Ancient Mesopotamian dream omens and the world's first dream manual

Among the tablets recovered from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh — assembled in the seventh century BCE and containing copies of far older material — is a compendium modern scholars call the Assyrian Dream Book, or by its opening line, the Iškar Zaqīqu.

Zaqīqu was a dream god, associated with wind, breath and phantoms. The text is a systematic catalogue: dream images paired with their predicted outcomes.

How it works

The format is conditional, in the standard style of Mesopotamian omen literature. If a man dreams X, then Y.

The entries range from the plausible to the entirely opaque. If a man dreams he is flying, he will lose his possessions. If he eats a raven, he will have income. If he drinks water in his dream, his days will be long. If his teeth fall out, a family member will die.

That last one is worth pausing on. The association between dreaming of teeth falling out and the death of a relative appears in Mesopotamian omen texts, in Artemidorus in the second century CE, in medieval Islamic dream interpretation, and in folk traditions across Europe and Asia that survive today. Whether this reflects independent invention from a common human experience, or an extraordinarily long chain of cultural transmission, is genuinely unclear.

Namburbi: cancelling a bad dream

The most striking feature of the system, and the one that distinguishes it from passive fatalism.

A bad omen was not a fixed sentence. It was a warning that could be averted through namburbi rituals — apotropaic procedures designed to cancel the predicted outcome.

For dreams, several methods are attested. The dreamer might recount the dream to a lump of clay and then dissolve it in water, transferring the dream into the clay and destroying it. They might tell it to a reed, which was then burned. Purification with water, incense and prayer to Shamash, the sun god and god of justice, was common.

There is also a practice of telling the dream aloud before the sun has risen on it, in the belief that an unspoken dream retains its force. Variants of this — that a dream told before breakfast will not come true, or that telling a bad dream prevents it — survive in European folk custom.

Dreams in the Epic of Gilgamesh

The literary evidence is as informative as the reference works.

Gilgamesh has a series of dreams that his mother Ninsun interprets — the falling axe and the meteor that he embraces, foretelling the arrival of Enkidu. Before the journey to the Cedar Forest, he has a sequence of terrifying dreams that Enkidu reinterprets favourably. And Enkidu's dream of the underworld, in which he sees the house of dust where the dead wear feathers and eat clay, precedes his death.

Several things stand out. Dreams require an interpreter — the dreamer cannot read his own. Interpretation is contested and can be argued in either direction. And a bad dream is a serious matter requiring response.

Incubation in Mesopotamia

Deliberate dream-seeking is attested. Kings slept in temples to receive divine instruction, particularly concerning building projects.

The Sumerian ruler Gudea of Lagash, around 2100 BCE, recorded on two large clay cylinders that he received the plan for the temple of Ningirsu in a dream — a dream he did not understand, and for which he sought interpretation from the goddess Nanshe before proceeding. The account includes his uncertainty, his consultation, and a second confirming dream.

The practice appears again in Egypt, in Greece at the Asclepian sanctuaries, and in Israelite tradition. Whether these are related traditions or independent solutions to the same problem is a live question in the scholarship.

The awkward comparison

Reading the Assyrian Dream Book beside a modern popular dream dictionary is a slightly uncomfortable exercise.

The structure is identical: an image, a fixed meaning, applied without reference to the dreamer. The confidence is identical. Only the content of the predictions has changed — where the Assyrian text forecasts income, illness and the favour of gods, the modern one offers claims about the self, relationships and hidden emotions.

Three thousand years, and the format has proven more durable than any of the theories.

Why it is worth reading

Partly because it is the earliest evidence we have of humans systematically thinking about dreams, and it is impressively organised.

And partly because it shows how completely the framework determines the reading. To an Assyrian scribe, a dream was information from outside about the future. To Freud it was disguised material from inside about the past. To a contemporary sleep researcher it is the by-product of memory consolidation and emotional processing.

The dreams themselves have presumably not changed much at all.