Ritual, Power, and the Power of Ritual in the Ancient Near East (ASOR)

Session at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR), 20–23 November 2024 and 19–22 November 2025, Boston

Organized by Céline Debourse & Elizabeth Knott

Workshop description

 Rituals are powerful tools that can make or break the socio-political status quo, and those who command ritual hold a special kind of sway over other people. But what does it mean to wield ritual as a socio-political tool? In this two-year session, we will explore who harnessed the power of ritual, how they did so, to what aims and ends, and how reliable these ritual strategies were. During the first year we will focus on ANE kingship and its rituals (“Ritual and Kingship in the Ancient Near East”), asking what royal ritual can teach us about the institution of kingship. In the second year, we will expand our outlook to understand how any ANE person or social group could use ritual to exert and subvert social or political power (“Power and Ritual in the Ancient Near East”). For both sessions, we welcome papers from archaeologists, art historians, and philologists.

The 2024 “Ritual and Kingship in the Ancient Near East” Session explores royal ceremonies, and the intrinsic links between ritual performance and kingship. Ernst Kantorowicz described the Medieval European king as having “in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic” (The King’s Two Bodies, 1957), and as one point of discussion we consider how ritual was a powerful tool for reconciling these two Bodies. Rituals were often exclusively designed for kings and kings participated in rituals as both performers and audience members. But what purposes did these ceremonies serve? What desired outcomes did they have, and how did they achieve those? What can these rituals tell us about the institution of kingship in different Ancient Near Eastern cultures? And what do they tell us about the individual who sat on the throne? In this session, we will explore royal ritual from different perspectives – through texts, ritual theories, aspects of materiality, and architecture.

The 2025 “Power and Ritual in the Ancient Near East” Session explores the socio-political power of ritual and how various ritual actors could tap into or subvert that power. A wide range of individuals and groups were involved in ritual performances. Rituals were often designed for kings, but they were not necessarily designed by kings. Who instructs who in ritual performance? And how do the presence and actions of various individuals and parties shape the experience of ritual? What traces of power plays can be found in the textual and material records? In this session, we will explore ritual from different perspectives – through texts, ritual theories, aspects of materiality, and architecture

Find the program for 2024 here and for 2025 here.

Who is it (good) for? Ritual texts and ritual performances (RAI 68)

Workshop at the 68e Rencontre assyriologique internationale, 17–20 July 2023, Leiden

Workshop description

Ritual performances have the capacity to reshape, leverage, or affirm structures and norms of established socio-political hierarchies. But whether written instructions for them reflect their actual performances remains open to debate. Without the opportunity to observe ancient Mesopotamian rituals, what can we say about their social dynamics on the basis of textual evidence alone?

This workshop pauses to reflect on decisions that led to the writing down of ritual texts. Who wrote them and for whom? Who was present in or absent from such texts? How did they represent performance and what kind of biases might they have introduced? Who benefited from written representation of performance? What other discourses might these texts have carried? In other words, who are the texts (good) for? 

Because Sumerian and Akkadian written tradition did not define ritual texts or their purpose, only a general sense of their form and function is current in modern scholarship. Most often the genre of “ritual texts” is defined as those that describe, or prescribe, a sequence of ritual actions, often in a durative verb construction in the second person. Although ritual texts give the impression of providing instructions for ritual performance, most do not include enough information to carry them out. Moreover, these texts could be copied and recopied over an extended period of time, so the preservation of a written tradition may or may not have corresponded to a continuity in ritual practice across time and space. 

Instead of viewing ritual texts as imperfect representations of ritual performance, this workshop considers other possible functions for them in ancient societies. In many cases, ritual texts were a product of elite scholarship and advanced literacy, mediating access to a very specific representation of ritual practice by and for the select few. The mere existence of these technical texts thereby contributed to this elite group’s cultural capital. A variety of experiences with and relationships to ritual texts can be approached through close examination of discourses used to record instructions for ritual performance (dromena) and ritual speech (legomena). Related textual production in other media as well, such as inscribed amuletic objects worn by both literate and illiterate users, may also be considered, for there the importance of writing itself encapsulated the symbolic value assigned to this advanced technical literacy.

From the prominent position of priests and scholars in the crafting and transmission of ritual texts, to the diversity of use and reception in their various forms among a wider population of users, this workshop examines the specifically textual nature of our evidence for Mesopotamian rituals and the place of these texts in ancient society.

Individual abstracts

• Evelyne Koubková (PhD candidate, Yale University): Rituals as Texts in Antiquity and Today: The Case of the Exorcist’s Manual

There are no Mesopotamian rituals we could directly study and so our perspective is always filtered through textual evidence. Unsurprisingly, when Assyriologists talk about rituals, they very often mean ritual texts, a broad category of technical texts describing or prescribing a ritual procedure. The collapsing of text and performance, however, dates back to Mesopotamian ritual specialists. In this process of representing rituals through texts, many aspects of the ritual event become obscured, intentionally or inadvertently.

