Bīt Rimki
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Bīt Rimki
Bīt rimki, “House of Ablution” or "Bath-house", is an ancient Mesopotamian prophylactic ritual and accompanying incantation series, recorded on seven or more tablets, the first of which describes the actual performance of the ritual. Its purpose was to cleanse the person of the Assyrian king, and his household, of the evils portended by the inauspicious sign of a lunar eclipse, witchcraft, ritual abuse, etc. The correspondence of Esarhaddon with his priests Adad-šumu-uṣur, Urad-Ea, Marduk-šākin-šumi, and Nabû-nāṣir shows that he was subjected to this ceremony on four separate occasions, while masquerading as a "farmer", in an elaborate substitute-king ritual. The Assyrian king of Babylon, Šamaš-šum-ukin, endured two such rituals where fresh copies of the incantation tablets were laboriously prepared. It seems likely that the ceremony lasted seven days. The ritual The Šamaš cycle of ''bīt rimki'' is a group of seven themed “houses”, or perhaps more properly ...
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Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia occupies modern Iraq. In the broader sense, the historical region included present-day Iraq and Kuwait and parts of present-day Iran, Syria and Turkey. The Sumerians and Akkadians (including Assyrians and Babylonians) originating from different areas in present-day Iraq, dominated Mesopotamia from the beginning of written history () to the fall of Babylon in 539 BC, when it was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire. It fell to Alexander the Great in 332 BC, and after his death, it became part of the Greek Seleucid Empire. Later the Arameans dominated major parts of Mesopotamia (). Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC. It has been identi ...
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Assyria
Assyria (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: , romanized: ''māt Aššur''; syc, ܐܬܘܪ, ʾāthor) was a major ancient Mesopotamian civilization which existed as a city-state at times controlling regional territories in the indigenous lands of the Assyrians from the 21st century BC to the 14th century BC, then to a territorial state, and eventually an empire from the 14th century BC to the 7th century BC. Spanning from the early Bronze Age to the late Iron Age, modern historians typically divide ancient Assyrian history into the Early Assyrian ( 2600–2025 BC), Old Assyrian ( 2025–1364 BC), Middle Assyrian ( 1363–912 BC), Neo-Assyrian (911–609 BC) and post-imperial (609 BC– AD 630) periods, based on political events and gradual changes in language. Assur, the first Assyrian capital, was founded 2600 BC but there is no evidence yet discovered that the city was independent until the collapse of the Third Dynasty of Ur in the 21st century BC, when a line of independent kin ...
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Esarhaddon
Esarhaddon, also spelled Essarhaddon, Assarhaddon and Ashurhaddon (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: , also , meaning " Ashur has given me a brother"; Biblical Hebrew: ''ʾĒsar-Ḥaddōn'') was the king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from the death of his father Sennacherib in 681 BC to his own death in 669. The third king of the Sargonid dynasty, Esarhaddon is most famous for his conquest of Egypt in 671 BC, which made his empire the largest the world had ever seen, and for his reconstruction of Babylon, which had been destroyed by his father. After Sennacherib's eldest son and heir Ashur-nadin-shumi had been captured and presumably executed in 694, the new heir had originally been the second eldest son, Arda-Mulissu, but in 684, Esarhaddon, a younger son, was appointed instead. Angered by this decision, Arda-Mulissu and another brother, Nabu-shar-usur, murdered their father in 681 and planned to seize the Assyrian throne. The murder, and Arda-Mulissu's aspirations of becoming king himself ...
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Babylon
''Bābili(m)'' * sux, 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠 * arc, 𐡁𐡁𐡋 ''Bāḇel'' * syc, ܒܒܠ ''Bāḇel'' * grc-gre, Βαβυλών ''Babylṓn'' * he, בָּבֶל ''Bāvel'' * peo, 𐎲𐎠𐎲𐎡𐎽𐎢 ''Bābiru'' * elx, 𒀸𒁀𒉿𒇷 ''Babili'' *Kassite: ''Karanduniash'', ''Karduniash'' , image = Street in Babylon.jpg , image_size=250px , alt = A partial view of the ruins of Babylon , caption = A partial view of the ruins of Babylon , map_type = Near East#West Asia#Iraq , relief = yes , map_alt = Babylon lies in the center of Iraq , coordinates = , location = Hillah, Babil Governorate, Iraq , region = Mesopotamia , type = Settlement , part_of = Babylonia , length = , width = , area = , height = , builder = , material = , built = , abandoned = , epochs = , cultures = Sumerian, Akkadian, Amorite, Kassite, Assyrian, Chaldean, Achaemenid, Hellenistic, Parthian, Sasanian, Muslim , dependency_of = , occupants = , event = , excavations = , archaeologists = Hormuzd Rassam, Robe ...
