Analogy, Metaphor, and Meaning in Babylonian Divination
GB 5/150–152 „Ruhrpott“
Guest lecture by Nicla De Zorzi (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
In Babylonian divinatory texts from the second and first millennium BCE, omens typically take the form of lists of conditional clauses, where various categories of signs (the omen’s protasis) are matched with outcomes related to human concerns (the omen’s apodosis). The connection between protasis and apodosis is established through correspondences based on similarity, reflecting a mode of analogical thinking rooted in a culture-specific analogistic ontology. Central to this "Babylonian analogism" is the idea that similarities between words, concepts, and things reveal meaningful connections among them. For the modern reader, however, direct one-to-one correspondences between protases and apodoses are often difficult to reconstruct, since omen logic operates through overlapping and interwoven networks of associations. This paper examines the role of metaphor in establishing these connections through a series of case studies drawn from different types of divinatory texts and from different historical periods, intending to identify broader patterns in the construction of omen meaning.
