The Aramaic Uruk incantation acquired 1913 by the

Louvre The Louvre ( ), or the Louvre Museum ( ), is a national art museum in Paris, France, and one of the most famous museums in the world. It is located on the Rive Droite, Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement of Paris, 1st arron ...

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

and stored there under AO 6489François Thureau-Dangin, ''Textes cunéiformes VI, Tablettes d’Uruk'' (Paris, 1922), no. 58.Christa Müller-Kessler, "Die aramäische Beschwörung und ihre Rezeption in den mandäisch magischen Texten am Beispiel ausgewählter aramäischer Beschwörungsformulare," in Rika Gyselen (ed.), ''Magie et magiciens, charmes et sortilèges'' (Res Orientales XIV; Louvain: Peeters, 2002), pp. 195–201, pls. 1–2. is a unique

Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...

text written in Late Babylonian

cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

syllable signs and dates to the

Seleucid Empire The Seleucid Empire ( ) was a Greek state in West Asia during the Hellenistic period. It was founded in 312 BC by the Macedonian general Seleucus I Nicator, following the division of the Macedonian Empire founded by Alexander the Great ...

ca. 150 BCE. The finding site is the ''reš''-sanctuary in the ancient city of

Uruk Uruk, the archeological site known today as Warka, was an ancient city in the Near East, located east of the current bed of the Euphrates River, on an ancient, now-dried channel of the river in Muthanna Governorate, Iraq. The site lies 93 kilo ...

(

Warka Warka () is a town in east-central Poland, located on the left bank of the Pilica river ( south of Warsaw), with 11,858 inhabitants (2013). It has been situated in Grójec County, in the Masovian Voivodeship, since 1999; previously it was in t ...

), therefore the label “Uruk”. Particular about this incantation text is that it contains a magical

historiola The historiola is a modern term for a kind of incantation incorporating a short mythic story that provides the paradigm for the desired magical action.Fritz Graf"Historiola" in '' Brill’s New Pauly''. Consulted online on 29 December 2020. It ...

which is divided up into two nearly repetitive successive parts, a text genre that finds its continuation in the Aramaic magical text corpus of

late antiquity Late antiquity marks the period that comes after the end of classical antiquity and stretches into the onset of the Early Middle Ages. Late antiquity as a period was popularized by Peter Brown (historian), Peter Brown in 1971, and this periodiza ...

from

Iraq Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in West Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to Iraq–Saudi Arabia border, the south, Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq border, the east, the Persian Gulf and ...

and

Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

, most prominently in

incantation bowl Incantation bowls are a form of Apotropaic magic, protective magic found in what is now Iraq and Iran. Produced in the Middle East during late antiquity from the sixth to eighth centuries, particularly in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria (region), Syri ...

s and Mandaic lead rolls. The Aramaic style in which the text is composed is of a literary standard nature and follows a conventional

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...

system of the Aramaic phonemes in cuneiform syllable signs (e.g. <*ḍ> > > Late Aramaic <’>).Christa Müller-Kessler, "Aramäisches ''equ'' „Holz“ im keilschriftlichen Brief aus Tyros und ''eq'' in der aramäisch-keilschriftlichen Uruk-Beschwörung," in Ludĕk Vacín (ed.), ''u4 du11-ga-ni sá mu-ni-ib-du11. Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Memory of Blahoslav Hruška'' (Dresden: ISLET-Verlag, 2011), pp. 155–158. The text is of importance for the linguistic setting as it is the only Aramaic text example of this period and geographical area (

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

) so far, which shows already the masculine plural ending of the determinative ''-ē'' on nouns as in Eastern Aramaic, but lacks certain morphemes as demonstrative pronouns, or the imperfect.Stephen A. Kaufman, ''The Akkadian Influences on Aramaic'' (Assyriological Studies 19; Chicago, 1974), pp. 125. The text is set up in a strict literary style and works with typical elements like parallelism and

chiasmus In rhetoric, chiasmus ( ) or, less commonly, chiasm (Latin term from Greek , "crossing", from the Ancient Greek, Greek , , "to shape like the letter chi (letter), Χ"), is a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses ...

