Summa izbu  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Šumma izbu, “If a reject (= anomalous birth)” is an ancient Mesopotamian compendium of around 2,000 teratological omens, on 24 tablets probably formed from three separate earlier series on odd human births, šumma sinništu arâtma, “if a woman is pregnant” (tablets 1–4), the šumma izbu proper, on physically malformed births (tablets 6–17), and anomalous animal births: goats (tablet 18), cattle and donkeys (tablet 19), horses (tablets 20–21), pigs (tablet 22), dogs (tablet 23), wild animals (tablet 24), lambs (tablet 5, possibly the oldest in the series) and sheep (distributed across tablets 18–24). Exemplars of izbu compendia first appear in the old Babylonian period but it is not until the late second millennium that it is thought to have reached canonical form and exemplars of teratomantic texts from this era have been found in Assur and Babylon as well as further afield in Susa, Emar, Ugarit and Ḫattuša. The most complete form of the text comes from copies in the library of Ashurbanipal.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Summa izbu" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools