Surpu: A Collection of Sumerian and Akkadian Incantations

Erica Reiner's Surpu, published in the Archiv fur Orientforschung series in Graz in 1958, is the standard critical edition of the Sumerian and Akkadian incantation series used in ancient Mesopotamian rituals of ritual absolution, the companion series to Maqlu. Reiner was a leading Assyriologist. Its strength is that it remains the standard scholarly edition of this text more than sixty years after publication, still cited as the base edition in current Assyriological work. Its limit is that it is a philological critical edition rather than a general account of Mesopotamian religion, so a claim about the wider ritual or religious context surrounding these incantations needs a source addressing that context directly.