ABSTRACT
This essay offers a brief overview of the abundant reports found in cuneiform sources of utterances that the Mesopotamians considered ecstatic speech, that is, the manifestation of communication from a deity through an intermediary, occurring spontaneously or by various means of induction. One major group of documents comes from the palace archives at Mari, dating to the eighteenth century BCE. A second block was discovered in the Assyrian palace archives at Nineveh, dating to the seventh century BCE. In addition to these serious and careful records, we also have a humorous text we may call “The Satire on Ecstatics,” written by a student learning Sumerian in his Babylonian school. Taken as a whole, the material affords us the privilege, rare in the ancient world, of being able to listen to the very words people spoke in the throes of ecstatic experience.
