Shumma Izbu

Anonymous / tradition (compiled across the second and first millennia BC) · c. 11th-7th century BC (canonized text drawing on older Old Babylonian material) · Babylon (Iraq) · science

A twenty-four-tablet series cataloguing the births of malformed animals and, more rarely, humans argues that teratological anomaly is not random misfortune but a divine message legible enough to be organized into a systematic, if grim, predictive reference work.