Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Greta Van Buylaere , Mikko Luukko , Daniel Schwemer and Avigail Mertens-Wagschal -- Introduction / Greta Van Buylaere , Mikko Luukko , Daniel Schwemer and Avigail Mertens-Wagschal -- The Exorcist’s Manual: Structure, Language, Sitz im Leben / Eckart Frahm -- Catalogues, Texts, and Specialists: Some Thoughts on the Aššur Medical Catalogue and Mesopotamian Healing Professions / Ulrike Steinert -- Identifying Divine Agency: The Hands of the Gods in Context / Nils P. Heeßel -- Kamadme, the Sumerian Counterpart of the Demon Lamaštu / Andrew R. George -- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wolf: Aggressive Magic and Witchcraft in the Old Babylonian Period / Avigail Mertens-Wagschal -- Evil Helpers: Instrumentalizing Agents of Evil in Anti-witchcraft Rituals / Daniel Schwemer -- Magico-medical Plants and Incantations on Assyrian House Amulets / Strahil V. Panayotov -- Alternative Models for the Development of Some Incantations / Tzvi Abusch -- Reusing Incantations and Making New from Old: On the Formation and Therapeutic Objective of the Muššuʾu (“Embrocation”) Compendium / Barbara Böck -- Tracing Mesopotamian Medical Knowledge: A Study of maškadu and Related Illnesses / Troels Pank Arbøll -- Ina lumun attalî Sîn: On Evil and Lunar Eclipses / Francesca Rochberg -- Highway to Hell: The Winds as Cosmic Conveyors in Mesopotamian Incantation Texts / Enrique Jiménez -- The Göttertypentext as a Humanistic Mappa Mundi: An Essay / Frans A. M. Wiggermann -- Indices / Greta Van Buylaere , Mikko Luukko , Daniel Schwemer and Avigail Mertens-Wagschal.

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Sources of Evil: Studies in Mesopotamian Exorcistic Lore is a collection of thirteen essays on the body of knowledge employed by ancient Near Eastern healing experts, most prominently the ‘exorcist’ and the ‘physician’, to help patients who were suffering from misfortunes caused by divine anger, transgressions of taboos, demons, witches, or other sources of evil. The volume provides new insights into the two most important catalogues of Mesopotamian therapeutic lore, the Exorcist’s Manual and the Aššur Medical Catalogue, and contains discussions of agents of evil and causes of illness, ways of repelling evil and treating patients, the interpretation of natural phenomena in the context of exorcistic lore, and a description of the symbolic cosmos with its divine and demonic inhabitants.