Laura Nasrallah

Ancient Mediterranean mechanisms for divination used randomizing procedures—such as a dice throw—so that a person could receive messages from the gods, sometimes offered through a verse from Homer or a line from the Bible. These divination machines provide a laboratory to learn about addressing uncertainty, interactions with non-human agents, creative theologies, the production and use of scriptures, and complex ideas of hermeneutics or literary criticism. They offered answers to questions anyone might wish to know: about children’s health, the success of a business, freedom and enslavement, a love interest, or the political state of the world. This project understands such devices, particularly ones from the second to fifth centuries CE, as machines with components that included materiality, such as stone, papyrus, and knucklebones; randomized procedures, like dice and numbers, verses or stories from literature; non-human beings; and the ritual expert who aided the petitioner. If one starts with these machines, rather than elite texts about fate, a story emerges about how a range of people, from poor to elite, wrestled with issues of justice, knowledge, and the cosmos’ organization, including whether divine providence touches those who live below the moon.