DIVINATION BY FISH, ARROWS, LIVERS 389 
a large and organised body of the priesthood under the direct 
control and patronage of the King. 
All strange occurrences in heaven or earth were referred to 
the seers. Almost every event of common life was believed by 
the pious Babylonian to require prophetic decision whether 
it boded well or ill. 
Among the reforms undertaken by Urukagina was that of 
the college of the diviners, for he tells us that ‘‘ he, who hitherto 
received one shekel for his work, took money no more.” 
In the letters of Hammurabi these diviners were recognised 
as a regular Guild. Knowledge of the tablets of recorded 
answers, which, suiting the individual circumstances of each 
interrogator, had for generations been stored in the library, 
enabled them to render an interpretation of practically all 
events. Their forecasts had resort. not only to astrology, but 
to other means, such as the observations of the movements of 
fish, of the flight of birds, and of the entrails and livers of sheep 
and other sacrificial animals, all of which were the subject of 
minute inspection. 
The Babylonians in seeking to determine the future watched 
carefully the movements, etc., of fish. Although the greater 
part of the known divination tablets regarding fish omens are 
in a sad state of preservation, the following will serve as an 
example: ‘If fish in a river keep in a school and steadily 
face up stream, in that place will be peaceful habitation,” a 
deliverance hardly fraught with comfort at times of flood or 
drought ! 
Then again the passage (in Ezekiel xxi. 21-22), ‘‘ The King 
of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the 
two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, 
he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver,’’ etc., is of 
great interest, as evidence that the Babylonians employed both 
Belomancy or divination by arrows, and Hepatoscopy or 
inspection of the liver. 
Belomancy was practised by other nations,! notably in 
1 Apollo to the Greeks was at once archer-god and god of divination. 
The word ayeide, ‘‘ he gave as his oracular response,’ means literally ‘‘ he 
picked up’ (the arrows). Indeed the curious fact that A¢yw in Greek denotes 
“Tsay ’’ and in Latin ‘‘ I read” is best explained by O, Schrader, who points 
