Divination & the Reading of Omens
The gods wrote the future into a sheep's liver and the night sky — and trained scholars learned to read it.
Mesopotamians believed the gods wrote their intentions into the world as signs, which a trained scholar could read. The diviner (baru) inspected the liver and entrails of a sacrificed sheep (extispicy); other experts watched the sky, monstrous births, the behavior of animals, oil on water, or smoke. The results were compiled into enormous reference series of conditional omens — 'if such-and-such appears, then such-and-such will happen.' This was a genuine intellectual discipline: systematic, cumulative, and empirical in its own way, applied above all to guide the king. Divination was Mesopotamia's chief science of the future, and the root of its astronomy.