Bureaucratic Creep, 1st Millennium BC Version

Casting my memory back across the aeons to the distant days when I was an undergraduate, I remember Jonathan Spence telling my Chinese history class that he was familiar with only one historical law, "all bureaucracies expand."

I was just reminded of Spence's wisdom by this story about rituals performed to protect ancient Mesopotamian kings from witchcraft. Babylonian and Assyrian kings were so worried about attacks by witches or sorcerers that they employed special teams of priests to perform counter-rituals at regular intervals. In these rituals the priests called on the sun god to protect the supplicants against evil spells and punish the witches:

Burn the warlock, and the witch!
Devour my enemies, consume my oppressors!
Let your fiery red light overwhelm them!
May they come to an end in a trickle like water from a waterskin!

According to Tzvi Abusch, who has made a long study of these rituals, they changed over time. In the early versions only ten incantations are made, and the ceremony was performed in a single morning. Over time the ritual grew increasingly complex, and in its full form it involved more than a hundred incantations and took a whole day and night to perform.