Maqlu (the Burning)

Maqlu treated witchcraft as a real and specific harm rather than a vague misfortune, and its structure answers a real accusation point by point. The client, never named as the accuser of any particular person, described symptoms, typically illness, insomnia or social ruin, that the exorcist diagnosed as the work of an unknown witch or warlock. Across roughly a hundred incantations recited through the night, the rite built a legal case in ritual form: it named every possible method a witch might have used, image magic, poisoned food, contaminated clothing, so that whichever method had actually been used was covered, then addressed the witch directly in the second person, cataloguing her or his crimes and revoking their power clause by clause.

The figurines stood in for the witch's body. Burning them enacted the same fate the witch had allegedly intended for the client, on the principle, common across Mesopotamian ritual, that a substitute object could carry a person's fate in their place. The series closes at sunrise with the client washed, dressed in clean garments and reintegrated into ordinary life, the ritual night itself functioning as the boundary between affliction and cure. Some incantations within the series address specific methods of harm the exorcist evidently regarded as most common, poisoned food and drink chief among them, suggesting real anxieties about domestic betrayal shaped which forms of alleged witchcraft the text bothered to name at length.

Maqlu is unusual among ancient magical corpora for how completely it survives, reconstructed from dozens of cuneiform tablets and fragments found across Assyria and Babylonia, most from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, which let Tzvi Abusch and earlier scholars assemble something close to a full working text rather than scattered fragments. What it reveals is a legal register laid over a religious one: the incantations repeatedly use courtroom language, accusing the witch before the gods Shamash and Gilgamesh as judges of the underworld and the living alike, because Mesopotamian law had no mechanism for prosecuting an unidentified sorcerer, so the wronged party turned to ritual rather than to a court.

Scholars debate how literally to read the witch as a real person the client suspected versus a generic category the rite existed to cover regardless of any actual accusation, since surviving instructions never name a target and some editions suggest the ambiguity was deliberate, protecting the rite's user from a countercharge of slander while still delivering psychological and social relief. The series also embeds fire itself as a moral agent, since burning both destroys evidence and, in Mesopotamian thought, purifies what it consumes.