Reading akkadian PRayeRs & Hymns An Introduction

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READING AKKADIAN PRAYERS AND HYMNS: AN INTRODUCTION
tions of such communication as well as the actual texts that contain these communications
are well-attested. Many of these powerful beings could be both benevolent
and malevolent toward a human. Enlil, for example, could be gracious
or vindicative; family ghosts could be implored for help or ritually expelled to
the netherworld; the apkallū, the sages of Ea, could assist or afflict humans; Pazuzu
was to be feared in his own right as a demon but could also be utilized for
apotropaic purposes against Lamashtu. 25 In order for a definition of prayer to be
useful in Mesopotamia, it needs to specify that “benevolent supra-human being,”
for the present purposes, refers to any supra-human being to whom a text directs
itself and about whom the text assumes, implicitly or explicitly, sufficient power
to aid the speaker. Because the text expresses hope for a beneficent response,
one might find words of deference or honor addressed to the supra-human
power at the beginning of the communication (see below, for example, on the
structure of the incantation-prayer). This text-centered orientation makes speculation
about an actual speaker’s subjective intention or emotion irrelevant. The
perspective and warrants of the text are all that is accessible to modern readers.
Because the present definition defines prayer as something directed to benevolent
supra-human powers, texts that communicate concerns or desires to
malevolent demons, ghosts, witches, illnesses, and other powerful entities are
not prayers. The same applies to texts that address themselves to mere humans
or no one in particular, benevolent or otherwise. These texts use forms of ritual
speech, to be sure (see below); but an investigation of the broader domain of
“Mesopotamian ritual speech” goes beyond the present purpose, which is focused
on the narrower categories of Mesopotamian prayer and the even more
focused category of hymn or praise. Other forms of ritual speech will be brought
into the present discussion only in so far as they help delineate the conceptual
parameters of prayer and praise by way of contrast (see fig. 1).
Second, does the descriptor “communication via words” in the initial definition
do justice to the Mesopotamian data about prayer and praise? Despite the prominence
and therefore usefulness that verbal communication has for the present
purpose (this book does after all deal with language), the answer is negative.
“Communication via words” does Mesopotamian prayer justice no more than it
does justice to the contemporary Muslim practice of ṣalāt ( ). Throughout the
ancient Near East, texts that contain or describe prayers and hymns—recognized
as such by the initial definition given above—often record or prescribe various
bodily gestures. These may include prostration, raising one’s hands, kneeling,
lifting up one’s head, facing oneself toward a temple, etc. as well as ritual acts
25 For the malevolent and benevolent character of some of these in Mesopotamian tradition from
an iconographic perspective, see Anthony Green, “Beneficent Spirits and Malevolent Demons:
The Iconography of Good and Evil in Ancient Assyria and Babylonia,” in Popular Religion (ed.
Hans G. Kippenberg; Visible Religion: Annual for Religious Iconography 3; Leiden: Brill, 1984),
80–105.