Burn your way to success Studies in the Mesopotamian Ritual and Incantation Series Šurpu by Francis James Michael Simons A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology School of History and Cultures College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham March 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract The ritual and incantation series Šurpu ‘Burning’ is one of the most important sources for understanding religious and magical practice in the ancient Near East. The purpose of the ritual was to rid a sufferer of a divine curse which had been inflicted due to personal misconduct. The series is composed chiefly of the text of the incantations recited during the ceremony. These are supplemented by brief ritual instructions as well as a ritual tablet which details the ceremony in full. This thesis offers a comprehensive and radical reconstruction of the entire text, demonstrating the existence of a large, and previously unsuspected, lacuna in the published version. In addition, a single tablet, tablet IX, from the ten which comprise the series is fully edited, with partitur transliteration, eclectic and normalised text, translation, and a detailed line by line commentary. Dedicated to my mum, Lesley, who has read the whole thing despite the lack of murders. Also, to Laura and Ben, without whom I’d have starved to death 5 years ago. Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to several people who have offered assistance during the writing of this thesis. Two people must be singled (doubled?) out. Henry Stadhouders and Elyze Zomer have put up with dozens of (often stupid) e-mails and skype messages a day with complete equanimity. They have offered consistent and continuous support over a period of several years. Their help has been of inestimable value in solving the problems of Šurpu. I am very grateful to the denizens of the British Museum tablet room. In particular, I should like to thank Christopher Walker, who drew my attention to BM 33636 and BM 33584, and John Taylor who has provided photos and collations when I could not make it to the museum. A vast swathe of the Assyriological community has received e-mails and questions from me since I started writing. Anybody generous (or foolish) enough to respond positively usually received a dozen follow-up questions or a large chunk of writing and a request for their thoughts. I am very grateful to all of them for their help: Hannelore Agnetheler, Odette Boivin, Jay Crisostomo, Jeanette Fincke, Enrique Jiménez, Evelyne Koubkova, Mikko Luukko, Stefan Maul, Daniel Schwemer, Selena Wisnom and Martin Worthington I am also indebted to Kate Kelley for first suggesting, then enforcing, a writing pact which ensured that rather than frittering days away, actual words appeared. This has been particularly valuable over the final few weeks. My thanks are due to the assyriological staff and students of Julius-Maximiliens Universität, Würzburg, in particular Mikko Luukko, who made me very comfortable for several days in their marvellous library. Finally, there is absolutely no chance that this thesis would exist were it not for the constant and unwavering support of Birgit Haskamp and Dr Alasdair Livingstone. My first knowledge of the ancient Near East came from them, as did my earliest training in Akkadian and Sumerian. They saved me from Egyptology, suggested the topic of this thesis and followed the progress of my research, often with more interest than I had for it. I owe them a very great debt. Table of Contents Introduction 1-6 History of research 2-5 Structure of thesis 6 Chapter 1 - A Proposal for the Reconstruction of Šurpu 7-23 Tablet I 7-8 Tablet V-VI 8 Tablet V-VI exploded 8-9 Tablet VIII restored 9 Evidence of the catalogues 9-14 Tablet VIII 14-17 Place of tablet VIII in Šurpu 17-20 Subscript of IX explained 20-21 Conclusion 21-22 Comparison of recensions 22-23 Chapter 2 - Tablet IX 24-55 Edition 28-55 Sigla 28 Partitur 29-45 Eclectic text, normalisation and facing translation 46-55 Chapter 3 - Line-by-line commentary 56-116 Kultgötterbeschwörung 56-91 List of māmītu 99-113 Washing ritual 114-116 Excursus – Kusu 117-137 Conclusion 138 Bibliography 139-147 List of Tables Table 1 Incantations of Recension β 10-11 Table 2 Incipits of Reiner’s text and Recension α 12 Table 3 Tablet VIII Incantations 14 Table 4 Recension α 21 Table 5 Šurpu 22 Table 6 Šurpu IX Sigla 28 Table 7 Feast Gods 125 Table 8 Feast Gods redux 127 Introduction The ritual and incantation series Šurpu ‘Burning’, at over a thousand lines, is the longest and most detailed Mesopotamian composition