A Prayer With a Job to Do

Shuilla prayers rarely stood entirely alone as private devotional acts. They were frequently embedded inside larger ritual sequences conducted by an ashipu, a specialist priest trained in diagnosing which supernatural cause, divine anger, demonic attack, sorcery or an offended personal god, lay behind a client's illness or misfortune, and in prescribing the correct combination of ritual actions to address it. Within such a sequence the shuilla's praise and petition worked alongside incantations, symbolic actions and sometimes medical treatment, addressed together to the same underlying problem.

This close working relationship between devotional prayer and specialist ritual technique reflects a broader feature of Mesopotamian religious practice: the boundary later traditions draw firmly between prayer and magic was, in this context, much less sharp. Erica Reiner's edition of the Surpu incantation series documents a closely related genre working the same territory from the incantation side, and reading the two together shows how thoroughly devotional address to the gods and technical ritual problem-solving were treated as complementary parts of a single practical response to suffering.