Diviner's Manual

dih-VY-nerz MAN-yoo-al

Definition

The Diviner's Manual (also "Babylonian Diviner's Manual") is a unique Akkadian scholarly text, edited by A. Leo Oppenheim in 1974, that combines terrestrial and celestial divination in an otherwise unattested scheme. It opens with incipits of omen tablets — thirteen for "signs occurring on earth," eleven for "signs occurring in the sky" — and then sets out a methodology for verifying and, where needed, averting a portent. It survives in many copies, in both Babylonian and Assyrian script, from Assurbanipal's library at Nineveh.

In Tradition

In Mesopotamian astral-science scholarship the Diviner's Manual is treated as a singular, systematic methodological composition rather than a lookup-catalogue of omens — Hunger and Pingree call it a singular attempt at solving a recurring problem in divination. Its theological signature is the statement that sky and earth, though appearing separately, are related (itḫuzu): a portent confirmed in both sign-systems on one date carries added weight. Brown reads it as a Scholar's guide to averting portended evil.

In Practice

For the student of how Babylonian celestial divination actually worked, the Diviner's Manual is the closest thing to a practitioner's handbook the corpus preserves. It instructs the Scholar in calendar verification — determining whether a month was intercalary, or had twenty-nine versus thirty days — so that an omen's protasis could be checked against the true circumstances of a date; it directs the consultation of hemerologies when no explicit omen cancellation is found; and, as Brown emphasizes, it teaches the use of intercalation to reclassify the date of a phenomenon, retrospectively shifting an omen's month-attribution to alter its prognostication. The text quotes the namburbû ("the means to avert evil") procedure and refers to first-visibility dates of stars and the balancing of Moon and stars in the manner of the MUL.APIN intercalation rule. Together with i.NAM.giš.ḫur.an.ki.a and Iqqur īpuš, it shows the philosophical-theological framing the late Neo-Assyrian Scholars gave their divinatory craft.

Historical Origin

The Diviner's Manual was composed by the seventh century BCE at the latest, its earliest exemplars coming from Assurbanipal's library at Nineveh; Oppenheim dated it to the Sargonid period, while Brown argues from its Old-Babylonian-style ideal-year conventions that it may be substantially older. Editio princeps: A. L. Oppenheim, "A Babylonian Diviner's Manual," *Journal of Near Eastern Studies* 33 (1974), 197-220; further study Williams (2002). Modern critical treatments: Hunger & Pingree, *Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia* (1999); Brown, *Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology* (2000).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading