Augur Anxieties in the Ancient Near East

1 Augur Anxieties in the Ancient Near East Scott B. Noegel In recent years, scholars have sought to understand ancient Near Eastern augury by considering the king’s propagandistic use of omens and his appropriation of divination for his ideological self-representation.¹ Others have analyzed the social, political, and psychological support afforded to diviners and the influence of augurs upon the royal house.² An alternative approach has been to examine the mechanics and hermeneutics of divination.³ While said scholarship has advanced our understanding significantly, in the main, it has tended to treat divination purely as an institution, often in competition with the royal house. Here, I should like to move in a different direction and examine augury from the practitioner’s own social, economic, and cosmological perspectives. It is my contention that such an approach reveals divination to be an enterprise heavily informed by a number of insecurities, and that attention to these sources of anxiety sheds light on Mesopotamian divinatory culture. I divide my contribution into four parts. In the first, I offer a brief synopsis of Near Eastern divination. In the second, I examine two compet- ing sources of anxiety that diviners negotiated: skepticism from others and their own theological principles. In the third portion, I look at ways that diviners addressed these insecurities. In the final section, I offer a few conclusions based on the combined evidence. ¹ Starr 1996; Sweek 1996 and 2002; Rochberg 2004; Cooley 2014 and 2015. ² Oppenheim 1969: esp. 120; Lieberman 1990: esp. 326–7; Radner 2009; Jean 2010: esp. 271–4 (Pongratz-Leisten 1995: 65 refutes this view). ³ Guinan 1989, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 2002a; Steinkeller 2005; Pearce 2006; Noegel, 2007, 2010; de Zorzi 2011; Pongratz-Leisten 2011; Frahm 2010 and 2011a; Winitzer 2011; Heeßel 2012. Scott B. Noegel, Augur Anxieties in the Ancient Near East In: Ancient Divination and Experience. Edited by: Lindsay G. Driediger-Murphy and Esther Eidinow, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844549.003.0001 18 . 1. Synopsis of Mesopotamian Divination Divination had a long life in Mesopotamia and it took many forms. It certainly predates our earliest written records and lasts in some forms well into the common era. Virtually anything could constitute a divine sign and omens could be solicited or unsolicited.⁴ Forms of solicited divination include the use of flour, incense, oil, and casting lots or arrows, though extispicy was the most common. One obtained unsolicited omens by way of dreams, malformed births, necromancy, and terrestrial, atmospheric, and celestial phenomena, as well as the sounds and movements of the animal kingdom. Even agricultural, building, and sexual activities could provide omens.⁵ The gods most commonly addressed before divination were the sungod Šamaš and stormgod Adad, who are given the respective epithets “Lord of Judgment” and “Lord of the Inspection.”⁶ Nevertheless, omens could be messages from any god. In celestial divination, stars and planets also could be manifestations of various divinities. The terms for those who interpret omens are equally varied and include most commonly the āšipu (“conjurer, magician, medical practitioner”), bārû (“examiner”), dāgil iṣṣūrē (“observer of birds”), kalû (“singer-chanter”), mašmaššû (“exorcist”), and šāʾilu (“requester”).⁷ Those most learned among them were called ummânū (“masters”). There is evidence for some women diviners, but the majority were men.⁸ Divinatory positions were largely hereditary, especially by the first millennium . Though some individuals could achieve notoriety for expertise in a particular divinatory tradition,⁹ the roles of each of the figures listed above overlapped so much that it is difficult to assign a particular expertise to any one of them, with the ⁴ For a convenient discussion of the omen compendia, see Frahm 2011a: 128–214. ⁵ On the sexual omens, see Guinan 1997 and 2002b; Pangas 1988. ⁶ The two gods also feature in the similar Babylonian oracle queries known as the tamītu texts. See Lambert 2007. According to Jeyes 1991–2, an extispicer would whisper a client’s query into the animal’s ear before sacrificing it to the client’s personal god, who represented him before the divine council, headed by Šamaš. Šamaš then authorized the verdict to be encoded in another animal’s entrails. ⁷ One can find more detailed discussions of the various divinatory professions elsewhere, e.g., Bottéro, 1993; Cryer 1994; Farber 1995; Jeffers 1996; Scurlock 1998; Schmitt 2004; Noegel 2007: 28–34; Jean 2006; Rutz 2013; Gabbay 2014. ⁸ The earliest glyptic evidence (c. twenty-fourth century ) for dream interpretation depicts a woman. See Asher-Grève 1987; Reisner 1985: 256; Heimpel 1998. ⁹ Note, e.g., the prestigious title ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil, “scribe of the (astrological omen) series named Enūma Anu Enlil.” 19 possible exceptions of the āšipu, who also performs apotropaic rituals to negate the influence of evil omens,¹⁰ and the bārû, who usually appears reading animal exta.