A snake entered the house. It was hunting — making its straight path through the rooms, pursuing prey. In Mesopotamia, this was not merely a household nuisance. A snake seen hunting inside the house was an evil omen, and it required a ritual response.
The namburbi (its name means "its undoing") was a formal apotropaic ritual: a structured sequence of actions and spoken words designed to sever the connection between an omen and its evil consequence. At sunset, the practitioner would draw water and mix in barley, emmer, lentils, silver, and gold. He would build a reed altar for Shamash in a secluded place and set out bread, honey, and ghee. He would make a necklace of stones and metals — carnelian, lapis lazuli, copper, tin, silver, gold — dipped in oil and fastened around the supplicant's neck. Then the supplicant would recite the prayer.
This prayer (Shamash 25 in the shuilla corpus) is the verbal heart of that ritual. Shamash, the sun god, is the right deity for the task: he is the great judge of heaven and earth, the one who revives the dead and releases the captive, whose command cannot be undone. The supplicant seizes the hem of his robe — an ancient gesture of submission found in legal contexts as well as religious ones — and makes the central plea in just three words: "Save me." What follows is the promise of praise: if saved, the supplicant will sing of Shamash's greatness, and those who see the supplicant delivered will join the chorus.
The prayer is preserved in one tablet (VAT 5). It is unusually complete. It begins and ends with the word "incantation" (šiptu / TE.ÉN), an inclusio that marks the beginning and end of the ritual wording.
This is a Good Works Translation from Standard Babylonian Akkadian, produced by the New Tianmu Anglican Church with AI assistance.
(Incantation)
Shamash, king of heaven and earth,
lord of truth and justice,
lord of the Anunnaki, lord of the dead —
you whose consent no god can reverse,
whose command cannot be altered —
Shamash: reviving the dead,
releasing the captive —
is in your hands.
O Shamash,
I am your servant.
I am [Name], son of [Name],
whose god is Marduk, whose goddess is Zarpanitum.
I stand before you.
I seize your hem.
On account of the evil of a snake
I saw making its way through my house,
hunting there —
I am afraid, I am in dread,
I am constantly in fear of this evil.
Save me —
that I might proclaim your greatness,
that I might sing your glories,
that those who see me
might forever praise your glories.
(End of incantation.)
Colophon
Colophon: Standard Babylonian Akkadian, first millennium BCE. Classified as Shamash 25 in the shuilla corpus. One preserved manuscript: VAT 5 (no ritual instructions preserved, only the prayer). The text was intended as the verbal component of a namburbi ritual against the evil omen of a snake seen hunting in the supplicant's house. References to the personal god Marduk and goddess Zarpanitum (lines 12–13) are unusual — most such prayers use the placeholder NENNI ("so-and-so"); the specificity here may indicate the tablet was copied for the Babylonian royal family or royal ritual use. Primary edition: Stefan M. Maul, Zukunftsbewältigung (1994), 296–97, 542 (unavailable). Text accessed through Duane Smith's grammatical commentary in Lenzi, ed., Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction (Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 421–430. Normalised Akkadian assembled line by line from Smith's commentary; Smith's English (pp. 431) not used. Translated by the New Tianmu Anglican Church with AI assistance, March 2026.
🌲
Source Text
Normalised Akkadian Transliteration
(Shamash 25, Standard Babylonian; text after Maul ZB/MS VAT 5, as presented in Smith's commentary in Lenzi 2011, pp. 424–428)
(1) šiptu: Šamaš šar šamê u erṣetim
(2) bēl kitti u mīšari
(3) bēl anunnakkī bēl eṭemmī
(4) ša annašu ilu mammam
(5) lā innû qibīssu
(6) lā uštepêli
(7) Šamaš mīta bulluṭu
(8) kasâ paṭāri
(9) qātīkā-ma Šamaš
(10) anāku aradka
(11) annanna mār annanna ša
(12) ilšu Marduk u ištaršu
(13) Zarpānītum
(14) ana maḫarka azziz
(15) sissiktaka aṣbat
(16) ina lumun ṣerri ša ina bītīya
(17) ešērū-ma bûru
(18) epēšu amurū-ma
(19) palḫāku adrāka
(20) u šutādurāku ina lumni šuāti
(21) šūtiqannī-ma
(22) narbīka lušāpi
(23) dalīlīka ludlul
(24) āmirūya ana
(25) darâtu dalīlīka
(26) lidlulū TE.ÉN
Source colophon: Normalised Akkadian assembled line by line from Duane Smith's grammatical commentary in Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction (Lenzi, ed., 2011), pp. 424–428. Lines 4–6 form a single relative clause: "whose consent no god can change, whose command cannot be altered." Lines 7–9 form a unit: the two infinitives (reviving the dead, releasing the captive) are the predicate of "in your hands, O Shamash" — the emphatic -ma on qātīkā marks the conclusion of the invocation. Lines 10–14 form the self-presentation sentence. Line 15's sissiktaka aṣbat ("I seize your hem") is a legal-religious gesture of submission, paralleled in 1 Samuel 15:27. Lines 22–26 constitute the conditional promise of praise, with dalīlīka ludlul (line 23) and lidlulū (line 26) bound by consonance. The prayer ends with TE.ÉN, mirroring ÉN/šiptu at the opening — a formal inclusio marking the bounds of the ritual wording.
🌲