Why Ancient Mesopotamians Would Have Used a Sheep's Liver to Predict Donald Trump's Election Odds
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https://theconversation.com/profiles/selena-wisnom-2242976" rel="nofollow">
Selena Wisnom[/url]
/The Conversation</p>
<p>I’m standing in a basement kitchen prodding at a sheep’s liver, looking for marks on its smooth surface. People crowd around to film the proceedings, since I’m here to ask a question that everyone wants to know the answer to: will Donald Trump win the US election?</p>
<p>I’m following instructions that were first written down by the ancient Babylonians 4,000 years ago, and still survive today. Every crease on the liver has a meaning, and cuneiform tablets discovered in modern-day Iraq explain how to interpret them.</p>
<p>Armed with this knowledge, it’s possible to calculate the answer to any question, so long as it is yes or no, by adding up the number of positive or negative signs and seeing which comes out on top.</p>
<p>Since this liver had an overwhelming number of bad omens in it, I <a href="
https://medieval.ox.ac.uk/2024/09/20/sheep-liver-divination-for-us-election/" rel="nofollow">concluded[/url] that it declared no for Trump this time. Though in 2016 this method <a href="
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1MVEYiN0THq5J7qvidbLjX" rel="nofollow">predicted a win[/url] well before he had won the Republican nomination, and in 2020 foretold that he would not be re-elected that year.</p>
<p>What started as an entertaining talk for a university open day has since become a serious part of <a href="
https://leicester.academia.edu/SelenaWisnom" rel="nofollow">my research[/url]—not because I sincerely believe in it, but because it gives us some of the earliest evidence in history for how human beings reason and think.</p>
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