Maqlu

No single ancient copy of Maqlu survives complete. What scholars read today is a reconstruction assembled from more than ninety cuneiform manuscripts and fragments recovered from Nineveh, Assur, Babylon, Sultantepe and other sites, most belonging to the library Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh in the seventh century BCE before its destruction in 612 BCE preserved the tablets by burning the palace that held them, baking the clay rather than erasing it.

Erich Ebeling produced the first modern edition in 1931, Gerhard Meier followed in 1937 with a text that stood as the standard reference for decades, and Tzvi Abusch's 2015 critical edition incorporated manuscripts discovered since, correcting readings and clarifying the series' internal divisions into named subsections addressing distinct stages of the rite. The reconstruction work itself is a case study in how much of Mesopotamian religious literature reaches modern readers only through exactly this kind of patchwork of duplicate and overlapping copies, since scribes across centuries and cities each copied the text for their own temple or exorcist's use. Duplicate copies from different cities occasionally disagree in small details of wording or tablet order, giving editors a genuine textual criticism problem not unlike reconstructing a classical Greek or Latin work from divergent medieval manuscript traditions.

Maqlu is not a spell but a programme, and its shape is the most informative thing about it. Eight tablets carry the incantations in sequence. A ninth carries the ritual instructions that go with them, keyed to the incantations by their opening words, which is how Mesopotamian scholars cross-referenced. The whole runs through a single night and finishes in the morning, and the sequence of the night is legible in the text: the powers addressed at the start are those of the night sky, and the closing material belongs to sunrise.

The situation it assumes is specific. A man is ill, or unlucky, or estranged from his household and his god, and no ordinary cause accounts for it. The diagnosis is that a witch has acted against him. The exorcist, the ashipu, then conducts what reads as a legal proceeding: the witch is summoned, denounced before the gods, tried and sentenced, and the sentence is carried out on figurines that stand for her, which are burned. Girra, the fire, and Nusku, the lamp, are the powers that do the work.

What makes the series valuable to historians is that the legal framing is not decoration. Mesopotamian law took witchcraft accusations seriously enough to legislate for them, and the ritual borrows the procedure of a court because that is how a wrong was understood to be righted. The exorcist is not overpowering the witch. He is prosecuting her before gods who are expected to give judgement, and the destruction of the figurines is an execution of a sentence rather than an assault.

Assyriologists routinely read Maqlu beside Surpu, "burning" in Akkadian as well, since both are extended incantation series built around fire as the instrument of release, both survive in comparably reconstructed form from the same library find, and both were edited in modern times by Erica Reiner. The two are not duplicates of one purpose. Surpu addresses a client afflicted by the consequences of a violated taboo or an unwittingly broken oath, an offense against divine order with no human perpetrator to blame, and its cure is confession and ritual absolution. Maqlu addresses harm attributed to a specific human agent, the witch, and its cure is retaliation against an identified, if unnamed, wrongdoer.

Reading them together shows Mesopotamian ritual specialists distinguishing sharply between misfortune that was nobody's fault and misfortune somebody caused, and building an entirely different incantation apparatus for each. Both series were almost certainly performed by the same class of exorcist priest, the ashipu, whose professional library plainly held both as complementary tools for adjacent but distinct kinds of affliction. Both series also share a formal closing structure, a final purification returning the client to ordinary life, which suggests Mesopotamian ritual specialists worked from a shared template for concluding an affliction rite regardless of which underlying cause the affliction was diagnosed to have.

The series as it stands is a first millennium standardisation, and it is not a single composition. Tzvi Abusch's critical edition, published in 2016 after decades of work, rests on the argument that Maqlu grew: an older stratum of independent anti-witchcraft incantations was gathered, arranged, and then supplied with the ritual instructions that now bind them into a night-long sequence. Where those layers meet is visible in inconsistencies of address, in incantations that assume a different setting from the one the ritual tablet gives them, and in the varying relationship between an incantation and the action attached to it.

That argument matters beyond this one series, because it offers a model for how Mesopotamian ritual literature in general reached its canonical form. A text that looks like a designed whole may be an assemblage that acquired its design late, and the parts may be considerably older than the arrangement and may originally have done a different job.

It also changes what the series is evidence for. Read as a unity, Maqlu testifies to the beliefs of the first millennium scholars who fixed it. Read as a stratified compilation, it testifies to a much longer development, and the anxieties in its oldest layers are not necessarily those of the men who copied it into Ashurbanipal's library. The atlas records the series as attested and the reconstruction of its growth as scholarship, because the reconstruction is an argument about the text rather than a fact recorded in it.