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Zisurrû
Zisurrû, meaning “ magic circle drawn with flour,” and inscribed ZÌ-SUR-RA''-a'', was an ancient Mesopotamian means of delineating, purifying and protecting from evil by the enclosing of a ritual space in a circle of flour. It involved ritual drawings with a variety of powdered cereals to counter different threats and is accompanied by the gloss: SAG.BA SAG.BA, Akkadian: ''māmīt māmīt'', the curse from a broken oath, in '' The Exorcists Manual'', where it refers to a specific ritual on two tablets the first of which is extant. The ritual The ''zisurrû'', a word ultimately derived from Sumerian, was used as a defensive measure and drawn on the ground around prophylactic figurines as part of a Babylonian ritual to thwart evil spirits, around a patient's bed to protect against ghosts or demons in much the same manner in which bowls thwart demons and curses, or as a component of another elaborate ritual. It was a component in the ''Ritual and Incantation-Prayer against Ghos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magic Circle
A magic circle is a circle of space marked out by practitioners of some branches of ritual magic, which they generally believe will contain energy and form a sacred space, or will provide them a form of magical protection, or both. It may be marked physically, drawn in a material like salt, flour, or chalk, or merely visualised. Techniques Traditionally, circles are believed by ritual magicians to form a protective barrier between themselves and what they summon. One text known as the Heptameron says of the circle, 'But because the greatest power is attributed to the circles; (for they are certain fortresses to defend the operators safe from the evil spirits); in the first place we will treat concerning the composition of a circle.' Moreover, as magician and historian Jake Stratton-Kent writes, 'In short a circle is not an obsolete symbol of a superstitious fear of spirits, but an intentionally created ritual space for various purposes. It is not always required for all kinds of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flour
Flour is a powder made by grinding raw grains, roots, beans, nuts, or seeds. Flours are used to make many different foods. Cereal flour, particularly wheat flour, is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cultures. Corn flour has been important in Mesoamerican cuisine since ancient times and remains a staple in the Americas. Rye flour is a constituent of bread in central and northern Europe. Cereal flour consists either of the endosperm, germ, and bran together (whole-grain flour) or of the endosperm alone (refined flour). ''Meal'' is either differentiable from flour as having slightly coarser particle size (degree of comminution) or is synonymous with flour; the word is used both ways. For example, the word '' cornmeal'' often connotes a grittier texture whereas corn flour connotes fine powder, although there is no codified dividing line. The CDC has cautioned not to eat raw flour doughs or batters. Raw flour can contain bacteria lik ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 Assyrian people, Assyrians and Babylonians) originating from different areas in present-day Iraq, dominated Mesopotamia from the beginning of recorded history, 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 aroun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gloss (annotation)
A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different. A collection of glosses is a '' glossary.'' A collection of medieval legal glosses, made by glossators, is called an ''apparatus''. The compilation of glosses into glossaries was the beginning of lexicography, and the glossaries so compiled were in fact the first dictionaries. In modern times a glossary, as opposed to a dictionary, is typically found in a text as an appendix of specialized terms that the typical reader may find unfamiliar. Also, satirical explanations of words and events are called glosses. The German Romantic movement used the expression of gloss for poems commenting on a given other piece of poetry, often in the Spanish style. Glosses were originally notes made in the margin or between the lines of a text in a classical language; the meaning of a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Akkadian Language
Akkadian (, Akkadian: )John Huehnergard & Christopher Woods, "Akkadian and Eblaite", ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages''. Ed. Roger D. Woodard (2004, Cambridge) Pages 218-280 is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa and Babylonia) from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement by Akkadian-influenced Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BC. It is the earliest documented Semitic language. It used the cuneiform script, which was originally used to write the unrelated, and also extinct, Sumerian (which is a language isolate). Akkadian is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC). The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a ''Sprachbund''. Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid 3rd-mil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Esagil-kin-apli
