Shurpu Incantation Series

Shurpu, the Akkadian word for "burning," denotes a ritual series where an incantation-priest systematically manipulated and burned objects (e.g., an onion, date clusters, bed matting, goat hair, grain flour, etc.) that signified the patient's physical ailments and their causes. The goal of the ritual was to sympathetically remove whatever was afflicting the patient. Thus, for example, the first action the text prescribes is to peel and burn an onion, thereby "peeling" the patient's pain and sickness from them and "burning" it off. While the magical manipulation and burning of objects corresponding to the patient's afflictions is arguably the climax of the (nearly completely preserved) canonical Shurpu series found in Assurbanipal's library, this text—our primary source of knowledge for the ritual—is much more complex. Consisting of 9 tablets, tablets V-VI contain the incantations for the patient's purification via ritual burning and presents these instructions as originating from the god Marduk after he took note of the afflicted patient and asked his father Ea, the god of wisdom, about the proper course of treatment. Tablet VI ends with two incantations wishing for the ritual to placate the gods and petitioning them to judge calmly and not out of anger. The source of affliction in the Shurpu series is primarily understood as retribution for some wrong the patient had committed, even if the patient did not know exactly what it was. Thus, tablet II constitutes the most comprehensive surviving Mesopotamian sin list, its length owing to the hope that the patient's error could be found therein and remediated by being named and ritually removed by the incantation-priest. Tablet II ends with a petition to an impressive array of deities to eliminate the patient's sin and its consequences. Tablet III petitions the god of magic, Asalluḫi, to free the patient from curses arising from a lengthy list of possibly unfulfilled oaths, curses cast on the patient by others, or harm done by numinous power invoked during oath-taking. Tablet IV further petitions Marduk, the great punisher and protector, along with a litany of other deities, to free the patient from guilt and curse—whatever might have caused the affliction—and invokes many other deities to assist in the process. Tablet VII repeats Marduk's interaction with Ea in tablet V-VI, but this time Ea gives abbreviated instructions to purify the patient by wiping them down with flour, having the patient spit on it (presumably to transfer guilt and its consequences), reciting an incantation over it, and leaving the mixture in the floodplain so that the gods may eliminate the impurities. Tablet VIII again invokes a litany of deities, foremost Marduk, to free the patient from guilt and curse, but also mentions witchcraft, and refers to a ritual where the patient is washed and purified with water, special stones, and special plants. Tablet IX contains 13 incantations to stimulate the efficacy of different plants and water sources used in the ritual. Tablet I has not been confidently identified. All copies (most are fragmentary) of the Shurpu Series come from Neo-Assyrian period archives, although it is likely that the work was first composed, as were many works of enduring value, in Kassite Babylonia (c. 1300). Several factors mitigate against our ability to reconstruct the precise practice of the Shurpu ritual from the ancient Shurpu composition, such as differences among the tablets of Shurpu regarding the means of purification and cause of misfortune; the seeming accumulation of incantations regarding or prayers to various deities—a tendency that can be modestly confirmed by the existence of a few disjointed passages appearing in other ancient works; and the existence of a tablet from Assur that attests to a somewhat different Shurpu ritual in terms of order, content, and length. It is best, then, to see the canonical Nineveh text as a scholarly semi-anthology with an unknown, but presumably complex, relationship to actual practice.