02 - Secrecy and the Oracle Lore: On Knowledge Restriction in Ancient Babylonia

In ancient Babylonia, political decisions were usually taken by support of an oracle procedure. When a king needed to decide whether to go to war, appoint an official or to give one his offspring to marriage, he would normally turn to an oracle expert, or a seer, who knew how to consult the decision of the gods on this matter. The seer, a highly trained scholar who specialized in this craft, would then conduct a complex ritualistic procedure, which purpose was to obtain the answer of the gods to a pre-formulated question, by means of inspecting the entrails of the sacrificial animal, usually a sheep.

This procedure was sustained by an elaborated semiotic system of knowledge, which allowed understanding different parts of the scarified animal as a network of signs, equivalent to a written message. An expression to this system of knowledge is found in the professional literature of seers, which including handbooks, liver models and encyclopedic treaties, exemplars of which reached us today. That important aspects of the oracle lore were considered secret or esoteric, is made clear by the labels: niṣirtī bārûti, "Secrets of Extispicy", with which these treaties were sometimes marked by their colophons. That secrecy and restricted knowledge played in important role within the intellectual framework of the study and training in extispicy is also made clear by several literary passages, telling us about the etiological background of the oracle lore. Thus, we find that the literary introduction to a manual describing the ceremonial order of the extispicy ritual, tells us the following:

"After having recited and memorized the series dealing with the lamb and its coils, the series of oil omens and bird omens, [the series of flour? omens and incense?], the master in this lore teaches the apprentice how to explain the skills of seers with the use of the explanatory lists, commentaries, mathematical tables and the Secret of Extispicy that Ea revealed."

As clearly made by this passage, acquiring the skills of oracle gave authority to seers over their client, usually the king, who, as an active participant in the ritual, needed an access to the gods' answer when aiming at exercising his executive duties. But more astonishing is that this passage also shows that seers needed to be proficient in a set of scholastic manuals, of which Secret of Extispicy, was only a part of. In other words, it is safe to claim that there existed a clear hierarchy among the treaties dealing with oracle, and that some aspects of the lore were considered secret, or restricted, while other were not. This paper will hence attempt to define the part of the oracle lore that was considered secret and restricted by giving an outline of the literature labeled by scholars in antiquity as Secret of Extispicy, a notion that stood at the bases of the authority these scholars to authentify the validity of the message of the gods.

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Presenters

Netanel Anor, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  SCS-83