What Maqlu Reveals About Accusation Without a Trial

Maqlu is unusual among ancient magical corpora for how completely it survives, reconstructed from dozens of cuneiform tablets and fragments found across Assyria and Babylonia, most from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, which let Tzvi Abusch and earlier scholars assemble something close to a full working text rather than scattered fragments. What it reveals is a legal register laid over a religious one: the incantations repeatedly use courtroom language, accusing the witch before the gods Shamash and Gilgamesh as judges of the underworld and the living alike, because Mesopotamian law had no mechanism for prosecuting an unidentified sorcerer, so the wronged party turned to ritual rather than to a court.

Scholars debate how literally to read the witch as a real person the client suspected versus a generic category the rite existed to cover regardless of any actual accusation, since surviving instructions never name a target and some editions suggest the ambiguity was deliberate, protecting the rite's user from a countercharge of slander while still delivering psychological and social relief. The series also embeds fire itself as a moral agent, since burning both destroys evidence and, in Mesopotamian thought, purifies what it consumes.