igo8. 



IN BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA. 649 



which represent such as in the opinion of the priests might occur. 

 Certain rules of interpretation having been devised, based on actual 

 occurrences following upon the signs noted, these rules were ap- 

 plied to contingent cases which might occur ; and often in astro- 

 logical texts, signs are even entered which have no practical sig- 

 nificance at all but purely a theoretical interest as illustrations of 

 the extremes to which the system of interpretation was pushed. 



In the case of both methods the interpretations have reference 

 almost exclusively to the general welfare and not to the individual, 

 to crops, war, pestilence, victory, defeat, famine, plenty, favorable 

 or unfavorable climatic conditions and the like. The individual 

 plays a very minor role, and when he is introduced, in most cases it 

 is the king who is directly mentioned or indirectly referred to. 

 Even the welfare of the king is bound up with the welfare of the 

 country under the view of kingship which continues to hold good till 

 the end of the Babylonian-Assyrian control and according to which 

 the king's welfare, because of his peculiar relationship to the gods, 

 conditions the general prosperity and happiness f and this applies 

 also to signs connected with a member of the royal household. It is 

 because of this bearing of both forms of divination on the general 

 welfare that they form integral parts of the official cult. Especially 

 is this the case with the rites of hepatoscopy which, as texts from 

 the days of the Assyrian empire show, formed part of a regular 

 ritual.^ 



More important, however, than this aspect of hepatoscopy and 

 astrology in Babylonia and Assyria is the circumstance that both 

 methods rest upon a well-defined theory and are therefore not to be 

 viewed as merely arbitrarily chosen devices. In the case of hepa- 

 toscopy the underlying theory may be summed up as follows. The 

 sacrificial animal on being accepted by the deity to whom it is 

 offered is assimilated to the deity. The deity becomes one with it, 

 much in the same way as the one who partakes of an animal becomes 

 part of that animal, or the animal part of him. The soul of the 

 animal is thus put in harmonious accord with the soul of the god. 



' See J. G. Frazer, " Lectures on the Early History of Kingship." 

 * See Jastrow, " Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens," II., pp. 174 seq. 

 and 300 seq. 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC. XI.VII. I90 PP, PRINTED FEBRUARY 6, I9O9. 



