Prayer to the Gods of the Night

Definition

The "Prayer to the Gods of the Night" is an Old Babylonian astral-divinatory incantation-prayer (Rogers: c. -1830 to -1530) that invokes a series of named stellar deities to bless a divination performed by inspecting the entrails of a sacrificial lamb (extispicy). Rogers counts seventeen invoked entities — including Dumuzi, Ningizzida, the Pleiades, the Bull's Jaw (Hyades), the Shepherd (Orion), Sirius, the Bow (Canis Major), Scorpius, the Eagle (Aquila), Piscis Austrinus, the Swallow, and the Twins — given in the same style later codified in MUL.APIN. The prayer is one of the earliest preserved Mesopotamian astral-religious texts.

In Tradition

Rogers treats the Prayer to the Gods of the Night as the principal written witness from the boundary-stone period confirming that early-second-millennium Mesopotamians identified named constellations with deities and invoked them as divine powers within a divinatory ritual. The prayer thereby documents the integration of celestial-divinatory and extispicy practice in the Old Babylonian period and supplies an early-second-millennium horizon for the constellation-as-divinity correspondence that the boundary-stone (kudurru) iconography parallels visually.

In Practice

For the student of how Babylonian celestial divination acquired its theological structure, the Prayer to the Gods of the Night is the documentary anchor that constellations were personified as gods in the early second millennium BCE — before MUL.APIN catalogued them and before EAE codified their omens. Rogers's seventeen-entity tally is not perfectly congruent with any later star-list, but the great majority of invoked entities are constellations already appearing on contemporary cylinder seals and on Kassite-period boundary-stones (kudurru). The prayer is recited before extispicy: the named stars are asked to "stand by" and place a propitious sign on the entrails of the lamb. This locates the text inside the dominant Old Babylonian divinatory practice but routes it through the celestial pantheon — a textual hinge between extispicy and celestial divination. The genre is independent of and earlier than the Three Stars Each tradition; the prayer treats stars as named deities to invoke rather than ideal-calendar tabulation. Rogers reads it as a written bridge between iconographic and formal star-catalogue periods.

Historical Origin

Dated to the Old Babylonian period — Rogers gives c. -1830 to -1530 BC. The prayer precedes the formal Three Stars Each star-catalogue tradition (twelfth century BCE) and the consolidation of MUL.APIN. Modern critical treatments: J. H. Rogers, "Origins of the ancient constellations: I. The Mesopotamian traditions," *Journal of the British Astronomical Association* 108/1 (1998), p. 15.

Further Reading

• J. H. Rogers, Origins of the ancient constellations: I. The Mesopotamian traditions (JBAA 108/1, 1998)