In this volume I have collected the studies on Mesopotamian witchcraft that I have written subsequent to the appearance of my 2002 collection of studies on witchcraft and Maqlû, namely, Mesopotamian Witchcraft: Toward a History and Understanding of Babylonian Witchcraft Beliefs and Literature (AMD 5). Moreover, I have added two earlier articles that were not included in AMD 5. I have not included material that appeared in the introductions or commentaries to my editions of Maqlû (WAW 37, 2015; AMD 10, 2016), or material contained in my earlier Babylonian Witchcraft Literature: Case Studies (BJS 132, 1987).
This volume differs from AMD 5 in at least one respect. Most of the studies in the earlier volume were conceptualized as part of a single project. That was not the case for the studies collected in this volume. While several of the essays included here were written in response to requests for overviews of Mesopotamian witchcraft as part of some larger enterprise (such as a handbook), most of them address problems or issues with which I was struggling while editing or translating portions of Maqlû.
The order of the studies of sections of Maqlû reprinted here generally corresponds to the order in which those sections appear in the text. In most of these studies I take a diachronic approach and attempt to solve a problem using a literary-critical and/or text-critical approach. This is not surprising given my own disposition and philosophy of knowledge. The reader will forgive, I hope, the repetition of methodological principles that are basic to diachronic studies. The problems for which I posit historical development as a solution appear in incantations where parallels or forerunners are available for comparison as well as incantations in which internal evidence or tension is the primary source of evidence for the analyses. Problems of interpretation that result from the lack of agreement (or fit) between textual segments are what drive my analysis. Often there is no “hard” evidence for my conclusions. Rather, they are teased out from anomalies and inconsistencies in our texts. Taken together, such inferences are a valid basis for the solution of many problems and possibly for the reconstruction of the history of individual incantations and groups of incantations. Thus, I have primarily taken account of discrepancies in the text, and I acknowledge that I have not dealt with the interaction of written and oral traditions. For better or for worse, my approach is not commonly used in Assyriology; however, I believe that its application is more than justified and will produce historical, literary, or interpretive results that cannot be achieved by other methods, though I recognize the uncertainty that adheres to many of my results.
Some comments on editorial matters are in order. The text of the studies reissued here replicates, for the most part, the text of the original publications. Minor errors have been corrected, and the mode of bibliographical citation has been standardized; a comprehensive bibliography is included at the end of the volume. I have updated citations of Maqlû to agree with the line numbering of my edition in AMD 10. Many of the non-Maqlû witchcraft texts cited in this volume were subsequently edited and published in volumes of the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals (CMAwR). References to texts cited prior to their appearance in those volumes are not updated; when such a text is first cited in a chapter in this volume, I indicate within double brackets the number assigned to that text in CMAwR. Subsequent references in that chapter are not updated. Articles written subsequent to the publication of a text in CMAwR cite it by its number and lineation in CMAwR. The reader is advised to consult the volumes of CMAwR for up-to-date editions of the aforementioned texts. In addition, texts and translations of selected items in CMAwR are available online at http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cmawro/corpus.
This preface would be incomplete without a word of thanks to all those who have made this volume of collected essays possible. PDFs of original publications were turned into Microsoft Word versions by Jared Pfost. These versions were then corrected on the basis of the original publications by Ji Min Bang. Gene McGarry then unified the mode of bibliographical citation. This version was proofread by Justin Huguenin. Finally, Eileen Xing read through the volume in search of errors and infelicities. Requests for permission to republish were organized by Dan Berman.
I wish to thank the original publishers and editors for permission to publish my studies here. Again, I thank Gene McGarry for his invaluable help and Brandeis University (The Norman Fund) and the department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies for providing financial support for the enterprise. My sincerest thanks also go to my editor at Brill, Ms. Katelyn Chin, for her efforts.