Author: Apiladey ApilSin
Date: Oct 23, 2002 - 01:47

This post was made by the one and only Berosus Etana, who I'm hoping will find his way back to AW Babylon: "

The history of Western civilization is characterized by superstition at first, followed by science. However, in ancient Mesopotamia, progress sometimes went in the opposite direction. This quote comes straight from the Time-Life book Sumer: Cities of Eden, and tells a story about Samuel Noah Kramer (1895-1990), the greatest Sumerian scholar of our time.

Kramer's skill as a Sumerologist was severely tested in the 1940s by one particular tablet from Nippur--a clay rectangle only about the size of a picture postcard on which a Sumerian physician of the third millennium B.C. had recorded his favorite medical prescriptions. Recalling his struggle to decipher the text, Kramer said: In the course of the past decade, I worked at the tablet repeatedly, but made relatively little progress.

Then in the spring of 1953, Kramer found a collaborator, Martin Levey, a young chemist, who had a doctorate in the history of science. Once again, Kramer recalled, I took the tablet from its cupboard, but this time it did not go back until it was at least tentatively translated. While Kramer worked on the Sumerian signs, words, and grammar, Levey applied his specialized knowledge of the ancient chemical and technological processes to identify the materials used in the more than one dozen prescriptions inscribed on the tablet.

Sumerian doctors made practical use of common mineral, animal, and vegetable derivatives. Sodium chloride (salt) and potassium nitrate (saltpeter) figured in many of the prescriptions. Snake skin and turtle shell were among the more exotic ingredients. Most of the medicinals, however, were extracted from the seeds, bark, and gum of plants--cassia, myrtle, asafetida, thyme, willow, fig, date, and others. The remedies concocted from these ingredients were intended for either topical use or to be dissolved in wine or beer for internal consumption.

One prescription for a poultice reads: Purify and grind to powder a water-snake skin, add the plant, the root of myrtle, crushed alkali, powdered barley, the skin of the kushippu bird, then pour water, boil it, and let the water be run off. Bathe [the sick organ] in it, and rub oil over it.

Unfortunately, not only have some portions of the text resisted the efforts of the translators, but the physician neglected to say what diseases the remedies are for. How efficacious they were is open to considerable doubt, but at least they appear to have been formulated on more of a scientific rather than superstitious basis.

Not one god or demon is mentioned anywhere throughout the text, Kramer remarked. It is a startling and rather unexpected fact that this clay document, the oldest 'page' in medical history as yet uncovered, is completely free from the mystical and irrational elements which dominate Babylonian medicine of latter days.

I wonder if this means the author of the clay tablet was the Sumerian equivalent of a quack? I mean, is it legal to prescribe medicines without reciting the appropriate mumbo jumbo? "