.i:
"if (a man) ascends to heaven: his days will be short," and
"if he descends to the netherworld: his days will be long."
Other forms of symbolic association can be identified,
such as the simple distinction of good and bad with the
common polarity of right and left. Something on the right
indicates a good outcome while left indicates a bad, and
bad is sometimes signified by the outcome being good for
one's enemy. Examples from the anomalous birth omens
of Summa Izbu are illustrative: the presence on the mal-
formed newborn of a right ear but not a left is good, while
a left ear without a right is bad.42 A deformity to the right
ear is bad, to the left ear is good.43 Two right ears are
good whereas two left ears are bad.44 The same is applied
to nostrils (having only a left nostril is bad, only a right
is good45), hands and fingers,46 feet and toes.47 If an izbu
has horns (tablets V and IX), something pertaining to the
right horn is good, the left bad, in the same way as with
other features of the body. Similarly, in lunar crescent
omens from Enuma Anu Enlil, in which the moon has

"horns," if the moon's right horn "pierces the sky" there
is a good outcome,48 or if the moon's right horn is long
and the left is short, this is a good omen.49 The same prin-
ciple is evident in the medical diagnostic omens. Symp-
toms observed on the right or left will be interpreted as
less severe or more severe, respectively: "if a man's right
ear is discolored, his disease will be severe but he will re-
cover," versus "if a man's left ear is discolored, he is in
a dangerous condition."50
42
Leichty, The Omen Series Summa Izbu, Izbu III: 20-21.
43 Leichty, ibid., Izbu III: 5, 11, 14 and 16 and 9, 12, 15, and
17.
44 Leichty, ibid., Izbu III: 18 and 19.
45 Leichty, ibid., Izbu III: 30-31.
48 Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian King, p. 35, no.
57: 5.
49 Hunger, ibid., p. 212, no. 373: 5; p. 284, no. 511: 5'.
50 R. Labat, Traite akkadien de diagnostics et pronostics
medicaux (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1951), 68: 1-2.
567
These forms of empirical judgment, loaded with cul-
tural content, belie the facile construction of the "empiri-
cal" as "the objectively true." As Sahlins puts it, "One

simply cannot posit another person's judgments of 'reality'
a priori, by means of common sense or common humanity,
without taking the trouble of an ethnographic investiga-
tion."51 Assyriologists are at an obvious disadvantage here.
But decisions regarding boundary lines between "reality"
and "fantasy" in this case are not simply a matter of how
relativistic we are about the validity of certain beliefs in
the context of particular world-views.52 It is the way em-
piricism itself is construed that will determine whether
interpreters of Babylonian omens view the unobserved
phenomena incorporated within these texts as empiri-
cally "valid" or simply absurd. Limiting the empirical to
sensory perception is as inadequate and distorting in
relation to ancient sciences as it is to modern.
OBSERVABLES IN MESOPOTAMIAN DIVINATION
It has become commonplace to admit that theory and
inference are embedded in observations and that, in fact,
one observes a field of phenomena, not blindly, but for
the purpose of discovering evidencefor something. The
conceptual context of an inquiry as a whole defines the
interests and the problems for inquiry, including defining
what is taken to be empirical for a particular inquiry. As
discussed above, the most basic of all premises of Meso-
potamian divination, namely, that "signs" in nature are
produced by deities for the purpose of communicating
with humans, suggests that ominous phenomena belonged
to a conceptual framework representing the world as cre-

