About the Project

Akkadian Ritual Texts is the first volume of an anticipated two-volume publication that highlights the performance and practice of ritual in ancient Mesopotamia as documented by clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing. The texts to be included in Akkadian Ritual Texts constitute some of the oldest known ritual texts in the world. They come from a more than two-thousand-year span of history (ca. 2350–200 BCE), extending from the earliest-known Akkadian ritual text, found at the Early Bronze Age site of Ebla (Tell Mardikh) in western Syria, to texts that were written in the Hellenistic period (ca. 323–31 BCE), after Alexander the Great conquered Babylon. The texts range in length from a 22-line ritual for a crying baby to the 388-line ritual for the New Year’s Festival.

Thematically, the texts address a wide range of events and situations that called for divine support including the completion of a proper sacrifice, banqueting in the temples, the installation of the king, the repair of a kettledrum, the care of the deceased, and protection against the evil eye. Daily, monthly, and annual rituals, as well as non-calendrical rituals, are included. Some of these rituals capture practices that would have occurred throughout Mesopotamian history; others—such as the six-month tabulation of rituals in the city of Emar (Tell Meskene, Syria) or the god Marduk’s tour by boat of neighboring towns farther south in the vicinity of Babylon—provide more localized insights into ritual performance. Texts offer witness to the beliefs and cultural practices of Mesopotamia; they also give additional color to many of the ritual practices known from the Bible (e.g., the scapegoat ritual of Leviticus 16, which has been compared to Akkadian substitution rituals). This grant provides the funding to complete the manuscript for all of the ritual texts in the first volume. The second volume, to be completed at a later date, would be comprised of non-ritual texts that offer insight into ritual practice.

This publication is designed to make texts accessible to a broad range of scholars. Each ritual text edition includes an introduction to the historical significance of the text and ritual, while a subsequent discussion of the materiality of the tablets invites readers to think about texts as products of writing (not just records of or prescriptions for ritual performance), and descriptions of the ritual performances highlight various theories from the field of Ritual Studies. Transliterations and translations will appear on facing pages to facilitate easy comparison. Images of many tablets will be included, and references to museum numbers for tablets will be prominently featured. Moreover, each transliteration/translation will be preceded by notes on the period of writing (dialect and script) to help those with basic familiarity of Akkadian read tablets and transliterations. Appendices provide new and additional tools for the study of Akkadian ritual texts, including a brief introduction to the grammar of ritual texts. 

A core methodology of the project can be seen in its commitment to publishing single manuscripts of each ritual text. Some rituals are known from multiple texts, and in some cases these texts can be found across multiple sites. Often, a single type of ritual performance (e.g., the repair of a kettledrum) is known through a compiled translation from multiple manuscripts, and these manuscripts may diverge in their coverage of and vision for ritual performance. The richness of the corpus of Akkadian ritual texts is often obscured by publishing practices, where tablets with parallel writings are published as a single text with multiple “manuscripts.” This practice, while providing an important bird’s eye view of various rituals, obscures the materiality of the tablets and the various breaks and lacunae that exist; it also can minimize the possible significance of any deviations between manuscripts. To address this methodological challenge, we have decided to feature, wherever pertinent, a single manuscript. This will allow readers to move more easily between photographs/drawings of the texts and the transliteration / translation; it will also encourage comparison with other manuscripts and further research on the practice of ritual textualization. 

Ritual texts included in Volume 1 (Akkadian Ritual Texts) cover 2,000 years of history and were recovered from sites across modern-day Iraq and Syria. The working Table of Contents for Volume 1 compiles 64 texts, with a total estimated 5,000 lines of cuneiform. In addition to transliterations and translations of the rituals, the final volume will include extended scholarly discussion in the form of introductions to the individual ritual texts, thematic chapters, and the overall volume. The primary output of the larger project will be the two-volume series Ritual and Ritual Performance in Akkadian Texts (Volume 1: Akkadian Ritual Texts and Volume 2: Akkadian Texts Pertaining to Ritual Performance), to be published with SBL Press in their Writings from the Ancient World series. 

Additionally, we anticipate several additional outputs from the project, including: the transferal of all transliterations and translations to the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc). Oracc provides access to cuneiform texts through rich annotation and open licensing of transliterations and translations. The website is regularly used by a wide-ranging audience to access cuneiform materials (see attached letter in the appendices for statistics). Other short articles or notes will be published in scholarly journals as a consequence of working closely with the cuneiform evidence (see, e.g., Pongratz-Leisten and Knott 2021 for a published article on one of the rituals).