volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

Model of a Sheep's Liver. 125
a forgery, for I had seen several forgeries that had been
made by the Jews at Kazimen and they were very
cleverly made, but after examining it for two days I felt
sure that it was genuine, and as I knew it to be unique
I decided to acquire it with the rest of the collection.
Its shape and general appearance seemed strangely
familiar to me, and at length I remembered that it
closely resembled the plaster cast of a sheep's liver which
I had seen in the hands of Canon Isaac Taylor. That
cast was made from a bronze original inscribed in
Etruscan, which had been found near Piacenza in 1877,
and had been sent to him so that he might attempt to
decipher the inscription. Taylor came to the conclusion
that the bronze original was the model of a sheep's liver,
and that it belonged to a temple and was used by the
extispex or priest whose duty it was to inspect the
Uvers of the sheep that were offered up as sacrifices,
and to predict events from their appearances, Taylor
brought the cast to the British Museum hoping to find
evidence to support his view, and he showed it to Franks,
Birch and myself. The more I thought about it the
more I became convinced that the object from Abu
Habbah was the model of a sheep's liver which had been
used for purposes of divination, and I bought the whole
collection and made arrangements to take it with me
to London.^
^ When Taylor saw the Babylonian model he felt convinced that
it represented a sheep's liver, and rejoiced in its acquisition by the
British Museum ; but Assjrriologists were sceptical about the correctness
of his identification, though they had no proofs to the contrary.
In i8g8 the Trustees of the British Museum pubhshed a photographic
reproduction of the Uver and a transcript of the texts on it in Cuneiform
Texts, part vi, pll. i, 2, and so made it available for general study.
The following year M. A. Boissier published his " Note sur un Monument
Babylonien se rapportant ci I'Extispicine," and proved beyond
all doubt that the object was a model of a sheep's liver, and that it
had been made with the purpose of giving instruction in the art of
divining from the appearances of the livers of sheep. A year later he
published a further " Note sur un nouveau Document Babylonien se
rapportant k I'Extispicine," and proved that the object in the Ku3mnjik
Collection (Rm. 620), which Bezold described in the official Catalogue
(vol. iv, p. 1628) as " part of model of an ox's hoof in clay," was in