Šurpu

Traditions

Mesopotamian divination and magic

Role in the tradition

Primary source Written from inside the tradition: scripture, revelation, a grimoire, a manifesto or a practical treatise.

Public attention

Minor Wikipedia has an article about it in 2 languages.

No free edition was found at sacred-texts.com, Project Gutenberg, esotericarchives.com, archive.org or Wikisource.

The ancient Mesopotamian incantation series Šurpu begins enūma nēpešē ša šur-pu t[epp]ušu, “when you perform the rituals for ‘Burning,’” and was probably compiled in the middle Babylonian period, ca. 1350–1050 BC, from individual incantations of much greater antiquity. It consisted of a long confessional of sins, ritual offences, unwitting breaches of taboos, offences against the moral or social order when the patient was unsure what act of omission he may have committed to offend the gods. Composed in Akkadian, its adjurations extend to nine clay tablets and, at Nineveh, Assurbanipal's scribes had canonized the series, fixing the sequence and providing a codicil at the bottom of each tablet providing the first line of the following tablet. Elsewhere, such as at Assur, the tablet order could vary. The three extant versions of the series vary in included passages, passage order, and tablet numbers. It has been suggested that the current canonical combined version omits one tablet.

From the Wikipedia article Šurpu, revision 1352380567, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikidata Q8082914: “Text from Mesopotamia”.