A fairly well preserved one-column tablet found among numerous other tablets in a private house in Aššur explains portions from Tummu bītu, an Akkadian incantation preventing evil spirits from entering the house, and from the second tablet of the magical compendium Šurpu, an eight-tablet series of rituals and incantations accompanying the magical rubbing of a patient, and the burning (šurpu) of the skin particles removed in the process.
The commentary was written by Kiṣir-Nabû from the Baba-šumu-ibni family, who was active during the last third of the seventh century BCE, in the years preceding the destruction of Aššur by the Medes in 614 BCE. Like the other members of his family, Kiṣir-Nabû was a ritual healer/exorcist (Akkadian mašmaššu/āšipu), and the texts he wrote in the course of his education and career reflect his profession. Among them were at least four commentaries. Apart from the one edited here, Kiṣir-Nabû produced the short commentary JRL 1053 (CCP 2.2.1.A.b), on individual lines from Marduk’s Address, Muššu’u, and Udug-ḫul; the fairly long commentary Ass. 13955fx+ (CCP 2.2.1.A.a), on Marduk’s Address; and the commentary Ass. 13955ii (CCP 2.1.A), whose first seventeen lines, on Tummu bītu, duplicate lines 1-17 of the present commentary, while its last portion explores the magical series Maqlû. The Aššur commentaries KAR 94 (CCP 2.1.D), on Maqlû and Šurpu, and LKA 82, on Udug-ḫul (CCP 2.2.2), may likewise be works of Kiṣir-Nabû, even though there are no colophons to confirm this. Why Kiṣir-Nabû copied certain commentary segments twice, and what exactly prompted him to write commentary entries dealing with different texts on one and the same tablet remains unclear, and it is also hard to gauge why he often quotes lemmata in an order that differs from their sequence in the base texts. Most likely, these choices were governed by pedagogical considerations.
The commentary follows the indentation format. Each of its entries quotes a line from the base text and provides explanations of individual words or expressions from it in the following, indented line(s). In two cases, ll. 45 and 49, the explanations begin in the line that includes the quote. Subscripts introduced by ina libbi “from” indicate in ll. 21 and 55 the incipits of the texts explained in the previous sections.
Many explanations in the commentary part on Tummu bītu deal with realia: technical terms for windows and doors. The explanations in the section on Šurpu mostly aim at clarifying the nature of the misdeeds described in Tablet II of the series as leading to divine punishment. Two entries on deities invoked in the base text to absolve the sinner complete this second part of the commentary.
Like other Aššur commentaries, the present one includes a few Assyrianizing features, such as an Assyrian subjunctive in l. 26 and the use of mā in l. 41. The Šurpu section of the commentary shares some explanations with the tabular commentary CCP 2.1.B from Nineveh (e.g., l. 48 // CCP 2.1.B 2.1.B, o i 10).