A Text Rebuilt from Nineveh's Ashes

No single ancient copy of Maqlu survives complete. What scholars read today is a reconstruction assembled from more than ninety cuneiform manuscripts and fragments recovered from Nineveh, Assur, Babylon, Sultantepe and other sites, most belonging to the library Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh in the seventh century BCE before its destruction in 612 BCE preserved the tablets by burning the palace that held them, baking the clay rather than erasing it.

Erich Ebeling produced the first modern edition in 1931, Gerhard Meier followed in 1937 with a text that stood as the standard reference for decades, and Tzvi Abusch's 2015 critical edition incorporated manuscripts discovered since, correcting readings and clarifying the series' internal divisions into named subsections addressing distinct stages of the rite. The reconstruction work itself is a case study in how much of Mesopotamian religious literature reaches modern readers only through exactly this kind of patchwork of duplicate and overlapping copies, since scribes across centuries and cities each copied the text for their own temple or exorcist's use. Duplicate copies from different cities occasionally disagree in small details of wording or tablet order, giving editors a genuine textual criticism problem not unlike reconstructing a classical Greek or Latin work from divergent medieval manuscript traditions.