The great army will fall: it was possible to decipher 4,000-Year-Old Tablets with Prophecies (3 photos)
Among other things, the texts also talk about a disease that will cause chaos, a locust invasion, and the death of livestock. 
Four clay tablets found in Iraq more than 100 years ago have been deciphered. According to experts, the text predicts the fall of civilizations and kings, and also conveys signs associated with lunar eclipses. The authors of the study, Andrew George and Junko Taniguchi, wrote about this in more detail.
These tablets are part of the British Museum's collection and are written in cuneiform, a writing system used in the ancient Near East.
The deciphered texts tell of the death of a king, a disease that would cause chaos, a plague of locusts, the death of livestock, and the fall of a "great army," among other things. 
The tablets were likely written during the Babylonian Empire, which existed from about 1890 BCE to 224 CE. Researchers George and Taniguchi write in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies that people at the time believed that signs in the sky were placed by the gods as warnings about the future of those living on earth.
They added: "Those who advised the king observed the night sky and checked their observations against the academic corpus of texts on celestial phenomena."
Further verification of the omens was done through a process known as "extispicy." According to George and Taniguchi, this involved examining the entrails of animals to determine whether the king was in real danger.
NASA notes that ancient civilizations were able to predict eclipses and took care to appoint "backup" kings to bear the brunt of the gods' wrath. The real monarch was left unharmed to ensure the continuity of government policy. 
