Evil Eye of Sumerian Deities

African and Asian Studies, 2017

The evil eye in ancient Mesopotamia has received surprisingly little attention in recent research. It has been suggested that the belief in the malefic gaze was much less prevalent in ancient Mesopotamia than initially thought by earlier generations of scholars. Unfortunately, though, recent scholarship has focused exclusively on the relatively small corpus of evil eye incantations from ancient Mesopotamia. This study attempts to add to the understanding of this ancient belief system by analysing the conceptual content of linguistic expressions for the evil eye of gods and goddesses in Sumerian literature.

Asian and African Studies, 2021

The widespread ancient belief in the deleterious powers of the eye as reflected in Sumerian literature has been largely neglected in recent research. It has even been suggested that the belief system, though common in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, was foreign to the ancient Sumerians. While Thomsen suggested that the evil eye was limited to humans, other scholars have argued that the evil eye was only associated with divinities in Sumerian literature. This study focuses on the conceptual content of linguistic expressions relating to the eye of humans, animals, and demons in order to demonstrate that much can still be learned about this complex belief system as it existed in ancient Mesopotamia when conceptual metaphors and metonymies for the evil eye are also taken into account.

2000

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Altorientalische Forschungen , 2008

Old Assyrian Incantations are still not very well attested, but their number is steadily increasing. A new member of this family, an incantation against the evil eye (ēnum alušītum), is published here, and parallels to Babylonian texts are provided. Also presented are several other new texts from the excavations at Kültepe/Kaneš in 1994, naming a number of previously unknown gods and lending considerable new insight into the religious life and practice of the merchants on their way from Aššur into Anatolia.

Kullat ṭupšarrūti, Festschrift für Stefan M. Maul, 2023

A quest for the meaning of evil, its perception, boundaries, modes of appearance and origin occupies a significant place in world philosophy, particularly in religious thought. Theologians strive to defend God almighty vis-à-vis evil and the suffering of the individual. Their treatises are classified in the literature as theodicy, the oldest of which is the Babylonian theodicy. Translators of cuneiform texts used ‘evil’ rather freely, oblivious of the debate and the possibility that something may be lost in the translation. In this article I explore the Mesopotamian intellectuals attitude towards evil.

The Routledge Handbook of Emotions in the Ancient Near East, K. Sonik U. Steinert eds. , 2022

This chapter explores the expressions for the emotion family (Goetz et al. 2010, 352) of compassion and the related states of pity, mercy, and empathy in the Sumerian literature. Sources examined date to the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000-1550 BCE). By that time, Sumer had ceased to exist as a socio-political entity, and the Sumerian language was no longer spoken nor expressive of the creativity of a living culture. The vernacular in Babylonia was the Semitic language Akkadian (Michalowski 2006, 171-77 and passim), so the general population was not able to understand Sumerian and enjoy its poetry. Sumerian persisted in use in the scribal education system as a written language used mostly for literary, liturgical, and scholarly texts. The Babylonian and Assyrian scribes who put our sources in writing, learned Sumerian as a foreign language. Through their integration into the school curriculum, Sumerian texts became an integral part of the Babylonian cultural legacy, studied, copied, and transmitted as long as the cuneiform script remained in use (it continued through to the first century CE). 1 But from the middle of the second millennium BCE, their numbers declined. The Sumerian text corpus was limited mainly to liturgy, and the texts were not transmitted unilingually but together with Akkadian versions as bilinguals (e.g., Cohen 1988). Thus, our sources are late witnesses to Sumerian narratives and traditions, which were selected by Semitic Babylonian intellectuals, adjusted to their own experiences, and handed down to future generations. The limited circulation of Sumerian texts within the boundaries of the scribal circles prompted textual dependence, a high degree of intertextuality, and rigidness of expression. Moreover, Mesopotamia in the fourth and third millennia was multiethnic. Textual evidence for cultural contacts between Sumerians and Semitic people during the third millennium shows mutual influences. Isolating the Sumerian elements in the extant textual sources is complicated, delicate work that leaves uncertainties. "Sumerian expressions" should, therefore, be understood primarily as referencing expressions written in the Sumerian language. Yet Sumerian origins can be traced through invocations of deities in hymns and prayers, specific mythemes, and some literary motifs.

The rod and measuring rope: Fs. for Olof Pedersén, 2019

The Female Breasts in Sumerian Literature: the sign(s), the contexts and the Akkadian correspondences Therese Rodin

1999

A study examined the different strategies used by speakers of Egyptian Arabic to ward off the potential effects of the evil eye, specifically the responding strategies to compliments perceived as invocations of evil as it relates to the gender of the recipient of the compliment and the social context in which the compliment takes place. Social context was defined as the social distance between interlocutors, small or large. Subjects were 40 (25 males, 15 females) Egyptian teachers of English-as-a-Second Language attending a teacher training program in the United States, only one of whom claimed not to believe in the evil eye. An open-ended discourse-completion interview; including 12 situations, was conducted with each subject in colloquial Egyptian Arabic in his or her own residence. The resulting 480 compliment responses obtained were analyzed for strategy type. The most common was complaining about the object of the compliment. Other frequently-used strategies included complimenting the speaker, evasion, and humor. The relationship of gender and social distance in the use of each of these strategies, and the apparent intent of the strategies, were analyzed. A list of formula phrases related to beliefs about the evil eye and the 12 test situations are appended. (Contains 22 references and 2 figures.) (MSE)

Towards the end of the Early Assyrian period, the phrase “Then DN will hear his prayers” appears as a formulaic conclusion to the royal inscriptions. This phrase became routine during the first half of the Middle Assyrian period (1362-963 BCE). It invoked the names of various deities, and the rationale behind the appropriation of particular deities is often missing for modern readers. This paper investigates the assorted uses of this phrase and concludes that the inclusion of specific deities was not haphazard, but intentional.

The present volume is the first systematic treatment of the Corpus of Middle Babylonian and Middle Assyrian Incantations. It comprises an exhaustive and detailed catalogue of all magical material in cuneiform texts in Sumerian and Akkadian from the Middle Babylonian and Middle Assyrian periods (ca. 1500–1000 BCE). The work begins with a typology of the different sub-groups of incantations, the physical properties of the tablets, an innovative survey of the text formats, a discussion of drawings on magical texts and a critical discussion of the different paratextual comments, followed by an overview of the geographical and archival setting and an examination on the social context of the corpus. The circulation of magical texts during the Late Bronze Age is investigated by outlining the corpus itself: its thematic grouping of incantations, division of unilingual and bilingual texts, local scribal traditions and their influences. With respect to the question of whether the standardization of incantations took place in Mesopotamia during the Second Millennium, an extensive chapter provides a comparative analysis of the incantation corpora of the Third and Second Millennium against the standardized ritual series of the First Millennium. Fifty cuneiform texts have been edited and translated, accompanied by a thorough philological commentary.