A Sacrifice That Also Speaks

Niqu carried a second function that had no equivalent in the daily meal service: the slaughtered animal itself became a source of divine communication. Once the sacrifice had been made, a specialist diviner called a bareu would examine the animal's liver and other internal organs for markings and irregularities believed to carry a message from the gods about future events, a practice this religion's page already documents as the ritual Barutu, Mesopotamian extispicy. In this way a single sacrificial act served two purposes at once, honoring the god with an offering and extracting from that same offering a reading of divine intention.

Francesca Rochberg's study of Mesopotamian divination situates extispicy within a much broader culture of reading omens from every available surface, the sky, oil poured on water, the behavior of animals, but treats sacrificial liver divination as among the most institutionally developed of these methods, with its own specialist training, its own technical manuals and its own place at the center, rather than the periphery, of state and temple religious life.