The British Museum has cracked a 4,000-year-old murder plot: Babylonian kings routinely sacrificed royal stand-ins to avoid eclipse prophecies.
From the museum's collection of 130,000 Mesopotamian clay tablets, four texts tell the story. The tablets, written in Old Babylonian between 1900-1600 BCE, contain humanity's earliest known eclipse omens — 61 terrifying predictions. According to Archaeology Magazine, these predictions weren't mere superstition but state doctrine.
"The sky and the Earth were mirror images," explains University of London Assyriologist Andrew George, "so events in the sky had counterparts in events on Earth."
The predictions paint a grim picture: eclipses could herald anything from famine to locust swarms. One passage warns that if an eclipse occurs on the fifteenth day of the first month, "people will sell their infant children for silver." Kings were particularly vulnerable, as eclipse omens often predicted royal death. To combat these threats, elaborate precautions were taken. First, priests would examine sacrificed animal entrails for more favorable signs. If danger still loomed, the king would go into hiding while a substitute took the throne. Once the threat passed, the real king would return — and his temporary replacement would face execution to dispel any lingering evil.
"The eclipse of one of the great celestial lights—the sun or the moon—meant that on Earth a great figure would be eclipsed," says George. "That is, a king would die."
Previously:
• Oldest-known drawing of a ghost found on ancient Babylonian tablet
• Listen: a sexy hymn to Ishtar, in the original Babylonian
• AI tries to decipher rules of ancient board game
• This 4,000-year-old recipe has had a long time to stew
