Secrets Of The Assyrian Dream Book And Dream Interpretation In The Ancient Near East

Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com - Dreams have always been of interest to ancient cultures. Our ancestors often believed dreams could foretell the future, and it was essential to unlocking the secrets of God's divine messages.

Mesopotamian writing- cuneiform tablets. Credit: Public Domain

Many ancient civilizations treated dreams as Gods' communication with mortals. People believed that dreams served as a window to the other side. Living people could see the activities of the deceased through dreams.

Dreams – From Ancient Egypt To Mesopotamia, Babylon And Assyria

Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians sincerely believed in precognitive dreams. Through a dream, the Sphinx gave Thutmose IV the power to become a Pharaoh.

Thutmose IV, whose name means "Born of the God, Thoth," was one of those who received a message from the gods in his dream. It happened one day when he was hunting trip.

Thutmose IV fell asleep, and in his dream, the Sun God Re-Harakhte - embodied in the Sphinx – visited him. He was tired and decided to rest in the shadow near the great Sphinx. The monument was buried in sand at the time.

Thutmose IV was promised that if he cleared away the sand that engulfed the monument, he would become King of Egypt. The famous Dream Stele of Pharaoh Thutmose IV can still today be found between the paws of the great Sphinx at Giza." ¹

Many years ago, archaeologists unearthed the ancient Egyptian Dream Book, compiled during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II. This fascinating hieratic papyrus lists several dreams and their interpretations. The old document reveals that "thousands of years ago, ancient Egyptians used the messages in their dreams to cure illnesses, make important State decisions, and even decide where to build a temple or wage a battle. Dreams were considered to be divine predictions of the future. They were messages from the gods that could foretell impending disasters or, conversely, of good fortune; therefore, understanding the significance of one's dreams was an important part of the culture." ²

It should not be surprising to learn Egypt's neighboring countries were as interested in the power of dreams as people who lived in the Land of the Pharaohs.

Our knowledge of the ancient Assyrian Dream Book is mainly based on clay tablets discovered in the Library of Ashurbanipal. Many of these ancient fragments are damaged and thus difficult to decipher. Still, scientists have thoroughly tried to put together the pieces to understand the tablets' content.

Understanding Of Dreams In The Ancient Near East

According to A. Leo Oppenheim, who has done a comprehensive study of the ancient Assyrian Dream Book, "the dream experiences of a civilization dead for many millennia must be studied in the reflections they have produced in the literary documents of that civilization. In the written records of the civilization of the ancient Near East, references to dreams occur on several distinct literary levels, each subject to its own rigid and consistent stylistic conventions." ³

People in the ancient Near East believed "dream-experiences were recorded on three differentiated planes: dreams as revelations of the deity which may or may not require interpretation; dreams which reflect, symptomatically, the state of mind, the spiritual and bodily "health" of the dreamer, which are only mentioned but never recorded m and thirdly, mantic dreams in which forthcoming events are prognosticated." ³

Divine messages were particularly important. Credit: Stock Photo

Message dreams were recorded on royal inscriptions and were highly significant. Evil ones were also taken seriously, and much attention was paid to omens.

Ancient clay tablets discovered in Susa offer some insight into dream interpretation of the ancient Near East, especially concerning dreams of "eating, and drinking bodily functions, receiving and manufacturing or handling or handling objects and tools cutting down trees and other occupations within the everyday sphere of human activities as far as these happen to be mentioned in the extant Neo-Assyrian fragments of the Dream-Book." ³

Some fragments of the ancient Assyrian Dream Book reveal people are warned not to leave the house after having had a specific dream. There are also references to dream travels "to heaven and the netherworld and with astronomical and meteorological phenomena seen in dreams" ³

The vital role of the ancient priests who were credited for interpreting dreams is also an important topic. In Mesopotamia, "the religion of the priest was centered primarily on the image and temple; it was concerned with the service the image required—not only in sacrifices but also in hymns of praise—and with the apotropaic functions of these images for the community." ³

The King could also "receive divine messages of certain types, but it was not considered acceptable for a private person to approach the deity through dreams and visions." ⁴

Divine Messages And Omens In The Near East

In the Library of Ashurbanipal, scientists found 11 tablets that contain dream omens. We learn from these ancient artifacts that special rituals were performed "to ward off the consequences of bad dreams, those dreams predicting disaster or other ills.

Other rituals in this collection functioned prophylactically to protect the sleeping persons against scary dreams. The protean variety of dream contents is organized rather pedantically in large and small sections that refer to certain definite activities of the dreamer, such as eating or drinking in one's dreams, traveling, and other activities of daily life.

The section concerned with eating includes cannibalism and coprophagy; in the tablet on traveling, dreams of ascending to heaven and descending into the nether world occur, as do dreams of flying. There are incestuous dreams, dreams of losing one's teeth, quarreling with family members, receiving gifts, and carrying objects.

As other types of Mesopotamian omen texts are related to the dream, the prediction derived from it is rarely understandable. Only a few omens bear out what has been said above concerning man as the carrier of "signs" through which the deity addresses the entire community." ⁴

Interestingly, there is little information on divine communication through dreams. Dream interpretation in the ancient Near East is a significant subject, and we can gain more knowledge of how people dealt with dreaming but, first after we deciphered clay tablets.

Updated on June 22, 2022

Written by Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com

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