Mesopotamian civilizations used to view lunar eclipses as warnings for oncoming evil.

Not the exact thing you want to read on an ancient tablet if you happen to be any sort of superstitious. But it's one of several omens that a group of archaeologists read when they finally deciphered a collection of 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets -- over a century after they were discovered.

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, experts described and translated a total of 73 cuneiform omens originating from ancient Babylonia. Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system (a system where symbols represent entire words) used by many languages of a region that roughly aligns geographically with the modern Middle East known as the Ancient Near East.

Like many others throughout history, the authors of the tablets turned to the supernatural to predict the future. "Divination was a hallmark of the Babylonians' attempt to understand the world," Andrew George, a retired Assyriologist and one of the authors of the paper, told Popular Mechanics in an email.

The omens themselves are tied to a lunar eclipse, which were once believed to warn about oncoming evils. Ancient astronomers may have used first hand experiences to predict what the eclipses foreshadowed, George told Live Science. "The origins of some of the omens may have lain in actual experience -- observation of portent followed by catastrophe."

From a modern perspective, however, "the omens reveal the typical disasters that could happen to the state and tell us about the anxieties that [were] attached to rulership and governance in ancient Babylonia," George told Popular Mechanics.

Included in the omens were threats of famine, plague, drought, and even assassinations of leaders. And according to the paper, people of the past took these warnings very seriously.

"If the prediction associated with a given omen was threatening, for example, 'a king will die,' then an oracular enquiry by extispicy [an examination of a sacrificed animal's innards] was conducted to determine whether the king was in real danger," George and Junko Taniguchi, the other author of the paper, wrote in their study.

If a king's advisors still felt that there was a threat after the examination, they would attempt to ward off evil with special rituals, the paper explained.

Although the complete translations are new, knowledge of the tablets themselves is not. The British Museum originally acquired three of the tablets in the 1890s, and completed the set with the final tablet in 1914. Soon after, the artifacts joined a collection of over 150,000 cuneiform tablets. Because of the scale of the collection and the lack of researchers in the field, the tablets were only rediscovered when a scholar happened to stumble upon them and realize their significance in the 1970s.

Studies on the tablets followed standard procedure for Assyriological research: slow reading, detailed line-drawings, and lots of repetition are all parts of the deciphering process, according to George. The paper explains that the tablets take the standard Mesopotamian divinatory list form. The language of the texts -- Akkadian, the Semitic language of ancient Iraq -- also proves that the tablets were Baylonian.

Reading the spoken and written word inscribed on cuneiform tablets can help create an accurate picture of what life and culture may have looked like 2,000 to 4,500 years ago, according to George.

"In 150 years we have progressed from knowing almost nothing about the Babylonians and Assyrians (only what the Greeks and Biblical books told us)," he wrote, "to accumulating a great mountain of knowledge of their civilization, its history, religion, literature, social and economic history, all painstakingly reconstructed from those cuneiform texts which have been published in the interim."