So, picture this: Babylon, sixth century BCE. The biggest name in urban planning and giving a shit about astrology. Every morning, some poor bastard named a Tupsharru—that’s a “tablet writer” for you uncultured swine—has to get elbow-deep in a lukewarm chicken carcass to figure out if King Nebuchadnezzar should invade Egypt or just spend the day getting his kingly rocks off. It was a messy, thankless job. The chickens were sick of it, and frankly, so was our boy, Chief Diviner Zababa-shim-Shamash.

Zababa wasn’t just a pretty face with sacrificial knife skills; he was a visionary. A deeply horny, frequently drunk visionary. According to the (entirely fabricated by me) *Annals of Tacky Divinations*, Zababa got tired of poking at bird guts. “There has to be a less... visceral way to hear the gods,” he probably whined to a temple prostitute—sorry, *qadishtu* priestess. “Something less... goopy.” One night, while messing with a massive golden dish he’d built to “eavesdrop on Marduk’s celestial pillow talk,” he noticed a faint, omnipresent static. A hum. A cosmic *thrum*. He didn’t know it was the echo of the goddamn Big Bang, of course—he figured it was the sound of the universe’s divine digestive system. And he had a revelation that would’ve made him the first billionaire if, you know, numbers went that high.

He and his nerd squad—the *rab shaqi*, or “chief cupbearers,” who were really just glorified accountants with fancy hats—started mapping the static’s fluctuations on wet clay. They created the first-ever candlestick charts, attributing spikes in energy to Anu the Sky-God having a particularly spicy celestial burrito. They quickly realized these patterns—the ‘holy flatulence,’ they called it—seemed to predict grain futures with terrifying accuracy. Suddenly, the Temple of Marduk wasn’t in the business of salvation; it was in the business of hostile takeovers. They cornered the market on everything from Lebanese cedar to the specific shade of lapis lazuli favored by the queen’s favorite boy-toy. It was, and I cannot stress this enough, a complete goddamn accident.

For a hot minute, Babylon was the Wall Street of the ancient world. They were printing drachmas, baby. Nebuchadnezzar’s Hanging Gardens got a solid-gold water feature. Temple orgies had a three-year waiting list. Zababa was a rock star, drowning in so much syrupy date wine and perfumed bodies he could barely find his own dick to piss with. But here’s the thing about basing your entire economy on a 13.8-billion-year-old fossil: it doesn’t fucking change. The universe’s background radiation is, you know, *background*. It’s static. Their whole system was a glorious, jewel-encrusted house of cards built on confirmation bias and dumb luck.

The Great Copper Crash of 577 BCE hit them like a sack of Hittite bricks. The holy flatulence said “buy, buy, buy,” but the market said “psych, motherfucker.” The empire’s treasury, which was leveraged to the tits in copper futures, evaporated overnight. Zababa was last seen being hurled into the Euphrates with a clay tablet inscribed with the word “HODL” tied to his ankles. It was a financial apocalypse of such biblical proportions that people just went back to the far more sensible method of reading sheep entrails. At least when a sheep lies to you, you can eat it.