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A groundbreaking reassessment of existing research and new data on traditional botanical medicine. Traditional medical systems continue to impact the lives of people around the globe. These systems vary greatly in their underlying beliefs, but all commonly rely on the consumption of plant matter as a central practice. An Ancient Mesopotamian Herbal is a new, fully illustrated book that explores the uses of plants in traditional medicine and how these botanical roots extend to modern, “conventional” medicinal treatments. Divided into two parts, An Ancient Mesopotamian Herbal introduces the lands and ancient cultures of Mesopotamia before surveying the different forms of evidence and research methods informing this academic book. The book then looks to the modern day, focusing on thirty case studies of plant-based drugs. Bridging the divide between the humanities and sciences and using new research and data from modern-day Iraq and surrounding areas, An Ancient Mesopotamian Herbal draws on the expertise of archeo-botanists, scientists, and Assyriologists specializing in historic Mesopotamian medicine to provide new identifications of Assyrian and Babylonian herbal medicines while giving a concise overview of ancient Mesopotamian herbal lore.

This volume exposes one of the world's oldest medical marketplaces and the emergence of medical professionalization within it. Through an unprecedented analysis of the Mesopotamian healing goddesses as well as asûs, a diverse group of “healers”, Irene Sibbing-Plantholt demonstrates that from the Middle Babylonian period onwards, the goddess Gula was employed as a divine legitimization model for scholarly, professional asûs. With this work, Sibbing-Plantholt provides a unique insight in processes of medical competition and legitimization in ancient Mesopotamia, which speak to similar processes in other societies.

After more than fifty years since the last publication, the cuneiform texts relating to the treatment of the loss of male sexual desire and vigor in Mesopotamia are collected in this volume. The aim of the book is to present Mesopotamian medical tradition regarding the so-called nīš libbi therapies.šà-zi-ga in Sumerian, nīš libbi in Akkadian, lit.'raising of the'heart'', is the expression used to indicate a group of texts intended to recover the male sexual desire. This medical tradition is preserved from the Middle Babylonian period to the Achaemenid one. This broad range testifies to the importance of the transmission of this material throughout Mesopotamian history.The book provides the edition of this textual corpus and analyzes it in the light of new knowledge on ancient Near Eastern medicine. Moreover, this volume aims to show how theories and methodologies of Cultural Anthropology, Ethnopsychiatry and Gender Studies are useful for understanding the Mesopotamian medical system. This edition is an important tool for understanding Mesopotamian medical knowledge for Assyriologist, however since the texts have been translated and discussed using the anthropological and gender perspectives they are accessible also to scholars of other research fields, such as History of Medicine, Sexuality and Gender.

Das babylonisch-assyrische Diagnosehandbuch, eines der am frühesten belegten Kompendien zur systematischen Beobachtung des menschlichen Körpers, gibt nicht nur einen faszinierenden Einblick in die Interpretation krankhafter Anzeichen in Mesopotamien, sondern auch in die Krankheitsätiologie. Neben Untersuchungen zu Rekonstruktion, Struktur und Terminologie werden in diesem Band zahlreiche neue Ergebnisse hinsichtlich regelhafter Verbindungen zwischen Zeichen- und Deutungsebene und den zugrundeliegenden heuristischen Techniken präsentiert. Einen weiteren Schwerpunkt bildet die Betrachtung der in Diagnosen und Ätiologien erkennbaren Berührungspunkte zu religiös-kosmologischen Vorstellungen, damit verbundenen überweltlichen Akteuren als Verursacher krankhafter Zustände sowie die Rolle des menschlichen Handelns als potenzielle Ursache. Den zweiten Hauptteil stellt die Neubearbeitung des umfangreichen zweiten Kapitels des Diagnosehandbuches (Tfl. 3–14) dar, in welcher der Text, unter Berücksichtigung aller neuen Textzeugen, in Partitur-Transliteration, gebundener Umschrift und Übersetzung samt Kommentar präsentiert wird. Ergänzt wird die Bearbeitung durch Keilschriftkopien der neu- und spätbabylonischen Fragmente aus dem British Museum.

