Iqqur Ipuš

Iqqur Ipuš (“he destroyed, he built”) is an ancient Mesopotamian menology, first described as "An Almanac from ancient Babylonia", a work recording favorable and inauspicious months in which one might choose to carry out a wide variety of enterprises, such as building works, ritual activities, etc. It exists in two forms, ordered by activity (“série générale”) and by month (“série mensuelles”), providing lists and tables for easy reckoning and was probably composed during the last third of the second millennium.[1] Together with the astrological work, Astrolabe B, it is the most distinctly menological work within Mesopotamian literature.

The menology

The work contains hundreds of omens in a hundred and five sections covering a calendar of twelve thirty-day months. The first sixty six sections of Iqqur Ipuš ordered by activity concern those of daily human life, such as “If a man digs a well, … in the month of Ajar, then he will be in want of grain…”, “If a child is born in the month of Abu, that child will be despondent”,[2] while the last third of the text concerns natural phenomena, such as metereological events, like thunder: "When Adad hurls his voice".[3] Like the series Enuma Anu Enlil, it contains many astrological omens, such as those concerning earthquakes and the rising of Venus, but its relationship with this prominent work is otherwise uncertain.[4]

The Assyrian royal hemerology, “Fruit, Lord of the month”, excerpts several of its omina, but with a man replaced by a king and a house by a palace.[5]

Primary publication
  • E. F. Weidner (1957). Ein Hauskalender aus dem alten Babylonien. RSO 32. pp. 185–196.
  • R. Labat (1965). Un calendrier babylonien des travaux des signes et des mois (series iqqur ipuš). Librairie Honoré Champion.

References
  1. Stefan M. Maul (2007). "Divination culture and the handling of the future". In Gwendolyn Leick (ed.). The Babylonian World. Routledge. pp. 365–366.
  2. Francesca Rochberg (2004). The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture. Cambridge University Press. p. 203.
  3. Jean MacIntosh Turfa (2012). Divining the Etruscan World: The Brontoscopic Calendar and Religious Practice. Cambridge University Press. pp. 252–253.
  4. Ulla Koch-Westenholz (1994). Mesopotamian Astrology: An introduction to Babylonian and Assyrian Celestial Divination. Museum Tusculanum Press. p. 93.
  5. Alasdair Livingstone (2007). "The Babylonian Almanac: A text for specialists?". In Brigitte Groneberg, Hermann Spieckermann (ed.). Die Welt der Götterbilder. Walter de Gruyer. p. 94.
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