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This book examines the Babylonian backgroundof melothesia, the science of charting zodiac influences on the human body, which transformed older divination by connecting astrology with medical techniques. Special attention is given to a text from late-5th-century Uruk, which is argued to be an important representative of this new approach to the healing arts, previously only known from Greek and medieval astrology.

This book brings together ancient manuscripts of the large compendium of Mesopotamian exorcistic incantations known as Udug.hul (Utukku Lemnutu), directed against evil demons, ghosts, gods, and other demonic malefactors within the Mesopotamian view of the world.It allows for a more accurate appraisal of variants arising from a text tradition spread over more than two millennia and from many ancient libraries.

As counterpoint to conventional studies that evaluate ancient systems of magic against the logic of rational thought, this paper situates magical practice as a mode of knowing and producing anterior to such logic, engaged in the reproduction of society. The discussion converges on Neo-Assyrian apotropaic figurine deposits, which provided magical protection of a priest-house at Assur. It is argued here that apotropaic magic engages in a mode of secrecy that underwrites protective power in the social field. These material assemblages, as mimetic expressions of myth and dedication, configure protection in a play on the public secret, the pathos of the real as really made up. Protective power, therefore, emerges in this process that compels the perception and experience of a transformed and protected reality.

\"When you perform the ritual of 'rubbing'\" is the first line of the so-called Mussu'u ritual tablet. The ritual instructions record ancient Mesopotamian medical and magical encounter with disease. Bock discusses medicine and magic in ancient Mesopotamia.

A new volume of literary texts from Nimrud has been in gestation for a very long time. Tablets were first found in Max Mallowan's excavations at Nimrud in 1949, with many more tablets found in subsequent seasons. In 1963 the decision was made to publish all the literary tablets from the Nabû Temple in hand copy, and this effort has finally culminated in the form of Literary texts from the Nabû temple, edited by J. A. Black and D. J. Wiseman (Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud 4, 1998). As is so often the case with the publication of new literary texts, these copies often solve many problems and create just as many new ones for editors of texts; many of the copies could benefit from collation. Furthermore, the catalogue describing the tablets is extremely sparse, and much more could have been done by the editors to identify the tablets and note published duplicates. Nevertheless, the volume makes a valuable contribution to the field of Assyriology by publishing a large number of literary texts in cuneiform copy.

Through work on the large collection of Mandaic lead rolls in the British Museum and collations of incantation bowls in various museums and libraries, it appears that Mandaic gnostic incantation formulas were often translated into Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac, but not the reverse. In Late Antiquity, Mandaic Vorlagen seem to have dominated the field of magic in Mesopotamia. Although, only a scanty amount of pre-Islamic Mandaic incantation material has been published so far, classical Mandaic literature already gives many hints of this fact. It turns out that many solutions to puzzling words or spellings in Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls can be explained in the light of a Mandaic Vorlage.

The concept of the evil eye, the ability to harm someone just by looking with a sort of witchcraft or power of the eyes, seems to be an almost universal belief. How the ancient Mesopotamians reacted to this belief and to what extent they believed it are discussed.