Crafting Purity in Assyro-Babylonian Procedures

Assyro-Babylonian procedural texts for making cult objects dated to the 1st millen- nium BCE provide an untapped resource for examining scribal conceptions of craft and purity in the ancient world. Ritual pro- cedures for “opening of the mouth” of a cult statue (mīs pî), and for manufacturing a ritual drum called the lilissu, constitute the principal focus of this two-part study. This work uses three themata – time, space, and the material world – to provide the scaffold- ing for a comparative analysis that spans various centuries and localities, highlight- ing the ways in which “purity” was crafted in cuneiform scholarly cultures.