On a night in the first millennium BC, in a house in Assyria or Babylonia, a specialist recited almost a hundred incantations in succession. Beside him, small figures representing witches were thrown into the fire. The ritual was called Maqlû, “Burning”, and it has reached us because someone wrote it on clay tablets. That is why Mesopotamia holds a special place on the map of this series, presented in Magic and spirituality in ancient civilisations: a map to get started: there, for the first time, prayers, healing recipes, omens and incantations were set down in writing.
Where and when
Mesopotamia is a Greek word meaning “between rivers”. The rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the region corresponds, in large part, to present-day Iraq. Over more than three thousand years, Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians passed through it, with different languages and a religious culture that was largely shared.
Long before that, higher up in the same region, hunter-gatherers raised the pillars of Göbekli Tepe. But written history begins in the south, at Uruk. There, around 3200 BC, the first tablets appeared with signs impressed in clay, the writing that would later be called cuneiform, because of the wedge shape of the strokes. The earliest texts did not speak of gods. They were word lists and accounts of grain, animals and labour.
Incantations came later. The oldest known ones, in Sumerian, were found at Fara, ancient Šuruppak, and at Ebla, in Syria, and date from about 2600 to 2500 BC. The Assyriologist Manfred Krebernik gathered these texts in a study published in 1984.
Gods, cities and demons
Each city had its chief god and a temple that was his house. Enlil was the lord of Nippur. Enki, called Ea in Akkadian, dwelt at Eridu and was the god of fresh water, wisdom and incantations. Inanna, the Ištar of the Akkadians, was the goddess of love and war, linked to the planet Venus. Marduk, the god of Babylon, grew in importance until he became king of the gods in the first millennium.
Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, in the dictionary Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, show that this world was also full of lesser beings, good and evil. The demoness Lamaštu attacked pregnant women and newborns. Pazuzu, a wind demon, had an image so frightening that it was used precisely to ward off other evils, including Lamaštu. Museums such as the Metropolitan in New York and the British Museum hold amulets of both, small enough to be worn on the body.
The historian Thorkild Jacobsen, in The Treasures of Darkness, proposed that the image of the gods changed over time. In the fourth millennium, according to him, the gods were seen chiefly as forces present in nature. In the third, they took on the figure of kings and rulers. In the second, the idea of a personal god, who protected each individual, grew. It is an interpretation, still debated today.
The specialists: āšipu, asû and bārû
For the Mesopotamians, illness and misfortune almost always had an invisible cause: the anger of a god, a demon or someone’s spell. Those who dealt with this were literate specialists.
The āšipu, an Akkadian word usually translated as “exorcist” or “conjurer”, was the chief among them. According to the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals project at the University of Würzburg, he purified houses, stables and fields, took part in temple rites and in the consecration of divine statues, and treated serious illnesses by driving away the malignant force thought to lie behind them. The knowledge of the āšipu had a name of its own, āšipūtu.
Beside him worked the asû, generally translated as “physician”. The asû dealt with ailments of visible cause, such as fractures, wounds and coughs, and used remedies whose preparation could include incantations. The two crafts overlapped. The texts of the Neo-Assyrian exorcists, in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, mix what we would today call magic and medicine, as Tzvi Abusch and Daniel Schwemer show in the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals.
The third specialist was the bārû, the diviner. His most prestigious technique was extispicy, the examination of the entrails of a sacrificed ram, above all the liver. The diviner asked the gods to write the answer on the animal’s body and then read the signs.
Omens: the world as a text
The Mesopotamians believed that the gods left messages in almost everything: in the liver of a ram, in the flight of birds, in the birth of a deformed animal, in eclipses. To interpret these messages, the scribes compiled enormous omen lists in the “if… then” format. If such-and-such a sign occurs, then such-and-such a consequence will follow.
The French historian Jean Bottéro, in Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, drew attention to this format. For him, these lists show a way of thinking that organises cases, compares and deduces, and that was born together with writing itself. The signs of the world were treated as a kind of writing of the gods.