ated and manipulated by deities. The expectations of
what kinds of "signs" might occur resulted from this very
inclusive concept of possible divinely produced phenom-
ena. Therefore, dreams, lunar eclipses, puddles, disease
symptoms and malformed fetuses, could all and equiva-
lently be "signs." No category of phenomena had greater
or lesser epistemological status, as all of the signs yielded
"predictions" of what was in store for the observers. The
periodic nature of astronomical phenomena rendered this
category of signs amenable to prediction, which, from
our point of view, distinguishes celestial divination from
other forms of scholarly divination. It seems likely that
the predictability of the signs themselves would be
advantageous to the practice of divination, giving the di-
51 Marshall Sahlins, How "Natives" Think, 162-63.
52 For an interesting discussion of this problem and its impli-
cations, see Dan Sperber, "Apparently Irrational Beliefs," in
Hollis and Lukes, Rationality and Relativism, 149-80.
viner advance knowledge of the occurrence of signs and
accordingly more time to prepare for their anticipated
consequences.
In the absence of sources making explicit what the
Babylonian scribes' criteria for empirical entities might
be the schemata themselves indicate what was deemed
"observable." The schemata typically exhibit symmetries
of direction (right and left, high and low, up and down,

or north, south, east, and west), temporal relationships
(beginning, middle, end), or other descriptive features
and their opposites (bright and dull, light and dark, thick
and thin), all, in principle, observable features of phe-
nomena. One such scheme is found in the omens refer-
ring to the color of the object of interest, for example, the
color of ants crossing the threshold of a house, the color
of a lunar eclipse, the color of a sick person's throat, or
the color of a dog that urinates on a man. These items
from the series Summa dlu, Enuma Anu Enlil, SA.GIG,
and Izbu, respectively, are all organized similarly, i.e.,
white, black, red, green-yellow, and variegated. Simple
numerical expansions are also characteristic, e.g., the
multiple births running from two to ten,53 or parhelia
(mock suns) numbering from one to four,54 some of
which seem to be beyond the range of the empirically
verfiable. Such patterns are also characteristically found
in impetrated omens, such as lecanomancy (oil divina-
tion): "if (the oil) becomes dark to the right/left," or "if it
dissolves to the right/left"; or libanomancy: "if the smoke,
when you scatter it, rises to its right, but does not rise to
its left," or "if the smoke, when you scatter it, rises to its
left but does not rise to its right." The formal patterns
into which phenomena could be organized in omen lists
indicate that the goal was to determine whether a phe-
nomenon appeared in a particular configuration (e.g., up,
down, to the right, left, etc.) in accordance with such pat-
terns. One may argue that it would only have been in
terms of established ideas about the behavior of phenom-
ena that any phenomenon would have been interpretable.
Or, put another way, the kinds of phenomena under ob-
servation were shaped by the scribes' traditional ideas of
what was deemed ominous. In and of themselves, strictly

sensory impressions would have been meaningless. The
phenomena collected as omens in the series include both
those potentially accessible to the senses and those that
were not, but both were apparently considered (poten-
tially) meaningful in conjunction with apodoses.
Within the diviners' conceptual framework, what was
"observable," in the sense of being worthy of observation,
53
Leichty, The Omen Series Summa Izbu, Izbu VI: 46-58.
54 See the samgatu omens in ACh Suppl. 2 32.
568
was not limited to what could be seen. Of course, this
statement requires that we make no distinction between
omens as factual or fanciful and simply take the evidence
of the omen lists "at face value." We can imagine that,
in the process of compiling the omen series and out of the
scribes' consideration of empirical symmetries, logical
possibilities were raised of "phenomena" that had not
been observed, but yet were conceivable and could ra-
tionally be included within the omen series. Since the
omens do not seem to recognize a categorical distinction
between observed and unobserved phenomena, both be-
longed to the category of "observables," in that the divin-
ers watched for them all in order to predict the future.

