Babylonian-Assyrian Birth-Omens and Their Cultural Significance

by Morris Jastrow

[220] See above p. 40 note 4.

[221] This birth-omen ‘if a woman gives birth to a head’ actually occurs in the Babylonian-Assyrian collections, e. g., Cun. Texts XXVIII Pl. 34, 24 (K. 8274). See above p. 37.

[222] See Jastrow, Religion II 943, 1. The vulture eats the liver because it is the seat of life. The renewal of the liver is the renewal of life. Prometheus thus suffers perpetual death and is yet condemned to eternal renewal of life. This view of the liver is incidentally a proof of the high antiquity of the myth.

[223] See Jastrow, Religion II 320 seq.

[224] Vol. 38 (190), 209-311.

[225] Schwalbe, Mißgeburten und Mißbildungen bei Menschen und Tieren I 39 also favors this view.

[226] See p. 4 and Jastrow, Religion II 740 seq.

[227] See Jastrow, Religion II 937, 2. In Se-ma Tsien’s Memoires Historiques tr. by Chavannes I 13, there is a reference to a monster which had the body of a man and the head of an ox, and which was born to a woman through a dragon.

[228] See Spiegelberg, Geschichte der ägyptischen Kunst 17; Maspero Art in Egypt 40.

[229] The Evolution of the Aryan 101.