to deal with assuagement of divine displeasure. The text consists of dozens of incantations, spread over 10 Tablets,1 which were recited with ritual accompaniment during an elaborate ceremony. The majority of the incantations are written in Akkadian, though some also feature interlinear Sumerian translations, and the final tablet of the series is written entirely in Sumerian. The ceremony involved four distinct stages, the first two and the last of which have been known since Zimmern’s 1896 editio princeps of the text, while the third is presented here for the first time, having been newly discovered during the course of the present research. The first stage consisted of the recitation of several extensive lists of offences that may have been committed to incur divine sanction, coupled with a plea that the sanction be removed. The second stage was the eponymous burning ritual, in which the patient’s offences were likened to various materials that were then burnt, symbolising the destruction of the patient’s problems and thereby removing them in an act of sympathetic magic. The third stage is unfortunately poorly preserved but seems to have consisted of various acts of magical transference in which the patient’s problems were passed into objects and locations and then absorbed, either by other people, by animals, or into the earth. The final stage of the ceremony, re-edited in chapter 2, involved the invocation of an extensive list of divine figures and a re-enumeration of some of the sins listed in the first stage, followed by a ritual purification using sanctified water. This is followed by a Tablet of Kultmittelbeschwörungen, a type of incantation designed to enhance the ritual efficacy of objects, such as juniper and water, used during the ceremony. Approximately 170 tablets and fragments of Šurpu are extant, over 100 of which were found in the 19th century excavations of Aššurbanipal’s library at Nineveh. Outside of Nineveh, fragments have been found at practically every major literary centre in Mesopotamia, as well as at some smaller sites. Manuscripts have so far been found at Aššur, Babylon, Kish, Khorsabad, Nimrud, Sippar, Sultantepe, Ur and Uruk. No Šurpu tablet so far discovered dates to earlier than the first millennium BC, though a small selection of the text is known from earlier copies. A Middle Babylonian sammeltafel (compilation tablet) from Aššur (KAR 226) containing an assortment of anti-witchcraft incantations includes an early form of an incantation belonging to the newly discovered tablet discussed in chapter 1.2 Many of the Kultmittelbeschwörungen from the final tablet have been found on Old Babylonian tablets.3 There is no manuscript evidence, however, that Šurpu existed before the first millennium – the incantatations found on sammeltafel are in a clearly distinct context and their contents differ substantially from the established text of the series, while the Kultmittelbeschwörungen are common to many ritual and incantation texts. Reiner has argued that Šurpu was a Middle Babylonian composition, based in part on the existence of Old Babylonian copies of the Kultmittelbeschwörungen, but chiefly on the widely held understanding that the major works of Mesopotamian literature were first canonised during the Kassite period.4 It is impossible, given the currently known exemplars, however, to give more than a terminus ante quem for the 1 ‘Tablets’ in this sense refers not to individual lumps of clay, but rather to discrete sections of the text roughly comparable to chapters. In this thesis, wherever the individual manuscripts are meant rather than the chapters, ‘tablets’ is left uncapitalised. All Tablet numbers used in this introduction are those of the revised numbering presented in chapter 1 below. 2 Abusch and Schwemer 2016: 157-166. 3 e.g. Ist Ni 2399, Falkenstein 1931: 99-100. 4 Reiner 1958: 2. Page 1 of 147 date of composition. The Khorsabad and Sultantepe tablets are likely the earliest manuscripts, dating to c. 700 BC. The basic features of this type of magic are cleaning or purification, and prayer. These are supplemented, depending on the purpose of the text, by a variety of ritual actions including burning incense, making and burying clay figures, rubbing the subject with flour, and tying and untying knots. Ankarloo and Clark point out that these actions were not simply symbolic as we now see them. To the Mesopotamians, ritual purification by water was as ‘real and effective [as] the physical cleaning process of taking a shower is to us’.5 These ritual actions were believed to have actual, tangible effects.