Although the second volume of Thompson’s book describes some additional supernatural beings and protective incantations, its main focus is on purification rituals and defence against disease and illness — including a handy incantation against headaches. Both volumes have recently been republished as part of the Cambridge University Press Library Collection. If Assyria gets you going, a major new exhibition opens next month at the British Museum entitled “I am Ashurbanipal, king of the world, king of Assyria” (8 November 2018 – 24 February 2019).Long words can be mellifluous, pulchritudinous, even pericombobulating things to behold. But sumtimes we jst nd 2 get 2 da pt. The very earliest writing, by the Sumerians circa 3000 BCE, was in pictographs. These representations of discrete ideas in small pictures, these proto-emojis, continued life in the early modern era, in places like Le Petit Livre d’Amour where we see “cœur” replaced by a ❤️. But from the ancient Greeks onwards, rather than draw pictures, writers striving for concision in alphabetic languages have usually preferred to omit non-crucial letters. Abbreviation of this kind had an unexpected renaissance with “textspeak”, a sublanguage formed in the 160-character-limited SMS (short message service). On early mobile phones you had to type each message on awkward little keys designating up to four letters. These spatial constraints, along with the simple desire to communicate quickly, gave rise to some wonderful abbreviations and acronyms — even if some take the receiver more time in the decoding than save the sender in the composing (e.g. “CURLO: See you around like a donut”).