Aramaic Uruk incantation
The Aramaic Uruk incantation acquired 1913 by the Louvre, Paris and stored there under AO 6489 is a unique Aramaic text written in Late Babylonian cuneiform syllable signs and dates to the Seleucid period ca. 150 BCE. The finding site is the "reš"-sanctuary in the ancient city of Uruk (Warka), therefore the label “Uruk”. Particuliar about this incantation text is that it contains a magical historiola which is divided up into two nearly repetitive successive parts, a text genre that finds its continuation in the Aramaic magical text corpus of Late Antiquity from Iraq and Iran, most  prominently in the Mandaic lead rolls and Aramaic incantation bowls. The Aramaic language style in which the text is composed is of a literary standard nature and follows a conventional transliteration system of the Aramaic phonemes in cuneiform syllable signs (e.g. <nowiki><*ḍ> > <q> > Late Aramaic <’></nowiki>). The text is of importance for the lingistic setting as it is the only Aramaic text example of this period and geographical area (Mesopotamia so far, which shows already the masculine plural ending of the determinative "-ē" on nouns as in Eastern Aramaic, but  lacks certain morphemes as demonstrative pronouns, or the imperfect. The text is set up in a strict literary style and works with typical elements like parallism and chiasmus as already employed in the earlier Babylonian (Akkadian) incantation type, for example in the incantation series Maqlû and Šurpu. There have been manifold discussions and studies concerning the interpretation and translation since the master handcopy by François Thureau-Dangin was published (1922). It is noteworthy that it contains an idiomatic expression in line 2, which already occurs in the Aramaic part of the Book of Ezra ‘a wood shall be pulled out  from his house’ 6:11.