Magic and Medicine in Ancient Mesopotamia--A New Collection of Translations.

• Author: Panayotov, Strahil V.
• Position: Critical essay

This Sourcebook for Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine is a welcome new contribution to the field of Mesopotamian medicine and magic. It is well structured and contains a wide variety of diagnostic, pharmacological, and therapeutic documents. Also included are their associated commentaries and several healing rituals. Further welcome is the fact that Scurlock has edited some texts for the first time (p. xiii). The Sourcebook accomplishes its purpose in illustrating Mesopotamian healing texts, reflecting the fact that Scurlock knows the material in great detail. Of course such an ambitious contribution to the field will elicit additions and corrections from colleagues.

There are several areas of particular concern, general and specific. After some discussion of the book's general contents we will consider Scurlock's edition of the Assur Medical Catalog (hereafter AMC; UGU in the Sourcebook, pp. 295-306). Furthermore, we will make some observations relevant to AMC.

Scurlock's self-referential citations occasionally overshadow the abundant and useful information in the Sourcebook, since Scurlock and Andersen 2005 appears multiple times on every single page with notes, while other relevant literature has been ignored.

In the introduction, Scurlock leads the reader into the problematic discussion of the two healing professions: asu and dsipulmasmasu. Scurlock is confident that she has given an accurate description of the two Mesopotamian healing professions (p. 2 n. 3). Nevertheless, Scurlock's analysis of asu as 'pharmacist' and dsipu as 'physician' is anachronistic, based on her own work, but never really substantiated. Different points of view and description of the asu's and dsipu's healing areas may be found in Hee[beta]el (2009: 13-15), Geller (2010: 43-55), and Schwemer (2015: 26-27).

Chapter 1 is devoted to the standard diagnostic and prognostic series known as the Diagnostic Handbook. It was used to identify a condition, disease, or agency and whether it is fatal or not. The first two tablets of the Diagnostic Handbook, however, are not included in the Sourcebook.

Chapter 2 provides a good sample of different drug lists. These are handbooks containing plants, minerals, Dreckapotheke, alternative/foreign names, or prescriptions of drugs for specific illnesses. Both the asu and the dsipu used such drug lists for learning and teaching purposes, or for consultation (Attinger 2008: 27; see the references to BAM 1[asutu] and KAR 44 [asiputu]). This illustrates only one problematic aspect of the strict division of the healing professions, since they used similar techniques and working materials.

Chapter 3 lists therapeutic texts that were presumably in use mostly by the asu. Scurlock's edition of the first part of AMC is also included here. This work is crucial since it has long been a desideratum. AMC is the only known catalog of medical compositions (or series) from the first millennium BC. Therefore, it is central for understanding the organization and serialization of medical knowledge in first-millennium Mesopotamia. Scurlock relies upon medical compositions mainly from Nineveh for the reconstruction of the broken AMC lines. The fact that manuscripts from Nineveh have been used by Scurlock to reconstruct AMC, which comes from a different city--Assur--might seem strange at first sight, but it is methodologically appropriate and will be clarified below.

Chapter 4 deals with medical commentaries, in which difficult phrases have been explained. But it is perplexing that Scurlock does not refer to Frahm's standard work on the subject (2011).

Chapters 5-10 provide a wide range of interesting texts demonstrating what we assume to be the asu's work. However, asipus also copied such texts, as occasionally noted in the Sourcebook (pp. 389, 410, 430). This illustrates once more not only the similarities connecting both healing professions, but also the difficulties of drawing a clear dividing line between them. The source material (chapters 5-10) seems to have been ordered according to an ancient anatomic principle: from head to foot, which resembles the order of the first part of AMC. It is noteworthy that in chapters 5-10 there is no therapy for "hands." It also seems that there are so far no extant therapeutic texts dealing exclusively with hand problems, although "hands" are a topic of the Diagnostic Handbook Tablet 11 (Sourcebook, pp. 82-93). This is presumably due to the chance of discovery, but wound treatments (Sourcebook, pp. 438-40) might refer to "hands" as well.

Chapter 11 has the anachronistic title "Neurology," but for the Mesopotamians such conditions were held to be due to external agencies such as ghosts and demons.

Chapter 12 deals with female medical care. For another perspective on the view of female conditions and how they were viewed, the reader may also find the systematic overview in Couto-Ferreira (2014) to be useful.

The final two chapters (13-14) in the therapeutic section address pediatrics and poisoning.

The third and last part of the Sourcebook (chapters 15-16) presents a choice of texts in which healing was done in a more magical manner. Here, in addition to therapeutic recipes, a major part of the healing process was achieved with the help of incantations, charms, and rituals.

THE FIRST PART OF AMC AND THE MEDICAL...