Babylonian-Assyrian Birth-Omens and Their Cultural Significance

Babylonian-Assyrian Birth-Omens
And
Their Cultural Significance
by Morris Jastrow, jr. Ph. D. (Leipzig) Professor of Semitic Languages in the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)
Gießen 1914 Verlag von Alfred Töpelmann (vormals J. Ricker)
Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten begründet von Albrecht Dieterich und Richard Wünsch herausgegeben von Richard Wünsch und Ludwig Deubner in Münster i. W. in Königsberg i. Pr. XIV. Band. 5. Heft
To SIR WILLIAM OSLER Regius Professor of Medicine Oxford University This volume is dedicated as a mark of esteem and admiration. “Most fine, most honour’d, most renown’d.” (King Henry V, 2d Part, Act IV, 5, 164.)


The significance attached to birth omens is thus merely a phase of the ceremonies attendant upon the passage of the new-born from its mysterious hiding place to the light. The analogy between the new life and the processes of nature is complete, for the plant, too, after being hidden in the earth, which is pictured in the religions of antiquity as a ‘great mother’, comes to the surface.
Malformations among infants and the young of animals were of course plentiful, but here too the anomalies and monstrosities are not as numerous and varied as were entered in the handbooks of the Babylonian and Assyrian diviners. The factor of fancy to which I have referred enters even more largely in the entries of many actual malformations, through the assumption of a more or less fanciful resemblance of some feature or of some part of an infant or of the young of an animal with the features or parts of some animal.
‘If it is a double foetus, but with one head, a double spine, two tails and one body, the land that is now ruled by two will be ruled by one person.