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‘Spirits of the Dead’ or ‘Necromancers’? The eṭemmū in an Old Assyrian Letter Reinterpreted in Light of Hebrew ’ōbôt, yidde‘ōnîm, and ’iṭṭîm

Damsma, Alinda; (2025) ‘Spirits of the Dead’ or ‘Necromancers’? The eṭemmū in an Old Assyrian Letter Reinterpreted in Light of Hebrew ’ōbôt, yidde‘ōnîm, and ’iṭṭîm. Religions , 16 (5) , Article 614. 10.3390/rel16050614. Green open access

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Abstract

The Old Assyrian archive from Kanesh, dated to ca. 1950–1850 BCE, has yielded a letter that refers to the consultation of the spirits of the dead (eṭemmū), thus making it the world’s oldest actual attestation of necromancy. However, whereas the immediate context mentions the šā’ilātum, ‘the women dream interpreters’, and the bāriātum, ‘the women omen interpreters’, a necromantic professional is lacking in relation to the questioning of the eṭemmū. Earlier studies have explained this discrepancy by suggesting that necromancy was part of the skill set of the aforementioned female professionals, or that the communication with the spirits happened directly, without the immediate involvement of a skilled specialist. The present article rather argues that the term eṭemmu, ‘spirit of the dead’, had a wider semantic range than hitherto held. In rare cases, it could also designate a necromancer. This proposal is supported by an identical semantic phenomenon in another ancient Semitic language. The biblical Hebrew terms ʼōbôt and yidde‘ōnîm not only refer to the spirits of the dead but also to necromancers. The same might be argued for the apparent Hebrew cognate of Akkadian eṭemmū, the hapax legomenon ’iṭṭîm in Isaiah 19:3. On the strength of the findings presented in this study, it is concluded that the fleeting blending of the spirit with the necromancer lies at the heart of this semantic merger.

Type: Article
Title: ‘Spirits of the Dead’ or ‘Necromancers’? The eṭemmū in an Old Assyrian Letter Reinterpreted in Light of Hebrew ’ōbôt, yidde‘ōnîm, and ’iṭṭîm
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3390/rel16050614
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16050614
Language: English
Additional information: Copyrights © 2025 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: Old Assyrian period; necromancy; spirits of the dead; Akkadian; biblical Hebrew
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Hebrew and Jewish Studies
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10208412
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