News from the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals Project (CMAwR)
This year two volumes of Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft lore have appeared:
- Tzvi Abusch, The Magical Ceremony Maqlû (Ancient Magic and Divination 10), Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2016.
- Tzvi Abusch – Daniel Schwemer – Mikko Luukko – Greta Van Buylaere, Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals, vol. 2 (Ancient Magic and Divination 8/2), Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2016.
Respecting Brill’s moving wall, all the texts edited in these volumes will eventually be presented online within the framework of Oracc.
At present, CMAwRo (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cmawro/corpus) comprises the texts edited in Tzvi Abusch - Daniel Schwemer, Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals, vol. 1 (Ancient Magic and Divination 8/1), Leiden - Boston: Brill, 2011. A pdf-file with corrections and additions to this volume can be found at: http://www.cmawro.altorientalistik.uni-wuerzburg.de/cmawr_corrections/. On this page you can also consult a list of additional manuscripts to previously edited texts. The addenda to texts from vol. 1 are being integrated online at Oracc’s CMAwRo.
In 2017, the texts of vol. 2 and their addenda will become available in the same place. The additional manuscripts to volumes 1 and 2 will be included in the final volume of Anti-witchcraft Rituals (CMAwR 3; AMD 8/3) that we are currently working on. It will be published in 2019.
At the moment, the Critical Catalogue of Mesopotamian Anti-witchcraft Rituals (CCMAwR; http://www.ccmawr.altorientalistik.uni-wuerzburg.de/ccmawr/index.php) encompasses information on the tablets published in CMAwR vol. 1 and 2 and in Tzvi Abusch’s Maqlû. Especially worth noting is the recent online prepublication of Daniel Schwemer’s hand-copies of most of the Maqlû manuscripts as part of the Critical Catalogue.
General information on Mesopotamian witchcraft, including information on the use of CMAwRo and the Bibliography of Mesopotamian Magic, can be found at http://www.cmawro.altorientalistik.uni-wuerzburg.de/startseite/.
Acknowledgements
CCMAwR, CMAwRo, and CMAwR, vol. 2, were created as part of the DFG-funded project Corpus babylonischer Rituale und Beschwörungen gegen Schadenzauber: Edition, lexikalische Erschließung, historische und literarische Analyse, directed by Daniel Schwemer at the University of Würzburg.