The largest collection of celestial omens is called Enūma Anu Enlil, a name taken from its opening words. It gathers about 70 tablets and some 7,000 omens about the Moon, the Sun, the weather and planets such as Venus. From that systematic observation of the sky emerged, centuries later, the astrology that reached the Greeks, the subject of the origin of astrology.
Against witchcraft: the Maqlû
In the first millennium BC, the incantations were organised into series, with numbered tablets in a more or less fixed order. One of the most famous is precisely the Maqlû.
According to the Würzburg project and Tzvi Abusch’s critical edition, the series had nine tablets. Eight carried the text of the incantations, almost a hundred in all, in Akkadian. The ninth, called the Ritual Tablet, gave the āšipu instructions on what to do while reciting. The ceremony lasted one night. The figures of the witches were burned, and the patient, seen as the victim of a spell, passed symbolically from death back to life. Researchers read the ritual as a judicial process before the gods, which ended with the acquittal of the victim and the condemnation of whoever had bewitched them.
The same authors show that the typical witch in these sources is a woman, and the typical victim a man, although there were also male sorcerers, such as an adversary in a lawsuit. Witchcraft was a crime (the Code of Hammurabi already deals with the accusation), while the rituals against it were the legitimate practice of the specialists.
The great library of Nineveh
Much of this material survived thanks to Ashurbanipal. The king, who ruled Assyria from 668 to about 631 BC, gathered at Nineveh a collection of tablets with texts on divination, magic, medicine and literature. According to the library project, maintained by the University of Pennsylvania and the British Museum, almost 32,000 tablets and fragments have survived. When Nineveh was sacked and burned, in 612 BC, the fire baked the clay and helped to preserve it. Many of the copies of the Maqlû come from that collection.
The next posts in the series will go deeper into each part of this world: Sumer and Akkad, Babylon, Assyria, the Mesopotamian gods, the Maqlû and Babylonian astrology [coming soon]. Soon afterwards comes Ancient Egypt.
Questions answered
Did the Mesopotamians separate magic from religion?
Not in the way we do today. The same specialist could pray to a god, prepare a remedy and recite an incantation to treat a single patient.
Did the astrology of the signs already exist in Mesopotamia?
Observation of the sky as a source of omens, yes. The omens of Enūma Anu Enlil dealt chiefly with the king and the land. The astrology of the signs, as we know it, took shape much later, with the blending of Babylonian and Greek knowledge.
Why do we know so many Mesopotamian texts?
Because they were written on clay, a material that resists time well and, when fired, hardens. Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh is the best-known example.
Mini-glossary
- Cuneiform: writing made with wedge-shaped strokes marked in clay, arising at Uruk around 3200 BC.
- Āšipu: Mesopotamian specialist in healing, purification and protection rituals, generally translated as “exorcist”.
- Asû: healing professional, translated as “physician”, who treated ailments of visible cause.
- Bārû: diviner who read the signs of the gods, above all in the liver of sacrificed animals.
- Extispicy: divination by examination of the entrails of a sacrificed animal.
Bibliography
ABUSCH, Tzvi. The Magical Ceremony Maqlû: A Critical Edition. Leiden: Brill, 2016. (Ancient Magic and Divination, 10).
ABUSCH, Tzvi; SCHWEMER, Daniel. Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals (CMAwR). vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
BLACK, Jeremy; GREEN, Anthony. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary. London: British Museum Press, 1992.
BOTTÉRO, Jean. Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
BOTTÉRO, Jean. Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
JACOBSEN, Thorkild. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
KREBERNIK, Manfred. Die Beschwörungen aus Fara und Ebla. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1984.
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA; BRITISH MUSEUM. Ashurbanipal Library Project: A royal collection. Available at: https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/asbp/.
UNIVERSITY OF WÜRZBURG. Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals online: Maqlû; Experts. Available at: https://www.phil.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/cmawro/.