In religious writings The Babylonian "
Marduk Prophecy", a text describing the travels of the Marduk idol from
Babylon, "prophesies" of the statue's seizure during the sack of the city by
Mursilis I in 1531 BC,
Assyria, when
Tukulti-Ninurta I overthrew
Kashtiliash IV in 1225 BC and took the idol to
Assur, and
Elam, when
Kudur-Nahhunte ransacked the city and pilfered the statue around 1160 BC. A copy was found in the House of the Exorcist at Assur, whose contents date from 713–612 BC and is closely related thematically to another
vaticinium ex eventu text called the Shulgi prophecy, which probably followed it in a sequence of tablets. Both compositions present a favorable view of Assyria. The
Book of Daniel utilizes
vaticinium ex eventu, by its seeming foreknowledge of events from
Alexander the Great's conquest up to the persecution of
Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the summer of 164 BCE.) and its
Second Temple are considered to be examples of
vaticinia ex eventu by the great majority of
Biblical scholars (with regard to
the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, in which the
Second Temple was destroyed). However, there are some scholars who only see the verses from Luke as constituting a
vaticinium ex eventu (and those of Mark not), • The
Divine Comedy by
Dante Alighieri includes a number of such prophecies of Dante's own exile from Florence. • In
Jerusalem Delivered,
Torquato Tasso uses the
vaticinium ex eventu trope in presaging the discovery of America by
Christopher Columbus: "Un uom de la Liguria avrà ardimento / a l'incognito corso esporsi in prima" • References in the late correspondence of
Virginia Woolf to "how I love this savage medieval water [...] and myself so eliminated" are sometimes taken as presaging her suicide by drowning a few months later: the danger of
vaticinium ex eventu has however also been observed. ==See also==