Anu (Sumerian: An) was the sky-god of ancient Mesopotamia, the highest-ranked deity in the great triad alongside Enlil and Ishtar. His divine number was sixty — the highest among the gods. His symbol was the horned cap. His temple at Uruk, the Bīt Rēš, was one of the great cult centres of the ancient world. To invoke Anu was to call upon the firstness of heaven itself: the supreme authority who could coronate kings, who decreed fates, before whom all the lesser gods bowed.

This prayer is a shuilla — a lifted-hand prayer, named for the gesture of the supplicant raising open palms toward the divine. It is brief for its genre: sixteen lines of prayer, followed by the genre rubric. But those sixteen lines are carefully made. The hymnic introduction (lines 1–6) consists of three pairs of parallel lines, each pair moving from generic epithet to the name of the god — a technique borrowed from Sumerian hymnic style. The third pair shifts the register: Anu is not merely the magnificent god of heaven, but specifically the one who releases the day of suffering. That is the key that unlocks the petition.

The petition (lines 7–13) piles up the ailments: evil and dreadful dreams, evil omens, wickedness and sin and crime, the anguish of a shattered heart, the relentless pursuit of unseen forces, the anger of the supplicant's estranged personal god and goddess. The supplicant does not describe these afflictions at length — he accumulates them, as if the very act of naming is itself a kind of release. The prayer ends with two precatives of promissory praise: if Anu intervenes, the temple will be lavished, the praises will be sung, the greatness of his divinity will be exalted forever.

This is a Good Works Translation from Standard Babylonian Akkadian, produced by the New Tianmu Anglican Church with AI assistance.

(šiptu: incantation)

O lord supreme, whose purification rites in heaven are holy —
O Anu, lord supreme, whose purification rites in heaven are holy —
O god of heaven, lord of the omen, lord of the crown —
O Anu, god of heaven, lord of the omen, lord of the crown —
Who releases the day, lord of the omen, lord of the crown —
O Anu, who releases the day, lord of the omen, lord of the crown —

Who releases evil dreams — sinister and dreadful —
evil powers and evil omens,
who clears away wickedness, sin, and grievous crime —

the anguish of a shattered heart
that has been laid upon me,
that ceaselessly pursues me, binding . . . my flesh —
may they be loosed through your spell of life.

All that I have sinned against my god and my goddess —
may it be released.
May the heart of my god and my goddess — wrathful both —
return to its place.

May your angry heart grow calm.
May your spirit be appeased — take pity!

Let me lavish your temple with abundance,
let me make your door-bolt drip with oil.
Let me proclaim the praises of my lord.
Let me forever exalt the greatness of your great divinity.

(It is the wording of a lifted-hand prayer to Anu.)

Colophon

Standard Babylonian Akkadian, first millennium BCE. Classified as Anu 1 in the shuilla corpus. Three manuscripts are known: BMS 6 (MS A), CT 51 211 (MS B), and LKA 50 (MS C) — all incomplete, with MS C the best preserved from line 7 onward. The beginning of the prayer (lines 1–6) is highly fragmentary, shows scribal errors (especially in MS C), and varies among manuscripts; the text is therefore tentative. From line 7, the translation follows MS C. The prayer was used in the Bīt salāʾ mê purification ritual (House of Water Sprinkling), initiating the ninth section (pirsu) of the series; this ritual involved transferring evil from the king to its suspected source by means of a purification bath. Commentary: Kyle Greenwood in Alan Lenzi, ed., Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns: An Introduction (Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), pp. 217–225. Base text: Erich Ebeling, AGH, 34–37 (outdated, incomplete); see also Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses (2005), 640; Marie-Joseph Seux, Hymnes et prières aux dieux de Babylonie et d'Assyrie (1976), 270–71. Normalised Akkadian assembled line by line from Greenwood's grammatical commentary. Translation independently derived from the normalised Akkadian; Greenwood's commentary consulted for verbal forms and manuscript variants; Greenwood's English not used. Translated by the New Tianmu Anglican Church with AI assistance, March 2026.

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Source Text: Shuilla to Anu (Anu 1)

Normalised Akkadian Transliteration
(Anu 1, Standard Babylonian; text after Greenwood/Ebeling AGH, following MSS A–C)

(šiptu:)
(1) bēlu šurbû ša ina šamê šuluḫḫūšu ellū
(2) Anum bēlu šurbû ša ina šamê šuluḫḫūšu ellū
(3) il šamê bēl ṣaddi bēl agê
(4) Anum il šamê bēl ṣaddi bēl agê
(5) pāšir ūmi bēl ṣaddi bēl agê
(6) Anum pāšir ūmi bēl ṣaddi bēl agê
(7) pāšir šunāti lemnēti ḫaṭâti pardāti idāti ittāti lemnēti
(8) mušēteq lumni ḫiṭīte u gillate marušte ḫūṣ ḫīpi libbi ša iššaknū-ma
(9) irteneddûni ukassû . . . šērīya ina tēka ša balāṭi luptaṭṭirū
(10) mimmû mala ana ilīya u ištarīya aḫṭû lippašra
(11) libbi ilīya u ištarīya zenūte ana ašrīšu litūr
(12) aggu libbaka linūḫa
(13) lippašra kabtatka rišâ rēmu
(14) luṭaḫḫid bītaka šigaraka lušaznin šamna
(15) dalīlī bēlīya ludlul
(16) narbi ilūtīka rabīti kayyāna luštammar
(17) ka-inim-ma šu-íl-la da-num-kam

Source Colophon

Normalised Akkadian assembled line by line from Kyle Greenwood's grammatical commentary in Lenzi, Reading Akkadian Prayers and Hymns (2011), pp. 220–223, following the base text Ebeling, AGH, 34–37, with supplementary readings from MSS B and C as noted in the commentary. Lines 1–6 are tentative due to heavy textual fragmentation and scribal variation. From line 7, the text follows MS C (LKA 50, Ashur). The ellipsis in line 9 marks lacunose text in the manuscript tradition; the extent of the gap is uncertain. Line 17 is the Sumerian shuilla-rubric, transliterated as it appears.

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