This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Cuneiform Incantation Series gathers three of the atlas's great Akkadian exorcistic series, each a structured ritual programme rather than a single composition, and together the principal evidence for how Babylonian and Assyrian scholars understood misfortune with no visible cause.
Maqlu, the burning, works by identifying, arraigning and destroying a witch held responsible for a sufferer's condition, its eight tablets of incantations followed by a ninth setting out the ritual actions, performed by an exorcist through a single night, with figurines standing for the witch burned in the rite that gives the series its name. Shurpu is its companion and its exact counterweight, assuming the sufferer is under a curse arising from an offence he may have committed without knowing it and working by absolution rather than attack; its long enumeration of possible transgressions, recited so that whichever one applies is covered, is the single richest surviving statement of what Mesopotamian society counted as wrong.
Utukku Lemnutu, the evil Utukku demons, is directed more broadly still, against a wide range of demons, ghosts and other malefactors rather than a named enemy or an unknown offence, distinct in purpose from both Maqlu and Shurpu. Its sixteen tablets trace to Sumerian incantations of the third millennium BCE and continued to be copied into late antiquity, making it among the longest continuously transmitted bodies of incantation text from the ancient Near East. Each series names a different theory of what has gone wrong and prescribes a different cure, recited by the same figure, the exorcist, for the same complaint, an affliction with no visible cause.