Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

SAA 10 238. Expelling an Evil Demon (ABL 0024) [from exorcists]

~670 BCE·Neo-Assyrian·P333976

Translation — scholar edition

SAA 10
High confidence
(1) To the king, my lord: your servant Marduk-šakin-šumi. Good health to the king, my lord! May Nabû and Marduk bless the king, my lord! (5) The crown prince is well; Šamaš-šumu-ukin is well. (7) Concerning the rites accompanying the incantation "Verily You are Evil" about which the king, my lord, wrote to me, they are performed to drive out the evil demon and epilepsy. (10) As soon as something has afflicted him (= the patient), the exorcist rises and hangs a mouse and a shoot of a thornbush on the vault of the (patient's) door. The exorcist dresses in a red garment and puts on a red cloak.…

State Archives of Assyria, volume 10 — scholar edition (ORACC).

Transliteration

a-na LUGAL be-lí-ia / ARAD-ka mdAMAR.UTU—GAR—MU / lu-u DI-mu a-na LUGAL EN-ia / dPA dAMAR.UTU a-na LUGAL EN-ia / lik-ru-bu DI-mu a-na DUMU—LUGAL / DI-mu a-na mdGIŠ.NU₁₁—MU—GI.NA / ina UGU né-pe-še šá ÉN* ḪUL.GÁL ḪÉ.ME.EN / ša LUGAL be-lí iš-pur-an-ni / a-na a-lu-u lem-nu u AN.TA.ŠUB.BA / na-sa-ḫi ep-pu-šu ki-ma mi-i-nu / il-ta-pat-su LÚ.MAŠ.MAŠ i-tab-bi / PÉŠ.QA.GAZ! NUNUZ GIŠ.NIM / ina šib-še-ti…

Scholarly note

Letter from a scholar (astrologer, exorcist, physician, lamentation-priest) to Esarhaddon or Ashurbanipal, edited by Simo Parpola (SAA 10, 1993). ORACC text P333976.

Attribution

Image: Adapted from Simo Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (State Archives of Assyria, 10), 1993. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2016, as part of the research programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich (Karen Radner, Humboldt Professorship 2015). The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P333976/..
Translation excerpted from Parpola, S. 1993. Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars. SAA 10. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa10/P333976/.

Related tablets

Related sources