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Ancient Mesopotamia, the “cradle of civilization,” is one of the sources of our own Western medical tradition.2 It vies with ancient Egypt for the honor of having produced the world’s earliest recorded medical texts. And yet, even the most basic questions remain unanswered. FromwhatdiseasesdidancientMesopotamianssuffer?Withoutthebenefitofmoderntechnology ,howwellweretheyabletodistinguishoneillnessfromanother?Whatherbsorother medicinal substances did they use to treat their patients? In view of the antiquity of this medical tradition, a surprisingly large amount of information is available to answer these questions. In addition to a little over half of the three thousand or so entries originally contained in the forty tablets of the diagnostic/prognostic handbook, there are over nine hundred tablets or tablet fragments containing instructions for the preparation of treatments. Thisbookaimstobringourknowledgeof ancientMesopotamianmedicinetothesame level as that enjoyed by other medical traditions of the ancient world. Previously, of preGreekmedicaltraditionsintheancientNearEast ,onlythatofancientEgyptwaswellknown outside its own field.3 This is in part due to the presence of special types of evidence in Egypt (such as mummies) which allow the existence of various modern diseases in ancient times to be independently established. Such archaeologically recoverable sources of information do not currently exist for ancient Mesopotamia, although the science of bone analysis, still in its infancy and sufferingbadlyfromalackofrelevantskeletalmaterial ,mayyetprovidepreciselythismissinglink. Nonetheless, the presence in ancient Mesopotamia of a corpus of texts that were designed for the training and use of ancient physicians allows for a type of study that is possible nowhere else in the ancient world, including Greece. Parchment is highly perishable, and chapter 1 The Ancient Mesopotamian Context A sore without an asû (pharmacist) is like hunger without food. —W. G. Lambert, BWL 242–243 ii 35–371 we have every reason to believe that what we have of Hippocratic medicine is only a fraction of what originally existed. In addition, there is the vexing question of which manuscripts actually belong to Hippocrates of Kos and his followers and which to competing traditions such as that of Knidos. Moreover, we have a decisive advantage in approaching ancient Mesopotamian medicaltextsnotavailabletotheeighteenth -andnineteenth-centuryfoundingfathersofAssyriology and quite apart from the subsequent accumulation of material and great advances made in the basic interpretation of texts. Our own modern system of medicine was founded on the premise that the rationalist and deductive approach pioneered by ancient Greek physicians was henceforth to be scrapped in favor of an inductive approach and an empiricist philosophy of “whatever works.” This new development came at a cost to the history of medicine, since, as time progresses, the way in which modern physicians approach their patients, diagnose illnesses, and recommend treatments will inevitably diverge further and further from the Hippocratic norm, making the treatises attributed to the “father of medicine ” and the elaborations of Galen ever more foreign and incomprehensible to modern practitioners of medicine. The ancient Greeks’ loss is, however, ancient Mesopotamia’s gain. As has long been recognized ,aninductive,empiricistapproachispreciselythattakenbyancientMesopotamian physicians to their patients. What this means is that, once the absence of lab tests has been accounted for, the types of clinical information collected by ancient Mesopotamian physicians are comprehensible to modern doctors in ways that ancient Greek descriptions of diseases will now never be. The Sumerian Legacy The oldest known ancient Mesopotamian medical text is a therapeutic manual, written inSumerian,whichdatesfromtheUrIIIperiod(2112–2004b.c.e.).Thistextis,inturn,part of a long tradition of scholarship whose beginnings may be traced back in Mesopotamia to the production of the earliest written records in the mid-fourth millennium b.c.e. or earlier. The Sumerians, a people speaking an agglutinative language with no known relatives, and their northerly neighbors the Akkadians, a people speaking a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, created their civilizations from the most unpromising of materials: mud, clay, and water. Rising in the Armenian Taurus ranges near Mount Ararat, the Euphrates River meanders for 2,780 km across the modern states of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq to the Persian Gulf. The comparatively shorter Tigris (only 1,950 km long) flows immediately southward from its sources just south of Lake Van in eastern Turkey. Both rivers slow as the gradient lessens, and form a number of shifting channels in whatisnowsouthernIraqbeforelosingthemselvesinamazeofswampywetlandsatthehead of the Persian Gulf.4 These marshes were home to wild boar and waterfowl, various types of reeds and grasses, and innumerable mosquitoes. Aside from these marshes and a strip of green along the rivers, the land up to the latitude of ancient As˙s˙ur (modern Qalat SHerqat) was a desert, whose parched earth received less than the...

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