the god of goldsmiths, but here we leave the world of intellectuals stricto sensuto
enter the world of craftsmanship, although there was no rigid separation between the
two in the Babylonian world. Indeed, the word ummânurefers to both expert craftsmen
and master scholars. Intellectual disciplines were, in their essence, crafts revealed by
the gods.
The most prominent intellectual discipline was the craft of the exorcist. A
compendium known from several manuscripts dating between the seventh and third
centuries includes titles of series and procedures belonging to it (Geller 2000 : 242 – 258 ).
No fewer than a hundred titles are listed there, including omen series, incantations,
purification rituals, and medical treatises. The compendium also includes a smaller,
alternative list detailing the corpus of the exorcist according to a certain Esagil-kı ̄n-
apli. There we find a higher concentration of medical texts and esoteric learning than
in the main list. This Esagil-kı ̄n-apli was also known as compiler of the medical
treatise Sagiggaand allegedly lived during the reign of the Babylonian king Adad-
apla-iddina ( 1068 – 1047 BC) (Finkel 1988 ). Since the Catalogue of Texts and Authors
attributes authorship of Sagigga and the entire corpus of the exorcist to the god Ea,
it ensues that, in the native view, Esagil-kı ̄n-apli did not accomplish a creative act
but only put into writing knowledge imparted to him by the god. “This is not my
incantation, this is the incantation of Ea and Asalluhi,” routinely pronounced the
exorcist after performing his duty. This must have been understood literally, in that
the exorcist acted merely as medium, almost as divine impersonator. Indeed, another
text claims that “the incantation is the incantation of Marduk, the exorcist is the
very image of Marduk.” The intervention of the exorcist was efficacious only if the
gods allowed it to be so, because only the gods possessed all knowledge. The same
was true of the other two disciplines, the crafts of the lamentation singer and diviner,
which were also defined by a textual corpus. The corpus of the former can be appraised
from the libraries of families of lamentation singers living in Babylon in the late
second century BC, principally the descendants of Nanna’utu. They included mainly
hymns and laments in the Emesal dialect of Sumerian, and indeed some of the
colophons indicate that these texts were copied “for chanting” (ana zama ̄ri). The
corpus of the diviner was more precisely and narrowly defined and consisted essentially
of texts dealing with extispicy and devoted mainly to various configurations of the
liver of the sacrificial sheep. These texts were known collectively as the “series of the
diviner’s craft” (isˇka ̄r ba ̄ rûti).
The fact that these disciplines were defined by corpora of texts and involved years
of studying with the masters means that their practitioners can truly be called
intellectuals. This label appears all the more justified when we take into consideration
that in the native view, exorcists and lamentation singers were responsible for most
of the literary and scientific output of late Babylonian civilization. For instance, the
Catalogue of Texts and Authors attributes the Exaltation of Isˇtar to the lamentation
singer Taqı ̄sˇ-Gula, and the Babylonian Theodicyto the exorcist Saggil-kı ̄na-ubbib, an
attribution also embedded in that composition in the form of an acrostic (Lambert
1960 : 63 ). The same catalogue attributes the Epic of Gilgamesh to the exorcist Sîn-
le ̄qi-unninni; the Series (Fable) of the Poplar to the exorcist Ur-Nanna; and the Series
(Fable) of the Spider to the lamentation singer Sˇumu-libsˇi. We find exorcists and
lamentation singers at the forefront of science, especially mathematical astronomy.
Although breakthroughs in astronomy were accomplished by individuals bearing the
— Late Babylonian intellectual life —