Augur Anxieties in the Ancient Near East

Abstract

This contribution examines divination in ancient Mesopotamia from the practitioners’ own social, economic, and cosmological perspectives. It maintains that such an approach reveals divination to be an enterprise heavily informed by a number of insecurities, and that attention to these sources of anxiety sheds light on Mesopotamian religious worldviews. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first offers a brief synopsis of Near Eastern divination. The second examines two competing sources of anxiety that diviners negotiated: skepticism from others and their own theological principles. The third investigates the ways that diviners addressed these insecurities. The final portion of the chapter proposes several conclusions based on the combined evidence that concern the legitimation of divination as a means of seeking divine will, the rise of astrology and its impact on other forms of divination, the diviners’ ways of controlling cosmological anxieties, and the depiction of divination in Mesopotamian “literary” texts as a reflection of divinatory ideologies and the codependency of diviners and the royal house.