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In ancient Mesopotamia, the ašipu (also āšipu or mašmaššu) acted as

priests A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deity, deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in p ...

. They were scholars and practitioners of diagnosis and treatment in the Tigris-

Euphrates The Euphrates () is the longest and one of the most historically important rivers of Western Asia. Tigris–Euphrates river system, Together with the Tigris, it is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia ( ''the land between the rivers'') ...

valley of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) around

3200 BC The 32nd century BC was a century that lasted from the year 3200 BC to 3101 BC. Events * c. 3190–3170 BC? reign of King Double Falcon of Lower Egypt. There is a strong possibility that he appears on the Palermo stone, although half his name ...

Etymology

Sumerian Sumerian or Sumerians may refer to: *Sumer, an ancient civilization **Sumerian language **Sumerian art **Sumerian architecture **Sumerian literature **Cuneiform script, used in Sumerian writing *Sumerian Records, an American record label based in ...

and

Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to: * Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire * Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language * Akkadian literature, literature in this language * Akkadian cuneiform, early writing system * Akkadian myt ...

ritual and incantation texts were associated with one specific profession, the expert called in Akkadian ''āšipu'' or ''mašmaššu'', is translated as “exorcist". The cuneiform record formed the lore of their practice translating āšipūtu as “exorcistic lore” or, simply, “magic”. Schwemer explains that Babylonian tradition itself "considered this corpus of texts to be of great antiquity, ultimately authored by Enki-Ea himself, the god of wisdom and exorcism."Daniel Schwemer 2014 article: "Healing and Harming: Mesopotamian Magic" section "Mesopotamian magic: āšipūtu
› magic-witchcraft
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Expertise

Some have described ašipu as experts in white magic. At the time, ideas of science, religion and witchcraft were closely intertwined and formed a basis of ''ašiputu'', the practice used by ašipu to combat sorcery and to heal disease. The ašipu studied omens and symptoms to formulate a prediction of the future for a subject and then performed apotropaic rituals in an attempt to change unfavorable fate.

Roles and tasks

Ašipu directed medical treatment at the Assyrian court, where they predicted the course of the disease from signs observed on the patient's body and offered incantations and other magic as well as the remedies indicated by diagnosis. Ašipu visited sick people's houses and were tasked with predicting the patient's future (e.g. he will live or she will die) and also to fill in details about the symptoms that the patients may have disregarded or omitted. The purpose of the visit was to identify the divine sender of the illness based on the symptoms of a specific ailment. Ašipu also acted as advisers on risky, uncertain and difficult decisions. Ašiputu was unusual for that period in history because ašipu did not claim to foresee the future but rationally approached the construction of advice through a repeatable, consistent process of identifying important dimensions of the problem, considering alternatives and collecting data.

References

{{Reflist Mesopotamian priests