as already employed in the earlier Babylonian incantation type, for example in the incantation series

Maqlû The Maqlû, “burning,” series is an Akkadian incantation text which concerns the performance of a rather lengthy anti-witchcraft, or ''kišpū'', ritual. In its mature form, probably composed in the early first millennium BC, it comprises eigh ...

and

Šurpu The ancient Mesopotamian incantation series Šurpu begins ''enūma nēpešē ša šur-pu t'' 'eppušu'', “when you perform the rituals for (the series) ‘Burning,’” and was probably compiled in the middle Babylonian period, ca. 1350–105 ...

. There have been manifold discussions and studies concerning the interpretation and translation since the master handcopy by François Thureau-Dangin was published in 1922. It is noteworthy that it contains an idiomatic expression in line 2, which already occurs in the Aramaic part of the

Book of Ezra The Book of Ezra is a book of the Hebrew Bible which formerly included the Book of Nehemiah in a single book, commonly distinguished in scholarship as Ezra–Nehemiah. The two became separated with the first printed Mikraot Gedolot, rabbinic bib ...

, "a wood shall be pulled out from his house" (, Ezra 6:11).

Literature

* Peter C. Jensen, ''Der Babylonische Beschwörungstext in spätbabylonischer Schrift'' (Marburg, 1926). * Godfrey R. Driver, "An Aramaic Inscription in the Cuneiform Script," ''Archiv für Orientforschung'' 3, 1926, pp. 47–53. * P. O. Bostrup, "Aramäische Ritualtexte in Keilschrift," ''Acta Orientalia'' V, 1927, pp. 257–305. * Erich Ebeling, ''Ein Beschwörungstext in aramäischer-akkadischer Mischsprache'' (Berliner Beiträge zur Keilschriftforschung II,2; Berlin, 1935). * Cyrus H. Gordon, "The Aramaic Incantation in Cuneiform," ''Archiv für Orientforschung'' 12, 1938, pp. 105–117. * Benno Landsberger, "Zu den aramäischen Beschwörungen in Keilschrift," ''Archiv für Orientforschung'' 12, 1938, pp. 247–257. *

Franz Rosenthal Franz Rosenthal (August 31, 1914 – April 8, 2003) was the Louis M. Rabinowitz Professor of Semitic Languages at Yale University from 1956 to 1967 and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic, scholar of Arabic literature and Islam at Yale from 196 ...

, "Das Reichsaramäische," in ''Die aramaistische Forschung seit Theodor Nöldeke’s Veröffentlichungen'' (Leiden 1939; reprint 1964), pp. 34–35. * Cyrus H. Gordon, "The Cuneiform Aramaic Incantation," ''Orientalia NS'' 9, 1940, pp. 29–38. * André Dupont-Sommer, "La tablette cunéiforme araméenne de Warka," ''Revue d’Assyriologie'' 39, 1942–1944, pp. 35–62. * Markham J. Geller, "The Aramaic Incantation in Cuneiform Script (AO 6489 = TCL 6,58)," ''Jaarbericht. Ex Oriente Lux'' 35-36, 1997–2000, pp. 127–146. * Christa Müller-Kessler, "Die aramäische Beschwörung und ihre Rezeption in den mandäisch magischen Texten am Beispiel ausgewählter aramäischer Beschwörungsformulare," in Rika Gyselen (ed.), ''Magie et magiciens, charmes et sortilèges'' (Res Orientales XIV; Louvain: Peeters, 2002), pp. 195–201 xcellent photography

References

{{Reflist Aramaic inscriptions Cuneiform History of magic Incantation Orthography Near Eastern and Middle Eastern antiquities in the Louvre 2nd century BC in the Seleucid Empire Uruk

Literature

Further reading

References