Beyond his role as cosmic judge, Shamash occupied a central, everyday place in one of Mesopotamia's most important professional practices: extispicy, the reading of omens from the entrails, especially the liver, of a sacrificed sheep. Trained diviners, the baru priests, addressed their formal questions to Shamash and the storm god Adad together in a fixed ritual invocation before every reading, asking the gods to write their answer plainly into the animal's organs so that it could be correctly interpreted, a practice attested across many centuries of cuneiform omen texts and query tablets from royal archives. This role made Shamash not simply a distant judge of right and wrong but an active, consulted source of specific guidance sought before military campaigns, building projects, royal appointments and other consequential decisions, so that kings and officials regularly awaited his verdict, delivered through the diviner's craft, before acting. The same solar logic that made him witness to every wrongdoing under the sun made him equally suited to see, and communicate through the sacrificial animal, what the future held, uniting his roles as judge of the present and revealer of what was to come under a single explanation: as the god whose light reached everywhere, nothing, whether already done or yet to happen, could remain hidden from him.