timelets

the quintessential Mesopotamian preoccupation is the restless urge to predict the future. A good percentage of intellectual thought over the best part of three millennia was lavished on the desire to penetrate the veil, fuelled by the conviction that human beings could, everything being equal, obtain the needed information from the gods through well-established procedures. This field of activity generated a vast literature of carefully assembled one-line omens on this pattern:

If A happened, B will happen.

One example exemplifies how a diviner operated in about 1750 BC while examining the surface of a freshly extracted liver from a healthy sheep for diagnostic marks:

Protasis: If there are three white pustules to the left of the gall bladder
Apodosis: the king will triumph over his enemy.