Six thousand years ago, in the territory between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a great and powerful civilization of Ancient Mesopotamia arose, which existed until the conquest of the East by Alexander the Great, Ancient Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria - to them we owe the most important knowledge in the field of astronomy, mathematics, jurisprudence, philology, as well as some stories from the Bible. All these cultural achievements were associated with a religious tradition, the basis of which was numerous rituals. What is a ritual? This is a ritual, a magical act, and a religious practice. Rituals symbolically regulated both the life of the country and society, and the lives of individual people. They expressed the change of seasons and ages of human life, and marked the most important milestones in the history of Ancient Mesopotamia. The book by V. V. Emelyanov tells in detail and fascinatingly about the theories of the origin of ritual in modern science, about what the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians themselves understood by ritual. Separate chapters are devoted to the meaning of ritual in various eras of the history of Ancient Mesopotamia, as well as the interaction of ritual and healing magic techniques in purification rites. The Appendix contains Sumerian and Akkadian ritual texts, almost all of them translated into Russian for the first time.