Scientific Superstitions

The ancient Mesopotamian culture, especially in the Assyrian Empire, as illustrated by Zainab Bahrani in Rituals of War, appeared to have placed high values in interpretations of signs from gods. The first chapter introduces the reader to the meaning of the king’s head in wall inscriptions. Later in the book we see many more examples of how Assyrians interpreted signs from bodies (human or animal), dreams, body organs, or any empirical occurrences. Extispicy and hepatoscopy were two ways that the Assyrians employed to read these omens.

What was quite fascinating in reading this book, especially Chapter 3 of it, was when Bahrani points out that these “superstitions” were, to the people during that time, their facts. Bahrani suggests that the popular paradigm that people followed was that of a cause and effect. That is, any observation made would imply a consequence. The omens that were followed in this period at first appear to be quite amusing to read most probably because some of them were overly absurd. For instance, there was a condition when “entrails resemble the head of Humbaba.” They also interpreted dreams in a rather arbitrary way, as it does not seem logical to correlate someone eating dog’s meat with a city’s rebellion, for example.

However, reading through the chapter, I found these relations to be quite interesting because without the presence of physical sciences that have accumulated over the centuries (or even millennia) as we do today, those observations and relations that they made were technically their “sciences.” In fact, Bahrani also quotes some results from a veterinarian that could support the correlations of these “causes” and “effects” as it is easily comprehensible that livers or entrails of animals would reveal the characteristics of the environment. Moreover, these omens probably came from repetitions of certain situations, and the people recorded the number of occurrences and summarized the data. This technique of observation is the fundamental of science today.