The book under review is an important contribution to a scholarly edition of an extensive Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft ritual, whose Akkadian title was Maqlû (“burning”). During the ritual performance, which lasted from nightfall to sunrise, figurines and representations of the witch were burnt (hence the ritual's name). The lengthy ritual manual was compiled by Mesopotamian scholars into a series of nine tablets. Eight tablets contained the wording of the incantations, the ninth gave instructions for actions to be performed.
The book's author, Daniel Schwemer, has been collaborating since 2001 with Tzvi Abusch in the project “Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals” (CMAwR). Both scholars have published extensively on this topic, individually and jointly. A convenient overview of the project, the publications deriving from it and many additional resources can be found online: http://www.cmawro.altorientalistik.uni-wuerzburg.de/startseite/
The reader who wishes to study a critical scholarly edition of the anti-witchcraft ritual Maqlû must consult two volumes, published by two different publishing houses, however. Tzvi Abusch has published recently the monograph The Magical Ceremony Maqlû: A Critical Edition (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016). This book offers a synoptic edition, composite transliteration and transcription of the Akkadian text of Maqlû as well as an English translation. The book by Daniel Schwemer under review here contains the autographs of the often only fragmentarily preserved cuneiform manuscripts from which Maqlû has been reconstructed. An impressive number of hand copies are arranged over no fewer than 126 plates, mostly by the hand of Daniel Schwemer himself. For the sake of completeness, autographs by other scholars, some already published, others hitherto unpublished, have also been included. The large number of manuscripts is made accessible by registers and concordances. Thus, any Assyriologist who wishes to read Maqlû will use Abusch's and Schwemer's books as companion volumes.
Daniel Schwemer's book contains more than autographs of cuneiform manuscripts, though. There is a general introduction to witchcraft and anti-witchcraft rituals in Mesopotamia with a focus on Maqlû and its transmission history, date and textual form. Schwemer furthermore offers a very detailed synopsis of the ritual performance. This part of the book will be of interest also to the non-Assyriological reader.
A chapter is dedicated to the history of reconstruction of the text of Maqlû by Assyriological scholarship. Furthermore, Schwemer has established a typology of the extant sources: there are manuscripts belonging to Maqlû, but also parallel sources containing only portions of text similar or identical to Maqlû, but in a different literary or ritual context. Among the manuscripts belonging to Maqlû, so-called full-text tablets and excerpt tablets can be differentiated. Excerpt tablets were school texts or commentaries. Most manuscripts of Maqlû are full-text tablets.
The author also presents provenance, date and library contexts of the pertinent manuscripts: there are manuscripts from Assyria (Nineveh, Aššur, Ḫuzirīna, Kalḫu) and Babylonia (Babylon and Borsippa, Sippar, Kiš, Nippur, Ur, Uruk).
There are several chapters with very detailed analyses of great interest to the Assyriological reader. Schwemer offers a thoughtful insight into variants and versions of Maqlû: there are variants on section level, when incantations or significant parts of text are missing in a part of the manuscript transmission. There are variants at line level, when lines are absent from a single manuscript or of even a group of sources. And there are variants at word level, i.e. the absence of words or short phrases, or the use of semantically similar (but lexically different) words or phrases in a manuscript or a group of sources.
There remains, however, the question of what is a variant and what is rather a scribal error. Schwemer points out that the norm are the manuscripts from Nineveh, which are the largest and most homogeneous group of sources, and they contain few scribal errors. Of particular interest is a paragraph dedicated to morphological variation, i.e. variation in the grammatical form of a word. There is also a chapter on spelling conventions and linguistic characteristics of nouns, pronouns, particles and verbs, discussing also phonological phenomena (such as, e.g., overhanging vowels, crasis, quantity metathesis), and characteristics of syllabic and logographic spellings.
These many details, meticulously treated by Schwemer, tend to be overlooked when reading only a composite text reconstructed by a modern scholar, which, however, never existed in this form in antiquity.
In conclusion it can be stated that Daniel Schwemer's book is an impressive scholarly work which addresses mostly the Assyriologist, yet some chapters are equally accessible to a reader from outside the field.
