Epilepsy in Babylonia.

• Author: Cassel, Jay

This book provides something of real value: a new medical text, increasing available information on medical knowledge and illness in the ancient world. The subject of seizures ("epilepsy") is actually very complicated - as a survey of current medical texts would reveal - and the author has my sympathy as he ventures into the terrain of Babylonian thinking about this phenomenon. The very brief introduction does not, however, prepare the reader adequately. The discussion in the commentary is often difficult to follow, which is the result of several problems: the complex subject, a quirky organization, the simultaneous discussion of several different questions, and an awkward use of English. The book is cumbersome, at times confusing, and in places populated by red herrings, but it does contain useful information.

In the middle of the book is a transliteration and translation of two key texts: sections of the "Diagnostic Handbook" edited in antiquity by Esagil-kin-apli, and a second one, the "Gurney text," which is possibly an earlier version of the same handbook. I am not an Assyriologist and so cannot comment in detail on the quality of the translation. The author says that it will be as literal as possible. "The result is an awful and wooden style inexcusable in literary translation" (p. 56). Stol is to be commended for trying to be accurate rather than elegant but the result is often unsatisfactory. For example, the "Handbook" cannot really say "the roving bennu-epilepsy has seized him" (p. 57). Stol has gone from translating to embedding modern terms and concepts in the text. My major reservation, however, is not about the way the translation is done but what gets translated. Why not include everything we currently have from Babylonia on the phenomenon? Stol's book only presents a summary of the therapeutic texts (chapter six: "Protection and Therapeutics"). As a compilation of primary documents, the book is not as "comprehensive" as the publisher suggests.

As a secondary source, a discussion of Babylonian thought about seizures and allied phenomena, the book is strange. When preparing a commentary on non-Western and ancient medical texts, there are basically two options: a careful presentation of knowledge as it stood at the time in the terms of that culture, or a paralleling of ancient knowledge with modern understanding. The latter is usually necessary to some degree for a modern Western reader to have any sense of what he is looking...