Bārûtu

The Bārûtu, the “art of the diviner,” is a monumental ancient Mesopotamian compendium of the science of extispicy or sacrificial omens stretching over around a hundred cuneiform tablets which was assembled in the Neo-Assyrian/Babylonian period based upon earlier recensions.

of the sheep, the offering of the sacrifice, the performance of extispicy.”[3]: 23  This required elaborate ritual purity, achieved through washing hands and mouth, donning fresh clothing, placing tamarisk and cedar into the diviner's ears, anointing and fumigation with sulfur[3]: 29  – all measures to avoid the outcome of the apodosis lā ellu niqâ ilput, “an unclean person has touched the sacrifice.” The autopsy then proceeded in a counter-clockwise direction, beginning with the liver, the lungs, then the breastbone, vertebrae, ribs, colon and finally the heart.

[2]: 620  These were the accumulation of a millennium and a half of observations of political, social and private events and the divinatory signs that accompanied them but bereft of their chronological context or other identifying marker and stylistically posed in the form of a prediction.

The šumma immeru records observations derived from scholarly debates relating to the behavior of sacrificial lambs before and during the ritual and there were also “orientation tables” in the form of extispicy models (example pictured right) and interpretive grids to assist with the training of bārû.

Captive scribal labor was employed at the Assyrian capital to contribute to the local material assimilated from older libraries such as those of Nabû-zuqup-kēnu, who was recorded as the copyist of a manzāzu commentary dated to 704 BC, from Nineveh.