Among his topics are sacrifice and the art of divination, the fine art of asking questions, divination to-go and prognostication on a shoestring, from meat inspection to science: the flourishing of the Babylonian art of
extispicy, at the center of power: divination and political counseling, and on prognostication as sense and nonsense.
Extispicy (hepatoscopy): KTU 1.141-44 / RS 24.312, 24.323, 24.326, 24.327 (liver models from the "fosse," p.t.
Nor do contemporary works show individuals, mythical or otherwise, practicing ornithomanteia, although artists of the period do regularly represent scenes of
extispicy.
"Trying to figure out Sarah Palin reminds me of the ancient practice of
extispicy, divination by examining entrails for meaning," Politico quoted former New Hampshire GOP chairman Fergus Cullen, as saying.
Among specific topics are cognitive theory and the first-millennium
extispicy ritual, the divine presence and its interpretation in early Mesopotamian divination, traces of the omen series Summa izbu in Cicero's De divinatione, and prophecy and omen divination as two sides of the same coin.
"
Extispicy" sounds like a sort of Asian nouvelle cuisine, but it is a form a divination.
Great emphasis was placed on the value of reading the future in the entrails (
extispicy) or liver (heptoscopy) of slaughtered sheep.
It, the ultimate tragedy, was surely all there constellated in the participants' nativities; all there for the scrying - the
extispicy - in the wire-snared cony.
In order to reconstruct the context from which this literature emerged, he separates the early
extispicy omen collections from
extispicy as it was practiced in Mesopotamia up to and including the period of the formation of the collections.
As has long been known, one of the primary methods by which the ancient Mesopotamians, as well as the participants in peripheral cultures partaking of cuneiform civilization, elicited information from their deities was the examination of the internal organs of sacrificial sheep--haruspicy or
extispicy. Within this method of divination, inspection of the liver (hepatoscopy) played a major role.
This approach profoundly influenced other disciplines, leading to astral medicine and astral magic, while causing traditional systems of divination (e.g.,
extispicy) to be virtually abandoned.
Parpola noted the similar line of questions in Assyrian
extispicy, dealing with cultic and religious reforms and also with military and political matters, e.g., "O Sun, great lord, what I ask you, true yes answer to me.