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Shamash-shum-ukin
Shamash-shum-ukin (Neo-Assyrian cuneiform: or , meaning "Shamash has established the name"), was king of Babylon as a vassal of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 668 BC to his death in 648. Born into the Assyrian royal family, Shamash-shum-ukin was the son of the Neo-Assyrian king Esarhaddon and the elder brother of Esarhaddon's successor Ashurbanipal. Despite being the elder son, Shamash-shum-ukin was for unknown reasons bypassed as heir to Assyria. His designation as heir to Babylonia was likely devised by Esarhaddon as a means to counteract future rivalry and jealousy between the brothers. Although Esarhaddon specified that Shamash-shum-ukin was to swear an oath of allegiance to Ashurbanipal, the clear primary heir, Shamash-shum-ukin was also referred to as Ashurbanipal's "equal brother" and Ashurbanipal was to stay out of his affairs. This part of the succession plans were not upheld by Ashurbanipal after Esarhaddon's death; Shamash-shum-ukin only acceded to the Babylonian throne ...
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Shamash
Utu (dUD "Sun"), also known under the Akkadian name Shamash, ''šmš'', syc, ܫܡܫܐ ''šemša'', he, שֶׁמֶשׁ ''šemeš'', ar, شمس ''šams'', Ashurian Aramaic: 𐣴𐣬𐣴 ''š'meš(ā)'' was the ancient Mesopotamian sun god. He was believed to see everything that happened in the world every day, and was therefore responsible for justice and protection of travelers. As a divine judge, he could be associated with the underworld. Additionally, he could serve as the god of divination, typically alongside the weather god Adad. While he was universally regarded as one of the primary gods, he was particularly venerated in Sippar and Larsa. The moon god Nanna (Sin) and his wife Ningal were regarded as his parents, while his twin sister was Inanna (Ishtar). Occasionally other goddesses, such as Manzat and Pinikir, could be regarded as his sisters too. The dawn goddess Aya (Sherida) was his wife, and multiple texts describe their daily reunions taking place on a mount ...
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Takpirtu
Takpirtu or Takpertu, inscribed ''tak-pir-tú'' and as a gloss to the term ''šu-gur-gur-meš'', and literally meaning “wiping,” from ''kupurru'', “to wipe, rub,” or more generally ““to perform a wiping rite,” were Mesopotamian purification rituals whose oldest attestations go back to the Old Babylonian period. It was an integral part of the Bīt rimki(''House of Ablution'') and Bīt salā’ mê(''house of water sprinkling'') rituals and may have been a cleansing rite in its own right as it is listed separately in the Exorcists Manual, perhaps in the form of ''tak-pir-tú nussētiq'', burnt offerings. The ritual Its earliest appearance seems to have been at Mari. Middle Babylonian attestation comes in the form of two references to the supply of grain or flour for the ceremony in temple administrative tablets from Kassite Nippur. In later neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian periods it was used for the spiritual cleansing of a field or a building, especially in the te ...
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Namburbi
The NAM-BÚR-BI are magical texts which take the form of incantations (Akkadian: ''namburbȗ''). They were named for a series of prophylactic Babylonian and Assyrian rituals to avert inauspicious portents before they took on tangible form. At the core of these rituals was an appeal by the subject of the sinister omen to the divine judicial court to obtain a change to his impending fate. From the corpus of Babylonian-Assyrian religious texts that has survived, there are approximately one hundred and forty texts, many preserved in several copies, to which this label may be applied. The apotropaic ritual The Sumerian rubric, NAM-BÚR-BI, which devolved from the broader class of counter-rituals, literally means “(ritual for) undoing of it (i.e of the portended evil)” or “apotropaeon," where the Sumerian possessive suffix BI was originally a reference to a preceding omen apodosis. The impending catastrophe identified in the apodosis was to be averted by the implementation of a ...
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