Esagil-kin-apli was the ''ummânū'', or chief scholar, of Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina, 1067–1046 BCE, as he appears on the Uruk ''List of Sages and Scholars'' (165 BCE)W 20030,7 the Seleucid ''List of Sages and Scholars'', obverse line 16, recovered from Anu’s Bīt Rēš temple during the 1959/60 excavation. listed beside him and is best known for his Diagnostic Handbook, ''Sakikkū'' (SA.GIG), a medical treatise which uses symptoms to ascertain etiology, frequently supernatural, and prognosis, which became the received text during the first millennium. He was a “prominent citizen of Borsippa” from a learned family as he was referred to as the “son” of Assalluḫi-mansum, the ''apkallu'', or sage, of Hammurabi’s time, c. 1792–1750 BCE. Works The ''Exorcists Manual'' The ''Exorcists Manual''KAR 44 aCDLI(ref. P369026) rev 5-20. is sometimes described as a “vade mecum” and is a compendium of the works all those aspiring to master the ''āšipūtu'', or craft ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sumerian Language
Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer. It is one of the oldest attested languages, dating back to at least 3000 BC. It is accepted to be a local language isolate and to have been spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, in the area that is modern-day Iraq. Akkadian, a Semitic language, gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language in the area around 2000 BC (the exact date is debated), but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century AD. Thereafter it seems to have fallen into obscurity until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets that had been left by its speakers. Stages The history of written Sumerian can be divided into several periods: *Archaic Sumerian – 31st–26th century BC *Old or Classical Sumerian – 26th–23rd century BC *Neo-Sumerian – 23rd– ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mîs-pî
Mîs-pî, inscribed KA-LUḪ.Ù.DA and meaning “washing of the mouth,” is an ancient Mesopotamian ritual and incantation series for the cultic induction or vivification of a newly manufactured divine idol. It involved around eleven stages: in the city, countryside and temple, the workshop, a procession to the river, then beside the river bank, a procession to the orchard, in reed huts and tents in the circle of the orchard, to the gate of the temple, the niche of the sanctuary and finally, at the quay of the ''Apsû'', accompanied by invocations to the nine great gods, the nine patron gods of craftsmen, and assorted astrological bodies. The ritual The extant corpus of tablets comprising ''mîs-pî'' consist of two ritual accounts, one late Babylonian and one earlier Assyrian, together with several Sumerian incantations to be recited at the various stages of the ritual, recovered from a wide distribution of find spots. These date from the eighth to the fifth centuries BC and are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maqlû
The Maqlû, “burning,” series is an Akkadian incantation text which concerns the performance of a rather lengthy anti-witchcraft, or ''kišpū'', ritual. In its mature form, probably composed in the early first millennium BC, it comprises eight tablets of nearly a hundred incantations and a ritual tablet, giving incipits and directions for the ceremony. This was performed over the course of a single night in the month of Abu (July/August) when the perambulations of the spirits to and from the netherworld made them especially vulnerable to its spells. It was the subject of a letter from the exorcist Nabû-nādin-šumi and the Assyrian king 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 .... It seems to have evolved from an earlier short-form with only ten incantations to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Šumma ālu
Šumma ālu ina mēlê šakin is the title for a series of a collected number of cuneiform texts of ancient Mesopotamia amounting to one hundred and twenty clay tablets. The title translates as ''If a City is Situated on a Height'', and it lists over ten thousand omens An omen (also called ''portent'') is a phenomenon that is believed to foretell the future, often signifying the advent of change. It was commonly believed in ancient times, and still believed by some today, that omens bring divine messages fr .... Many of the omens listed in this group begin with the words "Šumma ina āli ma'du (kind of people)," as in, "if there are too many kinds of people," and the omens in this group then proceed with a description of misfortune or negative occurrence. Similarities are recognised within the nature of the series and in other types of works that are concerned with hemerology and menology.Erlend Gehlken (editor) Weather Omens of Enūma Anu Enlil: Thunderstorms, Wind and R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kettledrum Rituals
Timpani (; ) or kettledrums (also informally called timps) are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum categorised as a hemispherical drum, they consist of a membrane called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionally made of copper. Thus timpani are an example of kettle drums, also known as vessel drums and semispherical drums, whose body is similar to a section of a sphere whose cut conforms the head. Most modern timpani are ''pedal timpani'' and can be tuned quickly and accurately to specific pitches by skilled players through the use of a movable foot-pedal. They are played by striking the head with a specialized drum stick called a ''timpani stick'' or ''timpani mallet''. Timpani evolved from military drums to become a staple of the classical orchestra by the last third of the 18th century. Today, they are used in many types of ensembles, including concert bands, marching bands, orchestras, and even in some rock bands. ''Timpani'' is an Italian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
