Mesopotamian and Indian Bird Omens

Adam in Ancient Mesopotamian Traditions

Since the recovery and publication of texts from the Ancient Near East is a continuing endeavor, the materials already published need to be reexamined from time to time in the light of more recent information. The case in point for reexamination here is the Mesopotamian story of Adapa, which is noted for its parallel with the early chapters in Genesis as a reference to man's squandered opportun...

Brain Diseases in Mesopotamian Societies

In ancient Mesopotamia were not practiced neither autopsies nor dissections, so the internal organs of human body were known only from occasional inspections on wounds and injuries. The brain was considered as a part of the head and was not related to mental activity. However, Babylonian and Assyrian physicians were able to identify the symptoms of many diseases that affect this organ. We will ...

Mesopotamian Metrological Lists And Tables:Forgotten Sources

Overconfidence, omens and gender heterogeneity: Results from a field experiment

We investigate whether overconfidence is affected by superstitious beliefs and whether the effect is heterogeneous according to gender. With this aim, we run a field experiment involving about 700 Italian students. According to widespread superstitions, some numbers are considered lucky while others are thought of as unlucky. In our experiment, we exploited this by randomly assigning students t...

Unusual Accounting Practices in Archaic Mesopotamian Tablets

§1.1. The archaic texts examined in this paper all come from the earlier Erlenmeyer Collection. As is widely known, this tablet collection was auctioned off in December of 1988 by the London auction house Christie’s, and the majority of them were purchased by the State of Berlin and transferred to the Vorderasiatisches Museum as a permanent loan. Many of the tablets are fully preserved and in v...