Babylonian Medicine

This paper offers a panoramic view of the use of plant substances in ancient
Mesopotamian therapy during the 2nd–1st mill. BCE. It illustrates the nature of the medical ingredients employed, it shows how ancient Babylonians prepared and administered them, and describes the role of the two main health professionals of the day. The written sources, which constitute some of the most ancient evidence for organized pharmaceutical knowledge, archaeological evidence and the problems connected with their study are also examined throughout.

Containing twenty prescriptions, the Neo-or Late-Babylonian tablet edited here is one of the most comprehensive sources for the phylacteries against fever. Although a duplicate of the whole text is yet unknown to me, several parallels or text variants of the single prescriptions can be identified in the published and unpuplished medical tablets from Aššur and Ninive. In the present paper I transliterate and translate the tablet, with special attention to the fever prescriptions and their parallels. 2

This paper argues that ancient Near Eastern private and domestic religion is a fruitful context in which to understand the Psalmist's experience and devotion to God. This is especially true for the penitential psalms and psalms of lament. These psalms not only conform in structure, but also in content and purpose. It will examine the form and function of Mesopotamian penitential prayers, and use this as a basis for the discussion of the function and theology of the penitential psalms, such as Ps 38 and Ps 51.
The paper will examine a Mesopotamian therapeutic ritual and its prayer, "My God, I did not know." It is clear that although the prayer is quite general, its purpose is to reconcile a sick person to his personal deity so that the patient is healed. It will then examine structural and content similarities with Pss 38 and 51. Thus, the paper's methodology is comparative and form critical.
The conclusion is that like the Mesopotamian penitential prayers and rituals, Pss 38 and 51 were ritual prayers through which the faithful Israelite was reconciled to God, and thus wholeness could be re-established in their life.

Discussion paper Hygieia at:  ‘Historicisation’ A summer course for PhD students arranged by the Nordic network for medical history (NordForsk) about "framing health".. The University of Bergen, 24-26 August, 2011.

Updated and corrected version: 28 juni 2021

The present article explores the simple but important idea that a very precise method for describing herbal remedies was in place prior to Theophrastus and that this system was not uniquely Greek, even though the two most prominent extant herbals were written by Greek authors. Rather, it shows how the structure adopted by Theophrastus (and probably by his predecessors) for plant descriptions was already in place in Mesopotamia at least five centuries earlier.

This article identifies the tradition of Babylonian Kalendertexte as the ultimate source for a passage in Pliny the Elder's HN 30.95-97, thus establishing a link between Babylonian and Graeco-Roman astral medicine. Implications include the identification of the astrological square aspect (perhaps called é, bītu, "house") in Babylonia, a connection with Hermeticism and the Greek medical theory of Critical Days, and the textual demonstration that Dreckapotheke-names did indeed refer to healing plants, in such a context.

The basic difficulties of writing the history of pharmacology in the Greco-Roman medical traditions (and others, such as the ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian tradition) become far more complicated when it comes to the Talmudic traditions. Accordingly, before delving deeper into the “sea of Talmud”, as it is often called in the Jewish tradition, to discover the pharmacological ”treasures” hidden in its depths, we first must briefly discuss the specific representation of medical information in terms of form, content, and context in Talmudic literature. Here, we must recall some important aspects that have been discussed already in the introduction. First, in contrast to the Greco-Roman medical tradition, very few texts in the Talmudic corpus contain any medical information, and we do not find any single works about medicine in Hebrew until the early Middle Ages (SeferAsaf).1 Second, in contrast to Greco-Roman technical literature, Talmudic and other rabbinic texts are characterized by anonymous and collective authorship, creating a polyphonic concert of different opinions. Moreover, since these rabbinical texts are in most cases our only extant sources, we know no more about Jewish medicine in Late Antiquity than the authors or transmitters of these works permit us to see.2 Third, we have to take into consideration the highly contextual nature of pharmaceutical knowledge that has been transferred to or integrated into rabbinic texts. As is the case with all other medical information, recipes, information about materia medica, and instructions about therapies are mentioned only in passing. Talmudic discourses about (religious) norms generally follow overarching principles that have little to do with knowledge of healing which occurs often as single teachings scattered in those broader Halakhic discussions.

In this paper, three unpublished Old Babylonian incantations from a private collection are presented for the first time in edition, translation and commentary. Two of the texts aim at helping a woman in labor (IncPriv 1, IncPriv 2), the third focus on a sick child, suffering from a severe throat inflammation, trying to save him from the brink of death (IncPriv 3). The incantations have no direct parallels, but one of them contain the well-known Cow motif (IncPriv 2).

