Resources for Mesopotamian Civilization
Sites: International World History Project The International Database of the Melammu Project Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamia
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| “In the library of King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh about 650 B.C., at least 30 percent of the twenty to thirty thousand tablets come into the category of omen literature. Each entry in these tedious irrational collections consists of an if-clause or protasis followed by a then-clause or apodosis. And there were many kinds of omens.... Rarely are we able to see any logical dependency of prediction on portent, the connection often being as simple as word associations or connotations.... History also begins, if vaguely, in omen texts, the apodoses or ‘then-clauses’ of some early texts perhaps preserving some faint historical information in a unique and characteristically Mesopotamian variety of historiography.” – Jaynes, Origin of Consciousness, 237-9. |
