Iqqur īpuš

Definition

Iqqur īpuš — Akkadian for "He tore down (and) he built" — is a Mesopotamian omen series organised around the calendar. It is a hemerology: a guide to lucky and unlucky days. Each entry pairs an activity, or an event in the sky, with whether it is favourable or unfavourable in each of the twelve calendar months. Its first sixty-six sections cover everyday human activities (overlapping the series Šumma ālu); the rest catalogues celestial events month by month — Sun-Moon conjunctions, eclipses, halos, the phases of Venus, thunder, rain, earthquakes — and overlaps heavily with Enūma Anu Enlil.

In Tradition

Scholars treat Iqqur īpuš as a calendar-based supplement to the great omen series, useful for choosing favourable times. Rochberg calls it a calendrical bridge between Šumma ālu (signs on earth) and Enūma Anu Enlil (signs in the sky). Koch-Westenholz takes René Labat's 1965 Paris edition as the standard reference. Pingree singles it out as one of the oldest "pre-astrology" sources for predicting an individual's fortunes from the month of their birth.

In Practice

The series is laid out as "if-then" pairs tied to a calendar month. A sample entry on choosing a time runs "if a man tears down and builds in Nisannu (Month I)," followed by whether the act is favourable or unfavourable. The text is built so the same information can be read two ways: month-first, listing every relevant activity for Month I, then II, then III; or activity-first, listing all twelve months for one act — building, marriage, a journey. Court scholars and private clients used it to time household and royal activities for good fortune. Its celestial half, overlapping Enūma Anu Enlil, offered an alternate set of outcomes for eclipses and conjunctions, indexed by calendar month rather than by which god the sign belonged to.

Historical Origin

Iqqur īpuš is attested in cuneiform across the second and first millennia BCE, with antecedents reaching back to a thirteenth-century BCE Hittite tablet (Riemschneider 1970) translated from an Old Babylonian Akkadian original. The standard modern edition is René Labat, *Un calendrier babylonien des travaux, des signes et des mois (séries iqqur īpuš)* (Paris, 1965). It is treated in Rochberg, *The Heavenly Writing* (2004); Koch-Westenholz, *Mesopotamian Astrology* (1995); and Pingree, *From Astral Omens to Astrology* (1997).

Further Reading

• Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture
• Ulla Koch-Westenholz, Mesopotamian Astrology
• David Pingree, From Astral Omens to Astrology: From Babylon to Bīkāner