The therapeutic texts give us some information on the social regulatory control of the male gender and sexuality in ancient Mesopotamia. The healing ritual, in order to combat the critical moment caused by the sickness, indeed reiterates some normative gender features. As is known, gender is a social apparatus whose purpose is to provide regulatory models to society. Sexuality is an aspect of individual and social life subject to these control processes. Judith Butler, making specific reference to Foucault’s works, argues that the gender is one of the criteria by which a society distinguishes, puts in order, subjects and normalizes the body giving rise to a process of subjectivation. The main object of analysis is a group of standard-Babylonian incantations and rituals, called ŠÀ-ZI.GA/nīš libbi, whose aim is to help a male patient regain the sexual desire. These texts are rich of several metaphors. I will investigate the animal images which convey ideas related to an active, irrepressible and vigorous male sexuality. In particular, the choice of wild animals is functional to create an idea of a strong and proud male sexual identity. Another group of metaphor deals with war imagery: often the patient’s penis is compared with weapons while the love-making with the battle.
In this regard it will make room for the description and meaning of bow ritual, one of the central parts of therapeutic practice. All this shows how this metaphorical imagery is, despite the similarities, quite different from the love songs one.
The ritual is performed, allowing a process of doing gender. Although this process is continuous at all times of life, the ritual practice is a privileged place for a modern scholar studying the gender construction because of its social and collective nature since the community is, more or less directly, the recipient of the ritual and since the social rules of a community are confirmed through it.

Research on ancient Mesopotamian medicine has progressed considerably in recent years: numerous editions of medical texts, as well as monographs on specific topics, have appeared, and research on the subject has been enriched with theoretical contributions from the social sciences. The draw of interdisciplinary dialogue and the need for theoretical tools has led some Assyriologists to turn to the anthropological disciplines. In 2016, a conference entitled “Cultural Classification Systems: Disease, Health and local biologic drugs. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Cultures in Medical Anthropology and Historical Sciences” was organized in Berlin. Building upon the accomplishments of that conference, this paper aims to show how theories and methodologies of medical anthropology are useful for understanding ŠÀ-ZI.GA therapy. The term ŠÀ-ZI.GA refers to the standard-Babylonian spells and rituals whose aim was to help a male patient regain lost sexual desire. Through a critical reading of the works of ethno-psychiatry and medical anthropology, the relationship between the male and female agencies in these rituals and the cultural categorizations of the body and sickness will be investigated. Questions include: who is the patient that must be cured? what function do the images of sexually excited animals play in the incantations? what is the relationship between spells and medical prescriptions? and how do they work for the purposes of the therapeutic efficacy? what role do the Abracadabra have? In addition, by analyzing the ritual bow special attention will be given to some aspects of Mesopotamian male sexuality.

This paper aims to discuss therapeutic prescriptions against the disease bu’šānu while providing an edition of two Neo-Babylonian medical tablets (BM 66560 and BM 67158) originating probably from Sippar. The importance of this disease shows in the fact that prescriptions for bu’šānu are attested since the Old Babylonian period, as well as that the sequence of therapeutic treatments and medical incantation forms a separate section in the sub-series ‘Teeth’ of the Nineveh Medical Compendia. Further medical recipes dealing with bu’šānu are known from various medical compendiums dated to the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods, and the two Babylonian tablets published here reflect the continuation of the Neo-Assyrian text tradition and also represent the local Babylonian medical traditions.

This paper focuses on a chain amulet from Mesopotamia, which has so far been known from the two largely unedited tablets K 4727+ and Sm 1071. Due to the fragmentary state of these sources, several questions have remained unanswered, pertaining to aspects like the exact number and type of raw materials needed to create this particular chain. Only parts of the stone list are preserved in both texts, which did not allow a complete reconstruction of the object; nor could it be established what purpose the amulet served, only that it had something to do with the patient’s head. These questions can now be answered with the help of new evidence provided by the Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia. In addition, by exploring the differences between these sources, it might also be possible to learn about the dynamics governing the selection of stones for amulets.

"In the Wake of the Compendia" presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian “rationality,” epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.

