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. Volume I

R. Campbell Thompson

Description

Volume I of “The Devils And Evil Spirits Of Babylonia”, a 1903 work by Reginald C. Thompson that looks at the religion and spiritual beliefs of Babylon, the powerful kingdom in ancient Mesopotamia that existed from the 18th to 6th centuries BC. It includes English translations of various 'Evil Spirit Texts', which form large and important sections of the native literature concerning Babylonian and Assyrian demonology. Reginald Campbell Thompson (1876 – 1941) was a British archaeologist, cuneiformist, and assyriologist. He is famous for his work on excavations at Nineveh, Ur, Nebo and Carchemish. Other notable works by this author include: “The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia” (1903–1904), “Semitic Magic: its Origins and Development” (1908), and “Archaeologia, Vol LXX” (1921). Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Sujets

• Religion
• Satanism
• Demonology

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781447482642
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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.
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL CUNEIFORM TEXTS, WITH TRANSLITERATIONS, VOCABULARY, NOTES, ETC.
BY
R. CAMPBELL THOMPSON, M.A.
ASSISTANT IN THE DEPARTMENT OF EGYPTIAN AND ASSYRIAN ANTIQUITIES, BRITISH MUSEUM.
VOL. I.
EVIL SPIRITS .
1903.
Copyright 2018 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Reginald Campbell Thompson
Reginald Campbell Thompson was born on 21 st August 1876, in Kensington, London, England. He is best known as a British archaeologist, but also as an assyriologist - which involves the study of ancient Mesopotamia and of its related cultures, and a cuneiformist - the study of cuneiform the earliest system of writing, utilised in Mesopotamia.
Campbell Thompson spent his early education at Colet Court (an independent preparatory school in London), St. Paul s School (an independent boys secondary) and Caius College, at Cambridge University. During his degree, the young man read Oriental Languages including Hebrew and Aramaic. This knowledge of ancient languages served Thompson in good stead in his later career; serving as a Captain in the Intelligence Service in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq, Kuwait and Syria) with the British army. Mesopotamia had fallen into British hands in 1918, and the Trustees of the British Museum applied to have an archaeologist attached to the Army in the field to protect antiquities from injury.
As a Captain in the Intelligence Service serving in the region and a former assistant in the British Museum, Campbell Thompson was commissioned to start the work. After a short investigation of Ur (an important Sumerian city-state, and home of the ruins of the Ziggurat of Ur ), Thompson dug at Shahrain - argued to be the oldest city in the world, and also at Tell al-Lahm, an archaeological site in Dhi Qar Province, Iraq. He also investigated Nebo, Carchemish and Nineveh, finding a bronze head of an Akkadian king at the latter site. The writer Agatha Christie was invited by Campbell Thompson, along with her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, to the excavation of the Nineveh site (which took place in 1931). As a result of the kind invitation, she dedicated her story Lord Edgware Dies (1933) to Dr. and Mrs. Campbell Thompson.
Following the end of the First World War, Thompson held a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. He taught at the university and continued his archaeological career. The celebrated scholar also published several academic studies, among them The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia (1903-4), Semitic Magic: Its Origins and Development (1908) and The epic of Gilgamish (translation, 1930). Reginald Campbell Thompson died on 23 rd May 1941, aged sixty-four, while serving in the Home Guard River Patrol on the River Thames.
Luzac s
Semitic Tert and Translation Series.
Vol. XIV.
Luzac s Semitic Tert and Translation Series.