The related series uru.an.na = mas / ltakkal,'uru.an.na means the mas/ltakkal plant', and mud-ur.mah = me sa libbi bini,'lion's blood means the liquid from the heart of the tamarisk', both give synonyms and equivalent foreign names for plants, herbs and wood, as well as for other ingredients ancient medical practitioners used to effect cures. This first volume, about both series, focuses on the cuneiform tablets on which the texts were written, from the British Museum, London, the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, and the Oriental Institute, Chicago. New hand copies and sketches show the physical and non-physical joins. Viewing the tablets as archaeological objects, the author provides numerous observations about format, shape, colour,'firing holes', worm holes and trace fossils. The ways scribes marked out their tablets with horizontal lines (sometimes doubled) to separate entries or paragraphs or provide ruled tablets are described; vertical rulings defined the left edge and column divisions (sometimes replaced by a glossenkeil). Areas reserved for writing, layout, slanted lines of writing, alignment and indentation of paragraphs, line spacing and ductus (especially changes from middle to neo-assyrian) are carefully examined. The last chapter concentrates on scribal corrections and various correction marks, line markers and supplementary glosses. Such features illuminate the personal preferences and professional experience of the frequently anonymous scribes behind the tablets.

In Medicine in Ancient Assur Troels Pank Arbøll offers a microhistorical study of a single exorcist named Kiṣir-Aššur who practiced medical and magical healing in the ancient city of Assur (modern northern Iraq) in the 7th century BCE. The book provides the first detailed analysis of a healer's education and practice in ancient Mesopotamia based on at least 73 texts assigned to specific stages of his career. By drawing on a microhistorical framework, the study aims at significantly improving our understanding of the functional aspects of texts in their specialist environment. Furthermore, the work situates Kiṣir-Aššur as one of the earliest healers in world history for whom we have such details pertaining to his career originating from his own time.

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig is intended for specialists in cuneiform studies, and includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, as well as a study on technical notations recurring in these commentaries. Within the Cuneiform Monographs series, this book represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary is intended for historians of medicine and interpretation, and explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook. In line with commentators'self-fashioning as experts of diverse disciplines, commentaries display intertextuality involving a variety of lexical, astronomical, religious, magic, and literary compositions, while employing patterns of argumentation that resist categorization within any single branch of knowledge. Commentators'choices of topics and comments, however, sought to harmonize atypical language and ideas in the Handbook with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body in therapeutic recipes. Scholastic rhetoric—supposedly unfettered to any discipline—served in fact as a pretext for affirming current forms of medical knowledge.

The reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian medical, ritual and omen compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence. This book offers the first complete edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue, an 8th or 7th century BCE list of therapeutic texts, which forms a core witness for the serialisation of medical compendia in the 1st millennium BCE. The volume presents detailed analyses of this and several other related catalogues of omen series and rituals, constituting the corpora of divination and healing disciplines. The contributions discuss links between catalogues and textual sources, providing new insights into the development of compendia between serialization, standardization and diversity of local traditions. Though its a novel corpus-based approach, this volume revolutionizes the current understanding of Mesopotamian medical texts and the healing disciplines of'conjurer'and'physician'. The research presented here allows one to identify core text corpora for these disciplines, as well as areas of exchange and borrowings between them.

Mesopotamian Medicine and Magic. Studies in Honour of Markham J. Geller is a thematically focused collection of 34 brand-new essays bringing to light a representative selection of the rich and varied scientific and technical knowledge produced chiefly by the cuneiform cultures. The contributions concentrate mainly on Mesopotamian scholarly descriptions and practices of diagnosing and healing diverse physical ailments and mental distress. The festschrift contains both critical editions of new texts as well as analytical studies dealing with various issues of Mesopotamian medical and magical lore. Currently, this is the largest edited volume devoted to this topic, significantly contributing to the History of Ancient Sciences.

