Ricerc@Sapienza

In this article I deal with IInd millennium Mesopotamian incantations to sooth a baby. Four Babylonian incantations are hereby analysed and their structure and motives discussed. A translation of the texts is presented in the Appendix. Incantations to soothe a baby are often associated or directly identified with lullabies, with which they share the aim and some motives, but both show fundamental differences. In incantations, the restlessness of the baby is perceived as an element that disturbs human and superhuman beings of the house.

In ancient Mesopotamia, infancy is an elusive category. Although vague- ly defined from a lexical viewpoint, the concept of childhood is almost en- tirely absent from literature, and seldom represented in non-literary textual sources. Texts regarding childbirth, however, constitute an exception to this. Several sources, from mythological accounts of creation (anthropogonies) to therapeutic texts and omens, shift their attention to birth and the baby. Taking this fact into account, in this paper I focus on the role that children bodies play in divination.