Divination-Driven Decision-Making

I've been reading a lot about ancient Mesopotamia. Over the winter I read Weavers, Scribes and Kings, a book about Cuneiform, and what we know about the people who used it — both directly from the words we wrote, as well as the "metadata" of where we find tablets. For instance, we know quite about about how people learned to write, and how schools for scribes were organized, not because anyone wrote about the process and the schools directly but because we've been able to find collections of practice tablets. (Helpfully, cuneiform was written on clay tablets— so when a building burnt down we're able to get a lot of information about works that might otherwise have been erased and repurposed.)The book is really interested in helping you understand the mindset of these ancient people. For example: The way they conceived of the gods, as both human-like beings in charge of natural phenomenon — beings with a physical location and physical needs — and in some way also literally those…