¹¹ In addition, while the āšipu, kalû, and mašmaššû appear to have had connections to the temple, others were connected to the royal court, though some villages also had resident diviners. In general, each figure was interdisciplinary, highly literate in both Sumerian and Akkadian, and derived his interpretive skills from a shared hermeneutic tradition that belongs generally to what we might call the religious establishment.¹² Simo Parola summarizes their expertise: . the crafts of these scholarly experts were to a large extent complemen- tary and . their respective disciplines and fields represented parts of a larger whole, which I, in conformity with the native Mesopotamian ter- minology, propose to call “wisdom.” In my opinion it is essential to consider these disciplines not in isolation but as integral parts of this larger whole, and to realize that as parts of an integrated system of thought, the different subdisciplines of the “wisdom” were in constant contact and interaction with each other.¹³ Diviners also valued piety and followed detailed rules of ritual purity, many specific to them, including washing of the mouth and hands, donning clean and sometimes special clothing, self-anointing, and fumigation with sulphur.¹⁴ This purity extended to their physical beings: they must be whole in body and have good eyesight; even chipped teeth kept one out of the profession.¹⁵ They also maintained strict rules of etiquette: one must not sneeze, be clumsy, dress too sloppily, or otherwise fidget during a divination. Timing too was important: some days and months were auspicious, others were not. Yet overzealousness was to be avoided; continuously engaging in extispicy was deemed inappropriate. ¹⁰ See Scurlock 1998. ¹¹ However, the bārû also appears as a mixer of potions, libanomancer, aleuromancer, augur, and astrologist. See Nougayrol 1963; Pettinato 1966; Finkel 1983. As Bottéro 1974: 129 n. 7, remarks: “Nous verrons du reste que le bârû, obliqué de procéder souvent à des contre-examens, devait pratiquer plus ou moins toutes les mantiques . ” ¹² See the wide range of texts cited as required knowledge in the so-called “magician’s manual” (KAR 44) published by Zimmern 1915–16; and the list of texts in Oppenheim 1974; Cavigneaux 1999. ¹³ Parpola 1993: 52. Italics are the author’s. ¹⁴ On the pious practices of the diviner, see Jeyes 1991–2: 29–32. ¹⁵ See Lambert 1998: esp. 144. 20 . In sum, Near Eastern diviners were pious polymaths with hereditary positions, who possessed a commanding knowledge of a vast array of written traditions. 2. Sources of Augur Anxiety Diviners negotiated two major sources of anxiety—skepticism from others and their own theological principles. Perhaps nowhere is skepticism of the divinatory institution more pronounced than in the figure of the aluzinnu (Sumerian = alan.zu), a figure whom Stephanie West has connected with the ἀλαζών in Greek texts.¹⁶ The aluzinnu was a male trickster, a quasi-clown, though dressed in women’s clothing, whose satire of others during religious festivals was accepted with something of a Mardi Gras spirit.¹⁷ In a lexical list, his title appears alongside the terms for ākil karṣi (“slanderer”), ṣarītu (“farter”), and naššiḫu and tēzû (both “defecator”).¹⁸ One must envision this burlesque character moving alongside the religious procession and its musi- cians, jugglers, and acrobats, playing the comic for the crowd. At times, the aluzinnu toys with pigs and bears.¹⁹ At other times, he balances on a tightrope. Yet always he is satirizing someone. Of particular importance are a number of his taunts that openly deride the divinatory professionals. Since these experts produced all of the learned omen compendia, lexical lists, ¹⁶ There exists no recent or critical edition of the aluzinnu text. Nevertheless, see the collation of fragments in Ebeling 1931, No. 2, pp. 9–19; and also Römer 1975–8; Foster 1974: 74–9; Jakob 2003. See also CAD A/2 392, s.v. aluzinnu. The text was part of the scribal curriculum in the Neo-Babylonian period. See Veldhuis 2003, who also opines (628 n. 1) that the fragments are not a unified text, and that all but one of the fragments belong to other text types. See also the related “Games” text discussed by Kilmer 1991. Kilmer’s study strongly suggests a connection between the figure of the aluzinnu and the cult of Ishtar, whose festivities, texts say (14) also “turn a man into a woman, and a woman into a man” and involve “slander, untruthful words, abuse . mockery, causing laughter, (and) being debased.” On parallels for the figure in the Mediterranean world, see West 1994, who also notes the observation of Stephanie West (2 n. 8) that the term aluzinnu might relate to the Greek ἀλαζών; adopted and expanded by Griffith and Marks 2011. ¹⁷ The aluzinnu’s relationship to the cult is vague at best. He is listed among the temple personnel in the Ur III period, and later he appears in texts from Alalakh as a royal wedding performer.

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