Author(s):
Maul, Stefan (Heidelberg)
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Jansen-Winkeln, Karl (Berlin)
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Haas, Volkert (Berlin)
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Niehr, Herbert (Tübingen)
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Wiesehöfer, Josef (Kiel)
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Et al.
[German version] I. Mesopotamia While attention in old Egyptian culture was largely centred on existence after death, the concerns of Mesopotamia were almost exclusively with the present. A significant part of the cultural energy of ancient Mesopotamia was devoted to keeping human actions in harmony with the divine, so as to ward off such misfortunes as natural catastrophes, war, sickness and premature death. As such, heavy responsibility rested on the ruler as mediator between the world of gods and that of men. In Mesopotamia everything which is and happens was seen as a manifestation of divine will. There was no such thing as ‘chance’; any disaster was attributed to the gods turning away from mankind, provoked to divine anger by pollution or the breaking of taboos. A break in their relations with the gods would not be revealed to the people of Mesopotamia only by a catastrophe but by warning signals in their surroundings deviating from the rules established at creation. Thus signs when properly interpreted revealed information on public and private concerns. The causal relationship between the observed phenomenon and the prophesied future event was seldom empirical in the way weather lore is, although the prehistoric origins of the art of divination may well lie in the observing of natural portents. Rather, analogies springing from these peoples' world view and not always immediately transparent to us, were at the bottom of these causal connections; analogies having their justification in the assumption that all conceivable observed phenomena, whether their appearance is provoked or not, are inextricably linked and reflect a single divine purpose. In this sense, the causal relationship between protasis and apodosis as established in an omen, reveals the cosmic order. Hence omens, laws and medical diagnostic texts all share the same outward form. For the same reason very different divinatory methods, applied in combination and complementing one another, would together convey a more precise insight into the future. Thus it was expressly stressed in a cuneiform handbook of divination [1] that the weighing of terrestrial signs can only lea…