Oaths and Curses

In most ancient societies divine agency plays an important role in legal procedures. Its advantage is that it can be appealed to where the human factor fails or proves insufficient. In Mesopotamian legal procedures divine agency was invoked in a number of ways, the most common of which were oaths, curses, blessings, ordeals and summoning of gods as document witnesses. The present study examines the first two of these means as they appear in clauses of legal documents of the first millennium BC Babylonia. It reconstructs the way in which Neo- and Late-Babylonian oaths and curses were formulated and examines the component elements of formulae and the ways they were put together. It also establishes the reasons behind the choice of formulae and determines the extent to which this choice depended on the people involved, the objects and subjects dealt with and the circumstances of time and place. The discursive part is followed by transcriptions and translations of and philological comments on the oaths and curses. The study is supplemented by extensive, especially prosopographic indices.