This volume is about the history, literature, ritual, and thought associated with ancient Mesopotamian witchcraft. With chapters on the changing forms and roles of witchcraft beliefs, the ritual function, form, and development of the Maqlû text (the most important ancient work on the subject), and the meaning of the Maqlû ceremony, as well as the ideology of the final version of the text. The volume significantly contributes to our understanding of the Maqlû text, and the reconstruction of the development of thought about witchcraft and magic in Mesopotamia.

This volume is about the history, literature, ritual, and thought associated with ancient Mesopotamian witchcraft. With chapters on the changing forms and roles of witchcraft beliefs, the ritual function, form, and development of the Maqlû text (the most important ancient work on the subject), and the meaning of the Maqlû ceremony, as well as the ideology of the final version of the text. The volume significantly contributes to our understanding of the Maqlû text, and the reconstruction of the development of thought about witchcraft and magic in Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and prescriptions prescribe ceremonies and treatments for dispelling witchcraft, destroying the witch, and protecting and curing the patient. The Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals aims to present a reconstruction and critical editions of this body of texts.

This volume, edited by Tzvi Zbusch and Karel van der Toorn, contains the papers delivered at the first international conference on Mesopotamian magic held under the auspices of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in June 1995. It is the first collective volume dedicated to the study of this topic. It aims at serving as a bench-mark and provides analytic and innovative but also sythetic and programmatic essays. Magical texts, forms, and traditions from the Mesopotamian cultural worlds of the third millennium BCE through the first millennium CE, in the Sumerian, Akkadian and Aramaic languages as well as in art, are examined.

Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and prescriptions prescribe ceremonies and treatments for dispelling witchcraft, destroying the witch, and protecting and curing the patient. The Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals aims to present a reconstruction and critical editions of this body of texts.

Among the most important sources for understanding the cultures and systems of thought of ancient Mesopotamia is a large body of magical and medical texts written in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. An especially significant branch of this literature centers upon witchcraft. Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and incantations attribute ill-health and misfortune to the magic machinations of witches and prescribe ceremonies, devices, and treatments for dispelling witchcraft, destroying the witch, and protecting and curing the patient. The Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals aims to present a reconstruction of this body of texts; it provides critical editions of the relevant rituals and prescriptions based on the study of the cuneiform tablets and fragments recovered from the libraries of ancient Mesopotamia.

Further Studies on Mesopotamian Witchcraft offers a collection of studies of Akkadian incantations and rituals directed against witchcraft. Many of these essays offer solutions for literary and textual difficulties in these texts through analysis and reconstruction of their historical development.