Featured on PDR in the collection Spells Against the Evil Spirits of Babylonia (1903)
So begins an incantation that started life on the lips of a Sumerian sorcerer six or seven millennia ago, before being penned into a clay tablet in the seventh century BC by an Assyrian scholar and then placed in the great library of his king, Ashurbanipal, at Nineveh. When the Babylonians sacked Nineveh in 612 BC, they consigned the library and its 30,000 tablets to the dust. In the 1840s it was excavated and the tablet was taken to the British Museum, where the scholar Reginald Campbell Thompson translated it, and forty-three similar incantations, into the first volume of The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia: Being Babylonian and Assyrian Incantations Against the Demons, Ghouls, Vampires, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, and Kindred Evil Spirits, Which Attack Mankind…