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In the religion of Ancient Rome, a haruspex (plural haruspices) was a person trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy (''haruspicina'') the inspection of the entrails ''(exta)'', hence also extispicy (''extispicium'') of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry. The reading of omens specifically from the liver is also known by the Greek term hepatoscopy (also hepatomancy). The Roman concept is directly derived from Etruscan religion, as one of the three branches of the ''disciplina Etrusca''. Haruspicy as practiced by the Romans and Etruscans has direct precedents in the religions of the Ancient Near East since at least the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2000 BC) and apparently reached Italy via Anatolian (Hittite, Luwian) transmission. The Latin terms ''haruspex'', ''haruspicina'' are from an archaic word ''haru'' "entrails, intestines" (cognate with ''hernia'' "protruding viscera", and ''hira'' "empty gut"; PIE '' *ǵʰer-'') and from the root ''spec-'' "to watch, observe". The Greek ἡπατοσκοπία ''hēpatoskōpia'' is from ''hēpar'' "liver" and ''skop- "to examine". ==Ancient Near East== The Babylonians were famous for hepatoscopy. This practice is mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel 21:21: :"For the king of Babylon stands at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination; he shakes the arrows, he consults the household idols, he ''looks at the liver''." The Nineveh library texts name more than a dozen liver-related terms. The liver was considered the source of the blood and hence the basis of life itself. From this belief, the Babylonians thought they could discover the will of the gods by examining the livers of carefully selected sheep. A priest known as a ''bārû'' was specially trained to interpret the "signs" of the liver, and Babylonian scholars assembled a monumental compendium of omens called the Bārûtu. The liver was divided into sections, with each section representing a particular deity. One Babylonian clay model of a sheep's liver, dated between 1900 and 1600 BC, is conserved in the British Museum.〔(WA 92668 (britishmuseum.org) ).〕 The model was used for divination, which was important to Mesopotamian medicine. This practice was conducted by priests and seers who looked for signs in the stars, or in the organs of sacrificed animals, to tell them things about a patient’s illness. Wooden pegs were placed in the holes of the clay tablet to record features found in a sacrificed animal's liver. The seer then used these features to predict the course of a patient's illness. Haruspicy was part of a larger study of organs for the sake of divination, called ''extispicy'', paying particular attention to the positioning of the organs and their shape. There are many records of different peoples using the liver and spleen of various domestic and wild animals to forecast weather. There are hundreds of ancient architectural objects, labyrinths composed of cobblestones in the northern countries that are considered to be a model of the intestines of the sacrificial animal, i.e. the colon of ruminants. The Assyro-Babylonian tradition was also adopted in Hittite religion. At least thirty-six liver-models have been excavated at Hattusa. Of these, the majority are inscribed in Akkadian, but a few examples also have inscriptions in the native Hittite language, indicating the adoption of haruspicy as part of the native, vernacular cult.〔four specimens are known to Güterbock (1987): CTH 547 II, KBo 9 67, KBo 25, KUB 4 72 (VAT 8320 in Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, for which see also George Sarton, ''Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece'' (1952, 1970), (p. 93 ), citing Alfred Boissier, ''Mantique babylonienne et mantique hittite'' (1935).〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「haruspex」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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