Volume 1

The devils and evil spirits of Babylonia : being Babylonian and Assyrian incantations against the demons, ghouls, vampires, hobgoblins, ghosts, and kindred evil spirits, which attack mankind / Tr. from the original cuneiform texts, with transliterations, vocabulary, notes, etc. by R. Campbell Thompson.

  • Thompson, R. Campbell (Reginald Campbell), 1876-1941.
Date:
1903-1904
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The devils and evil spirits of Babylonia : being Babylonian and Assyrian incantations against the demons, ghouls, vampires, hobgoblins, ghosts, and kindred evil spirits, which attack mankind / Tr. from the original cuneiform texts, with transliterations, vocabulary, notes, etc. by R. Campbell Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    texts in the reign of Assurbanipal represented sub- stantially the readings of the primitive documents. We are, in short, justified in assuming that we have in our hands at the present time tolerably accurate copies of the exorcisms and spells which the Sumerian and his Babylonian successor employed, some six or seven thousand years ago, to avert the attacks of devils, and to ward off malign influences of every kind. The first to make known to the world the character of the Evil Spirit Texts was the late General H. C. Rawlinson, Bart., G.C.B., who published in the Fourth Volume of the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia, London, 1875, as much of the text of the Fifth and Sixteenth Tablets as had then been identified. During the period of the preparation of the seventy plates which form the Fourth Volume printed copies of many of them were supplied to M. Francois Lenormant, and to various other scholars, and M. Lenormant issued some months before the appearance of the British Museum publication his La Magie chez les Chaldeennes et les Origines Accadiennes, in which he gave renderings of several of the texts relating to Evil Spirits. In the year 1887 Professor Sayce, in his Hibbert Lectures, gave English translations of the greater number of the texts with which M. Lenormant had already dealt, as well as of others. The translations, however, of both these scholars were necessarily incomplete, for the simple reason that only a portion of the available