The so-called Exorcist’s Manual, a catalog of text series relevant for the profession of the exorcist (āšipu), is a paramount example. Many, but not all, of its entries can be identified with known texts: ritual texts, incantation series, divinatory compendia, and more. Other entries, however, do not necessarily relate to a specific text but provide an important commentary on the exorcist’s profession. Analyzing the Manual’s structure and individual entries reveals its complex editorial history that changes our understanding of its contents. Its final textual form conceals the dynamic development of the exorcist’s profession and obscures the ideology of his self-presentation.

• Céline Debourse (Harvard University): New light on the Late Babylonian Kislīmu ritual text (BM 32206+)

BM 32206+ is a Late Babylonian text describing rituals performed primarily in the month Kislīmu. Based on paleographic features, the tablet can be securely dated to the Hellenistic period. However, when Çağirgan and Lambert first published the text, they claimed that its original composition dated back to as early as 800 BCE. Moreover, they pointed out that the “copy” with which we are dealing is pervaded by “textual corruption”, limiting our understanding of the text’s contents. Despite that poor understanding of the text, BM 32206+ is frequently cited and used in modern studies on Mesopotamian ritual.

In this paper, I will offer a critical rereading of BM 32206+ in order to reach a better understanding of its contents and context of creation. Based on philological and historical analyses, I claim that the ritual text’s origins can be firmly anchored in a Hellenistic setting. Placing it against this historical background also sheds more light on the question of “who it was (good) for”, as it exposes the text as part of a discourse that gives an unprecedented central role to Babylon’s priesthood (Late Babylonian priestly literature).

• Jon Beltz (PhD Candidate, Yale University): The Wearers and Creators of Inscribed Amulets in Ancient Mesopotamia

Mesopotamians wore a variety of small inscribed objects for protection or blessing, including stone amulets of several shapes (those with a projection on top pierced longwise for hanging, and those of a “flattened cylinder seal” shape), cylinder seals, and clay cylinders. The texts on these objects can be excerpts from large collections of incantations, stock incantations, or created from loose formulae with much room for variation. These incantations have received much attention in scholarship through the creation of critical editions and comparisons with well-known incantation compendia, but the usage of these texts as objects in the lived religion of Mesopotamia has received less attention. In this paper I will consider several amulets containing zi–pa₃ incantations that I am currently publishing and offer some preliminary thoughts on who used them and how. While very few of these objects come from controlled archaeological excavations—and therefore lack any archaeological context—they do provide some evidence for who used them and how they were created. Parsing out the different social players involved in the creation and usage of amulets is foundational to sketching the ways that such religious practices may have varied among members of society.

• Elizabeth Knott and Spencer Elliott (Ph.D Candidate, New York University): Parts and their Sum: Integrated Ritual Writing at Ugarit

Ritual texts from the site of Ugarit offer an intriguing dataset for the study of ritual writing and its purpose(s): Written in alphabetic cuneiform, they are similar to Akkadian ritual texts in their use of prescriptive verb forms, interest in actions and things being offered, and frequent calendrical orientation. Excavations at Ras Shamra / Ugarit were sufficiently well-documented to allow us to assign ritual texts to various buildings and, in some cases, specialists, offering the opportunity to think in more archaeologically-precise terms about the function of the tablets in society.

At the same time, however, many of the texts cannot be linked in a straightforward way to cultic activities; or, rather, the particulars of their link(s) to cultic activity are difficult to flesh out. Thus, the question “Who was it good for?” remains unresolved, and in many ways, understudied. In this paper, we explore one particularly baffling text: RS 24.643 – a composite ritual text with different elements, including a Hurrian hymn written in alphabetic cuneiform and several god lists that many think were used as an offering list. With respective interests in the use of the Hurrian language in Ugarit rituals (Spencer Elliott) and the function of god lists in administrative activities and theological beliefs (Elizabeth Knott), the two speakers will unpack the possible functions of this single text in Ugaritic ritual life and its interaction with different levels of society at Ugarit.

• Beatrice Baragli (Martin Buber Postdoctoral Fellow, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): To each his own Language: Explaining Linguistic Diversity in Ritual Texts and Incantations

Assyriologists nowadays have at their disposal an incredible amount of ritual texts and incantations stemming from different regions, periods, functions and specialists (āšipu, kalû, barû). Furthermore, these texts are written in different languages: Akkadian, Sumerian, Emesal or even in pseudo-languages better known as Abracadabra. Furthermore, each of these languages is usually associated with a certain specialist and thus with a certain textual genre: the kalû speaks or writes laments in Emesal, the āšipu incantations in Sumerian or Akkadian, the barû and the aṣû divinatory and medical texts almost exclusively in Akkadian. However, the roles are not always so clearly defined and extensive ritual texts like Bīt rimki, Mīs pî, and Udug ḫulu include incantations composed in different languages. The main research question of this paper is: why such linguistic diversity? Is this difference explainable by the textual transmission history only? Or can other reasons be found? Why maintain such diversity throughout the millennia? This talk will try to answer these questions using a broad range of ritual texts and incantation series mainly from the first millennium BCE. Here, the question “Who is a language good for?” will be explored in an interdisciplinary way, making use of language theories that highlight how different languages relate to each other in the same society and culture. This will also shed light on the performance, addressees, occasions, and audience of a ritual and explain why a certain ritual text or incantation is written in a specific language