Babylonian tablets reveal kings installed royal doubles during eclipses, then executed them

The British Museum has cracked a 4,000-year-old murder plot: Babylonian kings routinely sacrificed royal stand-ins to avoid eclipse prophecies.

From the museum's collection of 130,000 Mesopotamian clay tablets, four texts tell the story. The tablets, written in Old Babylonian between 1900-1600 BCE, contain humanity's earliest known eclipse omens — 61 terrifying predictions. — Read the rest

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