Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen

Previous volumes of Franz Köcher’s series on Babylonian and Assyrian medical literature have provided autograph copies of cuneiform medical tablets with extensive indices listing all known parallel passages. The present volume edits all of the tablets listed in volumes 1–6 of Babylonisch-assyrische Medizin dealing with renal and rectal diseases. Many of the British Museum sources have been known from fragments, copied by R. Campbell Thompson in his Assyrian Medical Texts (1923), but many new joins have been made since that time, and hence tablets dealing with renal and rectal diseases have been copied and edited in the present volume. Although some of these medical texts have been previously translated by R. Campbell Thompson in 1929 and 1934, these translations are now generally considered to be inadequate by modern standards. Most of these medical texts are being made available to Assyriologists and medical historians for the first time. One interesting feature is how seldom magic and magical rituals feature within these medical recipes.

This book brings together ancient manuscripts of the large compendium of Mesopotamian exorcistic incantations known as Udug.hul (Utukku Lemnutu), directed against evil demons, ghosts, gods, and other demonic malefactors within the Mesopotamian view of the world. It allows for a more accurate appraisal of variants arising from a text tradition spread over more than two millennia and from many ancient libraries.

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compendia and their complex history is still characterised by many difficulties, debates and gaps due to fragmentary or unpublished evidence.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.

There is to date no comprehensive treatment of eye disease texts from ancient Mesopotamia, and no English translation of this material is available. This volume is the first complete edition and commentary on Mesopotamian medicine from Nineveh dealing with diseases of the eye. This ancient work, languishing in British Museum archives since the 19th century, is preserved on several large cuneiform manuscripts from the royal library of Ashurbanipal, from the 7th century BC. The longest surviving ancient work on diseased eyes, the text predates by several centuries corresponding Hippocratic treatises. The Nineveh series represents a systematic array of eye symptoms and therapies, also showing commonalities with Egyptian and Greco-Roman medicine. Since scholars of Near Eastern civilizations and ancient and general historians of medicine will need to be familiar with this material, the volume makes this aspect of Babylonian medicine fully accessible to both specialists and non-specialists, with all texts being fully translated into English.

This volume contains the first comprehensive edition of the most important medical compendium on gastrointestinal ailments, bile-induced diseases, and fever from ancient Mesopotamia: the Stomach Treatise from Ashurbanipal’s royal library at Nineveh. Assembled three millennia ago from symptom descriptions, drug recipes, incantations, and healing rituals, this treatise formed part of the only authoritative source of knowledge on therapeutic medicine at the time, the Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia. With numerous textual improvements based on first-hand examinations of the manuscripts and more than a dozen new joins, the Stomach Treatise now finds its rightful place alongside the Ebers Papyrus and the Greco-Roman medical traditions as one of the key representatives of ancient medical thought.

Treatments for women from ancient Mesopotamia form the most extensive medical corpus on female health from antiquity beside the Hippocratic gynaecological works. This volume presents a comprehensive edition of cuneiform texts from the first millennium BCE concerned with women's health issues.

The book, which includes numerous hitherto unpublished tablets, contains diagnostic and therapeutic texts, ranging from medical prescriptions to incantations, rituals and fertility tests. Selected texts from the second millennium BCE as well as scholarly commentaries on diagnostic or therapeutic texts from the first millennium BCE are also included in the volume. While the main thematic focus of Mesopotamian women’s healthcare lies on female fertility, pregnancy and birth, the corpus covers an impressive range of health problems spanning from haemorrhage to cosmetic treatments. Complemented by philological commentaries and an introduction that provides an overview of the textual history and a discussion of medical concepts and practices, this textbook forms an up-to-date survey for both specialists and non-specialist readers interested in ancient Mesopotamian healing traditions.

Alongside examinations of its structure, reconstruction, terminology, and the aesthiologies of disease associated with cosmological and religious convictions, this volume deals with the systematics of the process of interpreting signs in the Babylonian-Assyrian Diagnosis Handbook. Part two presents a new annotated edition of the extensive second chapter in "score" (Partitur) transliteration, in a transcription in verse, and in translation.