Everyday Magic? Four Sumerian <b>zi … pa₃</b> Incantations on Amulets

Cuneiform incantations present modern researchers with a conundrum. On the one hand, they appear to be texts spoken over an individual to heal and protect from harm, but on the other, they are written on clay tablets, a medium more associated with educated scribal literature. Inscribed amulets, however, provide examples of written incantations that clearly had a place in magical praxis. This article presents editions of four zi … pa₃ incantations from amulets—two of which are entirely new to scholarship—and uses these four texts as a test case for comparison with zi … pa₃ incantations from clay tablets. This comparison reveals that there are significant similarities between the amulet incantations and those from single incantation tablets and larger compendia, suggesting that there may be less of a divide between the Sumerian incantation tradition and actual magical praxis than is sometimes thought. At the same time, the variation among the amulet texts themselves and between the amulet texts and other early zi … pa₃ incantations indicates that the amulets are not copies or excerpts from precisely worded scripts but appear to be creative adaptations of basic forms and textual structures.