The Magical Ceremony Maqlu: A Critical Edition

Tzvi Abusch is an Assyriologist specializing in Mesopotamian magic and religion, and this Brill critical edition is his modern scholarly edition of Maqlu, the ancient Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft incantation series, superseding the earlier 1937 edition by Meier. Its strength is direct engagement with the cuneiform tablets themselves and with the substantial body of Assyriological scholarship on the series accumulated since Meier's edition, producing a more accurate and complete text than was previously available. Its limit is that, like any critical edition of a fragmentary ancient corpus, portions of the text remain damaged or debated, and Abusch's own scholarly apparatus is the place to check which specific readings are secure and which are reconstructed, rather than treating the translated text as uniformly certain.