Maqlû, the «Burning»: the great Babylonian series against witchcraft

In the religious literature of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the longest and most studied works bears an eloquent title: Maqlû, which in Akkadian means «burning». It is a series of clay tablets containing the incantations and instructions for a great ceremony against witchcraft. Its name comes from the central act of the rite, the destruction by fire of figurines representing the sorcerer or witch accused of causing harm.

The tablets and their provenance

The series comprises eight tablets of incantations and a ninth, called the ritual tablet, which indicates when each text was to be recited and which actions were to accompany it. Most copies date to the first millennium BC and come from libraries and archives of Assyrian and Babylonian cities: Nineveh, where many were found in the remains of Ashurbanipal's library, Assur, Nimrud, Sultantepe and some sites in Babylonia.

The composition probably predates the copies. Scholars believe the series took shape over time, gathering older incantations and arranging them in a canonical sequence. This standardisation is typical of the culture of Mesopotamian ritual experts, called āšipu, who preserved and copied the texts of their craft. The copies show local variants, but the overall scheme remains stable.

What the rite tells

The underlying framework is judicial. The patient, convinced he is the victim of sorcery, presents himself before the gods, in particular the fire god Girra and the sun god Šamaš, the divine judge, and asks for the sorcerer to be condemned. The incantations describe the harm suffered, invoke divine protection and announce the defeat of whoever caused it.

According to many scholars, the ceremony took place in a single night and the following morning, at the end of the month of Abu, in high summer, a period in which Mesopotamian tradition placed the passage of the dead and of spirits. The rite led the patient from darkness to light, from the disorder caused by witchcraft to the restoration of divine order.

Editions and studies

The first modern edition of the series was published in 1895 by the Finnish Assyriologist Knut Tallqvist. In 1937 Gerhard Meier produced a new edition, updated with texts discovered in the meantime. In the following decades the Assyriologist Tzvi Abusch devoted fundamental studies to Maqlû, culminating in a critical edition that reconstructs the history of its composition and the workings of the ceremony.

Maqlû should not be confused with another Mesopotamian series with a similar name, Šurpu, which can also be translated as «burning» but concerns release from faults and transgressions committed by the patient himself. The two works show two different ways of explaining misfortune: as the effect of an external attack, in the case of Maqlû, or as the consequence of one's own fault, in the case of Šurpu.

Studied as a historical document, the Maqlû series offers an exceptional window onto the fears of an ancient civilisation and onto how religious institutions responded to accusations of witchcraft. It also bears witness to the literary refinement of Mesopotamian scribes, who built a unified and solemn work out of formulas born in different times and places.