Author: Apiladey ApilSin
Date: Oct 26, 2002 - 00:50

The Babylonians had several terms which could be rendered as inflammation. The word ummu (meaning "the hot thing") could be used, but it more often referred to fever. If the evolution of the cuneiform ummu is traced back to the Sumerian pictogram, we get what seems to be a flaming brazier. Guido Majno, in The Healing Hand, also shows the evolution of a similar cuneiform which is written as the word ummu, but enclosed in a frame. When this is traced back to the pictogram, it appears to be a brazier inside a human torso (with no arms shown). This fever inside the chest (or heart) is the word for love.

The word most often used for inflammation is napppahu, which is derived from the verb nappahu (with the 2nd 'a' overlined), meaning "to blow". This sounds a bit puzzling, but read Majno's explanation, "To us, accustomed as we are to matches, blowing is connected rather with extinguishing. We blow our fires off. It was quite otherwise for people who had to start their fires by friction: they blew their fires on and must have puffed a lot to kindle them. In fact, the Akkadian way of saying "to light a fire" was "to blow a fire." The blacksmith was called nappahu [same as the verb], and if the accent is removed, the word becomes his bellows. So when the asu said "inflammation," to his patient, it must have sounded like something between "the burning thing" and "the blown thing"."

The word for pus (sharku) involved two pictogram signs. The first looked like an upside-down Y (symbolizing a branching vein?) and meant "blood". The second seemed to be a simple drawing representing a sunrise and meaning "white" (an upward curving horizon line, with a half exposed sun (no rays) rising behind it). Sharku has the general meaning of "white sap". Other than the plasters described in previous posts, Babylonians used heat to treat abscesses. Here is another quote from Majno, "The asu seems to have realized the helpful effect of heat in speeding up the formation of an abscess. The process, empirically referred to as maturation, is not an old wives' tale but a fairly precise biological fact. It is the last stage in a sequence of events whereby a focus of infection is first surrounded by white blood cells (pus), then walled off, cut off, and finally digested by the enzymes contained in the pus; at this stage it is "ripe" and ready to be let out. Heat tends to speed up this process by increasing the flow of blood, hence the supply of white blood cells."

The following is a poetic charm to be read by the asipu (physician who relies chiefly on magic) while treating abscesses.

The sieve, the sieve
The red sieve hath come
And masked the red cloud
The red rain hath come
And deluged the red wastes
The red flood hath come
And filled the red river
The red gardener hath come
And brought spade and tupsikku-board
That he may dam back the red waters
Red door forsooth, red bolt forsooth
Their gateway is shut [?]
But that which shall open you
[is] planting and watering,
Planting and watering.

Majno says, "the pus is symbolized in the "red rain," "red wastes," "red flood," and so on, and then quotes Campbell Thompson (the most esteemed expert on Babylonian medical herbs) about this charm, "As usual, the charm begins with the beginning of things, in this case the rain-clouds which bring the flood ultimately to be dammed back by the Red Gardener." I agree with Majno when he then says, "I am not aware that pus ever rose to higher poetry".