Franz Köchers Standardwerk zur Babylonischen und Assyrischen Medizin, das darauf angelegt war, Kopien der Texte mit Übersetzung und Kommentar vorzulegen, war bei seinem Tod 2002 unvollendet geblieben. Sechs Bände Umschriften mit jeweils kurzen einführenden Kommentaren und Zitaten von Parallelen und Duplikaten lagen vor. Die Publikation der Reihe wird nun mit Robert Biggs und Marten Stol als neuen Herausgebern fortgesetzt. Die neuen Bände enthalten vollständige Übersetzungen und philologische Kommentare und machen damit in aktuellen Untersuchungen die Babylonisch-Assyrischen Medizintexte für Medizinhistoriker zugänglich.

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.

Orlando Mejía Rivera es voraz y prolífico a la vez. No es de esos intelectuales estériles que acumulan conocimientos inútiles porque son incapaces de metabolizarlos y convertirlos en creación o en reflexión. Al contrario, Mejía Rivera tiene una capacidad que deslumbra y desconcierta a la vez, tanto que uno siempre se pregunta de dónde sacará el tiempo para leer, vivir, pensar y escribir cada año lo que para una persona normal significaría el trabajo de un decenio. -Héctor Abad Faciolince (2005)

Providing a comprehensive examination of the traits and areas of authority Ancient Babylonians attributed to their healing goddess, this book draws on a wide range of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform sources, including god lists, literary compositions, lexical lists, prognostic texts, incantations, and prescriptions. Analysing the use of selected metaphors associated with the goddess, a new perspective is offered on the explanation for disease as well as the motivation for particular treatments. Special chapters deal with the cuneiform handbook on prognosis and diagnosis of diseases, medical incantations appealing to the healing goddess, and the medicinal plants attributed to her. For the first time a body of evidence for the use of simple drugs is brought together, elaborating on specific plant profiles. The result is a volume that challenges many long-held assumptions concerning the specialized cuneiform medical literature and takes a fresh look on the nature of Ancient Babylonian healing.

This monograph begins with a puzzle: a Babylonian text from late 5th century BCE Uruk associating various diseases with bodily organs, which has evaded interpretation. The correct answer may reside in Babylonian astrology, since the development of the zodiac in the late 5th century BCE offered innovative approaches to the healing arts. The zodiac—a means of predicting the movements of heavenly bodies—transformed older divination (such as hemerologies listing lucky and unlucky days) and introduced more favorable magical techniques and medical prescriptions, which are comparable to those found in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos and non-Hippocratic Greek medicine. Babylonian melothesia (i.e., the science of charting how zodiacal signs affect the human body) offers the most likely solution explaining the Uruk tablet.

Utilizing a great variety of previously unknown cuneiform tablets, Ancient Babylonian Medicine: Theory and Practice examines the way medicine was practiced by various Babylonian professionals of the 2nd and 1st millennium B.C. Represents the first overview of Babylonian medicine utilizing cuneiform sources, including archives of court letters, medical recipes, and commentaries written by ancient scholars Attempts to reconcile the ways in which medicine and magic were related Assigns authorship to various types of medical literature that were previously considered anonymous Rejects the approach of other scholars that have attempted to apply modern diagnostic methods to ancient illnesses

This collection of articles is the first collection of studies on the specific subject of disease in Babylonia, based upon actual medical texts, with contributions by senior scholars who have spent years working on published and unpublished cuneiform medical texts. The volume contains editions of unpublished materials as well as syntheses of information about specific diseases in Babylonia, such as fever, published here for the first time. The volume will be important for anyone interested in the history of ancient medicine as well as being an important contribution to Assyriology.

