TEXTS OF GROUP NINE ANTI-WITCHCRAFT INCANTATIONS WITHIN BĪT RIMKI AND RELATED TEXTS

The Šamaš prayer Šamaš šar šamê u erṣeti bēl kītti u mīšari was recited by the king as the second incantation in the second house of the Bīt rimki ritual (according to the count of the houses in PBS 1/1, 15 and some of the incantation tablets). The structure and phraseology of the prayer are typical of firstmillennium anti-witchcraft incantations addressed to Šamaš (cf. here especially texts 8.3–5). The thematic focus of the prayer lies on returning the miasma of witchcraft to the witch by washing oneself over a figurine representing her; as to be expected, the brief ritual instruction prescribes handwashing over a figurine of the witch. The sources E and F certainly represent Bīt rimki manuscripts in the strict sense. In both the text of the prayer is followed by the specific Bīt rimki rubrics, and ms. F had the text of the Sumerian (bilingual) ki-dutu prayer of the second house on the obverse (cf. also in ms. F the addition of l. 45a which restricts the use of the text to the person of the king). In contrast, ms. A, G and the almost identical sources B and C — probably the product of two students working on the same assignment — give only the text of the Akkadian Šamaš prayer with its ritual instruction; the same may well be true for ms. d. This manuscript situation may indicate that the ritual segment was also performed outside the Bīt rimki context as a self-contained antiwitchcraft ritual. Ms. A obv. 3 shows that the recitation of this text was envisaged in a bathhouse, probably the bathhouse of the ‘bathhouse ritual’; but note that this phrase is absent from ms. B, where it is replaced by anāku annanna mār annanna.