Marten Stol published extensive paper on ‘Psychosomatic Suffering’ 15 years ago in AMD 1. The present talk aims to continue in a slightly different direction analyzing case studies from texts on ghost’s afflictions, which were made generally accessible through their publications by JoAnn Scurlock in AMD 3.
The term ‘psychosomatic illness’ remains an elusive concept in modern medicine. It could apply to diseases in which malfunction of an organ is associated or due to psychological problems. The present paper will use the general term ‘psychosomatic’ as a temporary solution to describe selected patient’s sufferings in Mesopotamia, which on the one hand, show physical (somatic) symptoms, but on the other hand, show mental (psychical) implications. The talk will raise the question if a patient could have psychological issues, which apparently could lead to a physical suffering? Medical texts do not provide such an answer and much is based on assumptions. Since, identification of such an illness from Mesopotamia is hardly possible. But, one could principally draw a picture of the patient’s symptoms and their relations to each other. On one hand, commentary texts could provide exceptionally useful information on ground principles of the patients symptoms, which otherwise will not be explained in other texts genres. On the other hand, it will be argued that each therapeutic prescription – the combination of magico-medical material, the treatment and/or the incantations – could provide additional clue on the disease and it’s cause.

The author’s main focus is on a cryptic spelling of the Akkadian plant name mirišmarû. Although one of its occurrences has been in the public domain for decades, it has hitherto been overlooked in cuneiform scholarship. In the guise of this arcane spelling, the plant appears to feature most prominently in an as yet unpublished cuneiform tablet inscribed with an incantation for the purpose of mobilizing the plant’s healing potential against the effects of curse and witchcraft; its text is edited here in transliteration and translation. Two further unorthodox notations of the name, recently detected in unpublished sources too, are evaluated for their implications; one of these proves crucial in establishing the correct reading of the name once and for all. To help the reader assess the new findings in their proper context, a chart detailing all currently known attestations of the plant name is included.

Traditional accounts of Babylonian medicine see the two disciplines involved in healing in ancient Mesopotamia, viz. āšipūtu "exorcism of incantation-and-ritual-driven healing" and asûtu "medicine", as complementary disciplines, collaborating in the treatment of individual patients. Ritter's 1965 paper on the two disciplines, for example, sought to differentiate them them, while at the same time arguing that they often collaborated in the treatment of individual patients. The new edition of AMC in this volume already overturns one of Ritter's primary working hypotheses, namely that Babylonian medicine lacked the type of carefully organised, discipline-defining compendium known for āšipūtu, where The Diagnostic Handbook clearly plays this role. This paper argues that these two disciplines were, for the most part, in competition for the attentions of the crown as well as for social standing generally. Each of the two disciplines maintained its own disciplinary identity and compendia and its own models of disease ethology and causation. The etiologies of gastrointestinal disease within exorcism-driven healing (āšipūtu) rely, almost exclusively, on postulating ghosts or demons as causal agents, while Babylonian medicine (asûtu)turned to increasingly "secular" etiologies based on analogies between unseen processes of the gastrointestinal tract and visible processes in the natural or social world.

Des commentaires portant sur le texte du manuel de diagnostics sont fréquemment attestés. Dans l'ouvrage de base d'Eckart Frahm de 2011 1 , 24 commentaires sur la série SA.GIG sont répertoriés et sur le site web du Cuneiform Commentaries Project à Yale, 35 sont désormais listés, y compris des pièces discutables 2. A dire vrai, ces commentaires textuels sont géographiquement très clairement répartis : à l'exception d'un fragment de la ville assyrienne Ḫuzirīna (Sultantepe) 3 , tous les commentaires du SA.GIG proviennent de Babylonie. Cette distribution est frappante, d'autant plus qu'aucun commentaire textuel ayant trait au manuel de diagnostics et provenant de Ninive n'était connu à ce jour 4. Le fragment de commentaire K. 11939 publié ici est d'un grand intérêt, non seulement parce qu'il représente la première preuve de l'existence à Ninive d'un commentaire du SA.GIG, mais aussi parce que le nombre de commentaires portant sur les dernières tablettes de la série est comparativement plus petit ; c'est de plus le seul commentaire connu à ce jour de la 37 e tablette de la série SA.GIG, tablette qui n'est que partiellement conservée.

Although many assyriological studies have been done on internal organs in the Mesopotamian worldview, the pathologies associated with them, and their metaphorical and ideological value, little attention have been paid to the fact that, sometimes, internal organs are associated with verbs of movement. Perhaps, this limited regard can be attributed to the assyriological look at the Mesopotamian body being shaped by the modern biomedicine. According to biomedicine, in fact, the human internal anatomy is composed of a series of organs which stay fixed in their positions. On the contrary, I want to show how the internal organs in Mesopotamia culture are thought as capable to move and leave their position. I will demonstrate, thanks to the contribution of the cultural anthropological perspective, that these movements of internal organs can determine two conditions: emotional and psychological states; and pathological signs. Consequently, some organ movements are considered necessary, in accordance to the functioning of the Mesopotamian anatomical-emotional system, while others produce alterations considered negative. In addition, the first case shows that there is no in Mesopotamian a clear distinction between “mind” and “body”, but that, on the contrary, the psycho-emotional dimension and bodily processes are strongly interrelated and that such expressions with internal organs and verbs of movement referring to emotional states should not be intended only as metaphorical, but in the concrete movement of the organs.

