The ‘Lying Down Menology’: Instructions for a Year of Auspicious Dreams

Abstract

Abstract The ‘Lying Down Menology’ is a previously unedited text belonging to the corpus of Mesopotamian hemerological and calendrical texts. It contains a set of ritual instructions about hygiene, clothing, food and drink, sexual relations, and sleeping for each of the twelve months of the year; the goal is to obtain an auspicious dream. This menology was one of the texts used to compile the royal hemerology ‘Inbu bēl arḫi’, and its transmission can be followed to late period Babylonia where it is associated with the micro-zodiac.