Babylonian Medicine
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Recent papers in 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... more
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... more
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.... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
An overview of the history of research and of beliefs on epilepsy, from ancient Mesopotamia to the end of the Middle Ages. Talk delivered at the 10th Latin-American Summer School on Epilepsy (LASSE) on February 26, 2016.
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.... more
In this paper, three unpublished Old Babylonian incantations from a private collection are presented for the first time in edition, translation and commentary.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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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,... more
"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... more
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... more
65éme Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Paris, 8th-12th July 2019
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... more
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,... more
Appeared in Le journal des médecines cunéiformes 28 (2016), 55-59.
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... more
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,... more
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... more
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... more
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... more
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... more