This paper argues that the well-known “fever” tablet K 2386+, the tablet that Stol used as the centerpiece of his “Fevers in Babylonia” paper (Stol 2007), can actually be assigned to the fourth tablet of the therapeutic subcorpus known as SUALU. Although no direct join to the known pieces of SUALU IV has yet been identified, several different
arguments suggest that K 2386+ should be located at the bottom of the first column of SUALU IV. This placement of K 2386+ in SUALU, a subcorpus that is otherwise largely concerned with diseases of the lower digestive tract and several forms of jaundice, raises a number of important questions as to the place of therapies against fever in the therapeutic corpus generally.

Gli studi sulla medicina mesopotamica hanno avviato negli ultimi anni, grazie al crescente interesse nei confronti delle scienze sociali, una riflessione critica sui concetti di malattia e salute delle popolazioni vicinorientali. Tale sguardo critico deve essere indirizzato anche al modo in cui il corpo è pensato e rappresentato. Come è stato osservato da Couto-Ferreira e Steinert, molti dei concetti anatomici espressi nella documentazione sumerica e accadica non si adattano esattamente alle moderne categorie anatomiche. Ciò ci porta inevitabilmente a un’analisi sul modo in cui i ricercatori applicano tali moderne categorie alle fonti antiche. Analizzare la terminologia anatomica significa comprendere il modo in cui il corpo è oggettivato, pensato e descritto all’interno delle società mesopotamiche. Come ci insegna Marcel Mauss, il corpo è un luogo fisico di iscrizione di pratiche culturali e sociali e quindi la sua costruzione dipende dal contesto storico e culturale. Le due antropologhe Nancy Scheper-Hughes e Margaret Lock hanno analizzato criticamente il modo in cui il pensiero occidentale, da Cartesio in poi, ha pensato il corpo, contrapponendolo alla mente. Proprio su questa distinzione è fondata epistemologicamente la biomedicina. Ma non solo questo, essa ha un’immagine statica degli organi all’interno del corpo umano, ognuno nella propria salda posizione. In questa presentazione vorrei dimostrare quanto, al contrario, i mesopotamici avessero una concezione dinamica degli organi all’interno dello spazio anatomico: essi si alzano, vanno, tornano, ecc. Il movimento degli organi, capace di determinare emozioni o stati patologici, è stato abbondantemente documentato dall’antropologia medica e linguistica in una prospettiva transculturale. Attraverso dunque un’analisi della documentazione accadica mostrerò che il movimento degli organi, nella loro concretezza fisica, determina sentimenti, pensieri, desideri e segni patologici.

Advertisements

Models of causation play a central role in defining specific types of scientific thought, and this was also certainly the case with Babylonian medicine, yet traditional expressions of causation, rooted in juridical practice, are never found in the medical corpus. This paper argues that Babylonian physicians represented disease causation or ethology in a new way, largely through conceptual metaphors embedded in incantations. These metaphors drew, for the most part, on landscape and atmospheric conditions -- rather than supernatural agents -- to represent unseen processes within the human body.

If a city is situated on seven heights…” Current insights into Ancient Near Eastern divination, webinar at Istituto Svizzero di Roma. Event date: September 23rd - 24th, 2020 | The study of the rich Mesopotamian medical corpus is crucial to the reconstruction of Babylonian scientific and intellectual history. Nevertheless, if considered alone, these sources do not allow us to understand various aspects of medical rationale. For this reason, scholars have been interested also in sources outside the medical corpus. The proposed communication aims at presenting the preliminary results of a pilot research project, conducted at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London (January–April 2019). The project consisted of a first survey of all medical-related information comprised in the first half of the divination series Šumma ālu (tablets 1-63), capitalizing on its recent edition (2017). The aim of the project was to verify if the label of Šumma ālu as a veritable encyclopedia for every aspect of ancient Mesopotamian everyday life was also valid from a medico-historical viewpoint.
After a brief contextualization of the pilot project, the communication will present some of its preliminary results and its possible, future developments.