To date, the pathbreaking medical contributions of the early Mesopotamians have been only vaguely understood. Due to the combined problems of an extinct language, gaps in the archeological record, the complexities of pharmacy and medicine, and the dispersion of ancient tablets throughout the museums of the world, it has been nearly impossible to get a clear and comprehensive view of what medicine was really like in ancient Mesopotamia. The collaboration of medical expert Burton R. Andersen and cuneiformist JoAnn Scurlock makes it finally possible to survey this collected corpus and discern magic from experimental medicine in Ashur, Babylon, and Nineveh. Diagnoses in Assyrian and Babylonian Medicine is the first systematic study of all the available texts, which together reveal a level of medical knowledge not matched again until the nineteenth century A.D. Over the course of a millennium, these nations were able to develop tests, prepare drugs, and encourage public sanitation. Their careful observation and recording of data resulted in a description of symptoms so precise as to enable modern identification of numerous diseases and afflictions.

Die bisherigen Bände von Franz Köchers Reihe zu babylonisch-assyrischen Medizintexten enthalten eigenhändige Umzeichnungen der Keilschrifttafeln medizinischen Inhalts und ausführliche Indices zur Auflistung aller bekannten Parallelstellen. Der nun vorgelegte Band ediert alle Tafeln aus den Bänden 1 bis 6, die sich mit Erkrankungen der Niere und des Darmausgangs befassen. Viele der Quellen aus dem Britischen Museum sind aus Fragmenten bekannt, die R. Campbell Thompson in Kopie wiedergegeben hat (Assyrian Medical Texts, 1923). In der Zwischenzeit wurden jedoch zahlreiche joins erkannt, was eine Neubearbeitung notwendig machte. Die Tafeln zu Nieren- und Darmerkrankungen werden daher im vorliegenden Band kopiert und ediert. Nach Teilübersetzungen durch R. Campbell Thompson (1929 und 1934), die nach heutigem Standard zudem als unzulänglich gelten, wird der Großteil dieser medizinischen Texte Assyriologen und Medizinhistorikern hier erstmals zugänglich gemacht. Eine interessante Beobachtung dabei ist, welch geringe Rolle Magie und magische Rituale in dieser Sammlung medizinischer Heilanweisungen spielen.

Franz Köchers Standardwerk zur Babylonischen und Assyrischen Medizin, das darauf angelegt war, Kopien der Texte mit Übersetzung und Kommentar vorzulegen, war bei seinem Tod 2002 unvollendet geblieben. Sechs Bände Umschriften mit jeweils kurzen einführenden Kommentaren und Zitaten von Parallelen und Duplikaten lagen vor. Die Publikation der Reihe wird nun mit Robert Biggs und Marten Stol als neuen Herausgebern fortgesetzt. Die neuen Bände enthalten vollständige Übersetzungen und philologische Kommentare und machen damit in aktuellen Untersuchungen die Babylonisch-Assyrischen Medizintexte für Medizinhistoriker zugänglich.

Franz Köchers Standardwerk zur Babylonischen und Assyrischen Medizin, das darauf angelegt war, Kopien der Texte mit Übersetzung und Kommentar vorzulegen, war bei seinem Tod 2002 unvollendet geblieben. Sechs Bände Umschriften mit jeweils kurzen einführenden Kommentaren und Zitaten von Parallelen und Duplikaten lagen vor. Die Publikation der Reihe wird nun mit Robert Biggs und Marten Stol als neuen Herausgebern fortgesetzt. Die neuen Bände enthalten vollständige Übersetzungen und philologische Kommentare und machen damit in aktuellen Untersuchungen die Babylonisch-Assyrischen Medizintexte für Medizinhistoriker zugänglich.

Franz Köchers Standardwerk zur Babylonischen und Assyrischen Medizin, das darauf angelegt war, Kopien der Texte mit Übersetzung und Kommentar vorzulegen, war bei seinem Tod 2002 unvollendet geblieben. Sechs Bände Umschriften mit jeweils kurzen einführenden Kommentaren und Zitaten von Parallelen und Duplikaten lagen vor. Die Publikation der Reihe wird nun mit Robert Biggs und Marten Stol als neuen Herausgebern fortgesetzt. Die neuen Bände enthalten vollständige Übersetzungen und philologische Kommentare und machen damit in aktuellen Untersuchungen die Babylonisch-Assyrischen Medizintexte für Medizinhistoriker zugänglich.