CONCLUSION: THE CLASSIFICATION OF BABYLONIAN
DIVINATION AS SCIENCE
If the character of observables is indeed "the index of
the whole framework of science" (Wartofsky), then the
system of Babylonian divination as science encompassed
a broad spectrum of the phenomenal world. Its interests
spanned a diversity of natural and human phenomena. A
classification of Babylonian omens on the basis of crite-
ria of scientific truth currently accepted can only lead to
a view that this system is a non-science, from its premises
to its approach to the observable. Aspects of this ancient
system, however, find many parallels with other historical
sciences, and to the extent that the system had as its chief
interest the phenomenal world, and indeed many natural
phenomena, it shares something fundamental with other
sciences, including modern.
Whether or not one classifies Babylonian divination as
science seems to me best pursued, as Hesse put it, "in the
spirit of the principle of no privilege."55 As far as the
omen protases referring to (for us) ontologically suspect
55 Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philos-
ophy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980), 147.
or even impossible entities are concerned, these were ap-
parently an important part of the scientific enterprise of
Mesopotamian divination, which suggests to me that we
need to consider them if we are to engage not in a judg-
ment, but an investigation of the nature of this system.
The presumption of a commonsense empiricism defined
in terms of categorical distinctions between the real and

the fantastic and predicted on a notion of an objective re-
ality corresponding to sense data does not take adequate
account either of the evidence collected in omen protases
or of the meaning of empiricism in any other scientific
context. Even if we are able to explain away some phe-
nomena, such as the lunar eclipses that are "observed"
when they cannot occur, treating these not as astronomi-
cal, but rather as meteorological eclipses, we are still left
with the "observations" of ghosts, gods, and three-headed
sheep. On the basis of the omen series themselves, we can
only note that the status of such phenomena as observ-
ables was as legitimate as those we recognize as empiri-
cally true. To bracket these protases, designating them as
"absurd," and then going on to discuss the empirical core
of Babylonian omen science, limits our ability to under-
stand what phenomena the Babylonian scribes regarded
as subjects for observation. It limits our ability to pene-
trate, if it is at all possible, something about their per-
ception of the world and what it meant within their own
"conceptual framework." If we do not regard contempo-
rary physical science as "just a systematic exposure of
the senses to the world," but "a way of thinking about the
world,"56 I wonder why we have not approached the sci-
ence of Babylonian omens in the same way. It seems to
me perfectly reasonable to apply the term empirical in a
characterization of Babylonian divination, and to view
all the subjects of the protases as "observables," because
these things belonged to the domain of their inquiry.
56 N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, 30.
569
Article
Contentsp.559p.560p.561p.562p.563p.564p.565p.566p.567p.568
p.569Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the American Oriental
Society, Vol. 119, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1999), pp. 559-734+i-

xiiiVolume Information [pp.i-xiii]Front MatterEmpiricism in
Babylonian Omen Texts and the Classification of Mesopotamian
Divination as Science [pp.559-569]A Shīʿī-Jewish "Debate"
(Munāẓara) in the Eighteenth Century [pp.570-589]The Fourth-
Century B. C. Guodiann Manuscripts from Chuu and the
Composition of the Laotzyy [pp.590-608]The Doctrine of the
Three Humors in Traditional Indian Medicine and the Alleged
Antiquity of Tamil Siddha Medicine [pp.609-629]Review
ArticlesChristian Palestinian Aramaic and Its Significance to
the Western Aramaic Dialect Group [pp.631-636]Artisans and
Mathematicians in Medieval Islam [pp.637-645]Remarks on the
"Person of Authority" in the Dga' ldan pa / Dge lugs pa School
of Tibetian Buddhism [pp.646-672]Brief CommunicationsA
Note on the Authenticity and Ideology of Shih-chi 24, "The
Book on Music" [pp.673-677]Addendum to JAOS 119.2: On the
Amenhotep III Inscribed Faience Fragments from Mycenae
[p.678]Book Reviewsuntitled [pp.679-680]untitled [pp.680-
681]untitled [pp.681-682]untitled [pp.682-683]untitled [pp.683-
688]untitled [p.688]untitled [pp.689-690]untitled [pp.690-
716]untitled [pp.717-719]untitled [pp.719-721]untitled
[p.722]untitled [pp.722-724]untitled [p.724]untitled [pp.724-
726]untitled [p.726]Back Matter [pp.727-734]

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