Reading akkadian PRayeRs & Hymns An Introduction

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READING AKKADIAN PRAYERS AND HYMNS: AN INTRODUCTION
manner (IV 38ff.). In fact, people marveled at his renewed well-being and
praised the gods for it (IV 70–82). Although there is much more one might say
here, this one examples illustrates the importance in becoming familiar with and
keeping in mind the broader communal and social contexts as one interprets
ancient prayers.
As for the institutional perspective, all of the texts that have come down to
us were preserved in writing by a group of elite, literate members of ancient
Mesopotamian society, the scribes. Most of the documents that the above definition
of religion would identify as religious are not simple, workaday scribal texts
such as letters, account summaries, or receipts. Rather, they are complicated
texts that demonstrate linguistic sophistication, contain theological erudition,
and would have required ritual expertise for their proper execution (such as the
performance of an extispicy, the making of figurines, the setting up of altars,
etc.). The scribes/ritual experts that composed and used these texts were likely
therefore not normal scribes but masters of the scribal craft (Akk. ummânū),
well-educated in the traditional cuneiform curricula. Most of them would have
worked for one or both of the great institutions of their day: the royal palace
and the temples. It follows that the composition and preservation of much of the
material treated in this volume was due to the patronage/support of the king
and/or the temples. Furthermore, judging from the content of the prayers and
hymns, their most common kinds of findspots (e.g., palaces and temples), and
clues from texts such as royal letters, the king was the most important, though
certainly not the exclusive, user/beneficiary of these prayers and hymns.
The three most important institutional groups of scholars/ritual experts
with regard to the Akkadian prayers and hymns in this volume are the diviners
(bārû), the exorcists (āšipū), and the cult-singers (kalû). Although they were
working in earlier times (see, e.g., the two OB prayers of the diviner in this volume),
our best evidence for these three professions comes from first millennium
tablets. From such texts we learn that these men—they were all men to the best
of our knowledge—served the king and temples via their learned corpora, including
many prayers that they believed derived from the gods themselves. 56
Thus, from an institutional rather than formal textual perspective many ritualprayers
could also be considered divine speech because the gods had delivered
them to the institutional experts, who in turn performed them for and with the
supplicant—adapting them as necessary. 57 In order to contextualize specific
56 See Alan Lenzi, Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical
Israel (SAAS 19; Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2008).
57 Understanding an ancient Mesopotamian prayer as both human (primarily) and divine speech
is akin to a theological understanding of Christianity’s most well-known prayer. The Lord’s
Prayer was attributed to Jesus, who is traditionally identified as divinity incarnate; was recorded
by a biblical author in Scripture, which is traditionally believed to be divinely-inspired; and is
prayed by contemporary Christians on their own behalf. For a similar issue in contemporary
Maya rituals, see William F. Hanks, “Exorcism and the Description of Participant Roles,” in Natural
Histories of Discourse (ed. Michael Silvertein and Greg Urban; Chicago: University of Chicago