To the ancient mesopotamian literati of the middle of the first millennium b.c., the patterns of stars covering the sky were a celestial script. The “heavenly writing” (šiṭir šamê or šiṭirti šamāmī) was a poetic metaphor occasionally used in Babylonian royal inscriptions to refer to temples made beautiful “like the stars” (kīma šiṭir šamê, literally, “like the heavenly writing”). In these Babylonian inscriptions, the metaphor is not used explicitly for astrology or celestial divination, but the notion of the stars as a heavenly script implies their capacity to be read and interpreted. Representing the work of the divine, the stars, “written” in the sky as they were conceived to be, could convey a sense of the eternal. When Neo-Assyrian King Sennacherib (704–681 b.c.) claimed of his capital city Nineveh that its “plan was drawn since time immemorial with the heavenly writing,” he meant that, when the gods drew the stars upon the heavens, they also drew up the plans for that city. A seventh-century scholarly text from Aššur explains the starry sky as the “lower heavens” (šamû šaplûti), made of jasper, on whose surface the god Marduk drew “the constellations of the gods” (lumāši ša ilāni). The image of the heavens as a stone surface upon which a god could draw or write, as a scribe would a clay tablet, complements the metaphoric trope of the heavenly writing.