A 1,800-Year-Old Stone Oracle at Kibyra Lists 56 Fortunes Decided by Five Knucklebones

Archaeologists at Kibyra in southwestern Türkiye have published a 1.24-metre limestone monument inscribed with 56 oracles in Greek. The stone dates to the 2nd or 3rd century AD. Excavators uncovered it in 2024 on the third terrace of the city’s agora.

How the oracle worked

The practice is called astragalomancy, a form of divination with knucklebones. A seeker cast five bones from sheep, goats or calves. Each bone had four usable faces, valued 1, 3, 4 or 6. The combined result pointed to one of the 56 oracles, and each oracle linked to a deity.

Five ones, for example, matched an oracle tied to Olympian Zeus. It promised good judgment and happiness and told the seeker to honour Aphrodite and Hermes. Other results warned against journeys or business ventures. Others promised success, recovery or a safe return. Topics covered illness, travel, money and the future, and many oracles use Greek hexameter verse.

A gift to the city

An inscription at the top says a wealthy benefactor paid for the oracle, a statue of Hermes, its pedestal and the decoration as a private gift to the city. No donor name survives. Hermes fits the monument, because Greeks linked him to travel, trade, communication and divination by lots. The researchers suggest the monument originally stood in or near the agora. Builders later reused the stone in the northern wall of a chapel on the same terrace.

Part of a regional habit

Cities across southwestern and southern Anatolia used similar knucklebone oracles between about AD 120 and 210. Termessos, Kremna, Sagalassos and Perge have comparable inscriptions. Kibyra’s text closely resembles the one from Kremna. The researchers noted differences in grammar, altered verses and metrical irregularities. Some may come from stonecutter errors, and others from deliberate local edits. Unlike some parallels, Kibyra’s text keeps the numerical casting instructions throughout.

Source

Şenkal Kileci, Nihal Tüner Önen and Şükrü Özüdoğru describe the monument in “A New Astragalos Oracle Text from Kibyra: A Comparative Study with Southern Asia Minor Parallels,” Gephyra 31 (2026), pp. 257-294. DOI: 10.37095/gephyra.2002699.