āšipu

Definition

The āšipu was the Mesopotamian magician-exorcist, one of the main scholarly professions of cuneiform learning. The others were the ṭupšarru (scribe-scholar), the bārû (extispicy-diviner, who read entrails), the kalû (lamentation-priest), and the asû (physician). The āšipu specialised in protective ritual, exorcism, and ritual cure. The core texts of the trade were the diagnostic-medical series sa.gig and the physiognomic series Alamdimmû, and its authority came from the gods Ea and Asalluḫi, who was identified with Marduk.

In Tradition

In Assyriological scholarship, the āšipu is treated as the working ritualist of the Mesopotamian divinatory system. Rochberg notes that the āšipu's authority "stemmed from the gods" and turned on rituals and incantations done for particular deities. Koch-Westenholz observes that unprovoked omens — signs that simply appear, unasked — are "often said to belong to the field of the āšipu," and that late-Uruk exorcists often doubled as scribes of Enūma Anu Enlil or came from priestly families such as the Ekur-zakir lineage.

In Practice

When you work with Babylonian primary sources, think of the āšipu as the ritual specialist who partnered the ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil, the scholar who read the omens themselves. When a celestial omen's outcome predicted danger to the king or the land, the āšipu carried out the matching namburbî — the "loosing-ritual" — to deflect the verdict: choosing the offended deity from the omen-source, preparing the prescribed offerings, and reciting the protective formulae on the prescribed day. The āšipu was distinct from the kalû, the lamentation-priest who handled the cultic soothing of angry gods, and from the bārû, the extispicy-diviner who consulted entrails for omens that had been deliberately asked for. At late Uruk, and within the Sargonid scholar-corpus, the āšipu and ṭupšarru roles often sat in the same person, trained across both bodies of knowledge — and that partnership is the working shape of state-level Mesopotamian divination.

Historical Origin

The āšipu is attested across Mesopotamian institutional history, from the Old Babylonian period into the Late Babylonian and Hellenistic periods. The Ekur-zakir scribal-priestly lineage at late Uruk (4th-3rd century BCE) preserves the combined āšipu and ṭupšar-EAE practice. Modern critical treatments include Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing (2004); Koch-Westenholz, Mesopotamian Astrology (1995); and Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings (SAA 8, 1992).

Further Reading

• Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture
• Ulla Koch-Westenholz, Mesopotamian Astrology
• Hermann Hunger, Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings (SAA 8)