VOL. I: T HE L AUGHABLE S TORIES COLLECTED BY B AR -H EBR US . Syriac Text and Translation, with Notes, Introduction, etc. By E. A. Wallis Budge. 21 s . net.
VOL. II: T HE L ETTERS AND I NSCRIPTIONS OF AMMURABI , K ING OF B ABYLON , ABOUT B.C . 2200; to which are added a series of letters of other kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon. Vol. I: Introduction and Babylonian Texts. By L. W. King. 21 s . net.
VOL. III: T HE L ETTERS AND I NSCRIPTIONS OF AMMURABI , K ING OF B ABYLON , ABOUT B.C . 2200; to which are added a series of letters of other kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon. Vol. II: Babylonian Texts, continued. By L. W. King. 18 s . net.
VOL. IV: T HE H ISTORY OF THE V IRGIN M ARY, AND THE H ISTORY OF THE L IKENESS OF C HRIST . Vol. I: Syriac Texts. By E. A. Wallis Budge. 12 s . 6 d . net.
VOL. V: T HE H ISTORY OF THE V IRGIN M ARY, AND THE H ISTORY OF THE L IKENESS OF C HRIST . Vol. II: English Translations. By E. A. Wallis Budge. 10 s . 6 d . net.
VOL. VI: T HE R EPORTS OF THE M AGICIANS AND A STROLOGERS OF N INEVEH AND B ABYLON . Vol. I: Cuneiform Texts. By R. C. Thompson. 12 s . 6 d . net.
VOL. VII: T HE R EPORTS OF THE M AGICIANS AND A STROLOGERS OF N INEVEH AND B ABYLON . Vol. II: English Translation and Transliteration. By R. C. Thompson. 12 s . 6 d . net.
VOL. VIII: T HE L ETTERS AND I NSCRIPTIONS OF AMMURABI , K ING OF B ABYLON, ABOUT B.C . 2200; to which are added a series of letters of other kings of the First Dynasty of Babylon. Vol. III: English Translations, with Transliterations, Commentary, Vocabularies, Introduction, etc. By L. W. King. 18 s . net.
VOL. IX: T HE H ISTORIES OF R ABBAN H ORMIZD THE P ERSIAN AND R ABBAN B AR - I DT . Vol. I: Syriac Texts. By E. A. Wallis Budge. 12 s . 6 d . net.
VOL. X: T HE H ISTORIES OF R ABBAN H ORMIZD THE P ERSIAN AND R ABBAN B AR - I DT . Vol. II: English Translations. By E. A. Wallis Budge. 12 s . 6 d . net.
VOL. XI: T HE H ISTORIES OF R ABBAN H ORMIZD THE P ERSIAN AND R ABBAN B AR - I DT . Vol. III: English Translation of the Metrical Life of Rabban Hormizd by Sergius of dh rb j n. By E. A. Wallis Budge. 10 s . 6 d . net.
VOL. XII: T HE S EVEN T ABLETS OF C REATION . Vol. I: English Translations, Transliterations, Glossary, Introduction, etc. By L. W. King. 18 s . net.
VOL. XIII: T HE S EVEN T ABLETS OF C REATION . Vol. II: Supplementary [Babylonian and Assyrian] Texts. By L. W. King. 15 s . net.
VOL. XIV: T HE D EVILS AND E VIL S PIRITS OF B ABYLONIA , transliterated and translated, with Introduction. Vol. I. By R. C. Thompson. ( In the Press .)
VOL. XV: T HE D EVILS AND E VIL S PIRITS OF B ABYLONIA , transliterated and translated, with Vocabulary, Indexes, and an Introduction. Vol. II. By R. C. Thompson. ( In the Press .)
VOL. XVI: T HE H ISTORY OF B ARAL M AND Y W S F . The Ethiopic Version, translated from the Arabic by Enb m, for the Ethiopian king Gal wd w s, A.D . 1553. Vol. I, Part 1: the Ethiopic Text. By E. A. Wallis Budge. ( In the Press .)
VOL. XVII: T HE H ISTORY OF B ARAL M AND Y W S F . The Ethiopic Version, translated from the Arabic by Enb m, for the Ethiopian king Gal wd w s, A.D . 1553. Vol. I, Part 2: the Ethiopic Text, continued. By E. A. Wallis Budge.( In the Press .)
VOL. XVIII: T HE H ISTORY OF B ARAL M AND Y W S F . The Ethiopic Version, translated from the Arabic by Enb m, for the Ethiopic king Gal wd w s, A.D . 1553. Vol. II: English Translation, Introduction, etc. By E. A. Wallis Budge.( In the Press .)
VOL. XIX: A C ONTRIBUTION TO B ABYLONIAN H ISTORY , being a series of Babylonian Historical Texts with English Translations. By L. W. King. ( In the Press .)
THE DEVILS AND EVIL SPIRITS OF BABYLONIA.
PLATE I.

Part of the tablet supposed to contain a mention of the Babylonian Garden of Eden (K. 111).
TO MY FATHER , REGINALD E. THOMPSON, M.D .
Preface.

T HE object of the two volumes which form the present work is to supply the student of Assyrian Demonology with English transliterations and translations, with the necessary notes, etc., of the documents printed in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Parts of Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, etc ., which have been recently issued by the Trustees of the British Museum. An examination of these two Parts will show that they contain copies of all the Tablets belonging to the Series U TUKKI L IMN TI , A AKKI M AR TI , and I I , i.e., Evil Spirits, Fever Sickness, and Headache, which have now been identified, together with the texts of a considerable number of compositions of a similar character.
These collections of Evil Spirit Texts form large and important sections of the native literature concerning Babylonian and Assyrian Demonology, and there is reason to believe that the material now published represents about one-half of that belonging to the three Series mentioned above which was known to the scribes of A urbanipal. Of the condition of the archetypes in pre-Babylonian times we have no information whatever, but there is no reason to doubt that the versions which were adopted as standard texts in the reign of A urbanipal represented substantially 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. Fran ois 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 Chald ennes 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 material had been published by the late Sir Henry Rawlinson, who made no pretence of publishing in his immortal Corpus of cuneiform texts more than specimens of the various classes of literature which were known to the Babyl