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In the Wake of the Compendia presents papers that examine the
history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions
and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume
offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of
technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship
between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early
scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive
from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and
cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging
from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of
Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the
properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions
on the history of Mesopotamian "rationality," epistemic labels for
tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized
case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these
studies offer an overview of several important moments in the
development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant
contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical
knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.
Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of
description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of
scientific description. The primary way of divining the
characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or
acquired, was to observe the patient's external characteristics and
behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of
descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what
we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced
through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before
arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures
such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman
world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with
typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial
culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and
ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links
between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in
characterological 'types' that had emerged in the Hellenistic
period. This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these
modalities of description in antiquity.
Babylonian medicine is the most important corpus of ancient
medicine prior to the Greeks. This volume provides a comprehensive
picture of how gasrtrointestinal illness, jaundice and related
fevers, as well as diarrhea were treated in ancient Mesopotamia.
The editions include transliterations, straightforward translations
and essential commentary, and are divided into three main sections:
the standard corpus for the treatment of gastrointestinal illness
in Royal Library in Nineveh (otherwise known as the sualu
subcorpus), the related group of texts that attribute intestinal
disturbances to malevolent ghosts and a third group of texts
focused on diarrhea. In addition to the standard compendia,
isolated precursor texts, which were incorporated into these
compendia, are included here in appendices. This volume provides an
overarching picture of the entire field of gastrointestinal
illnesses and related conditions in ancient Mesopotamia.
The missing piece in so many histories of Mesopotamian technical
disciplines is the client, who often goes unnoticed by present-day
scholars seeking to reconstruct ancient disciplines in the Near
East over millennia. The contributions to this volume investigate
how Mesopotamian medical specialists interacted with their patients
and, in doing so, forged their social and professional identities.
The chapters in this book explore rituals for success at court, the
social classes who made use of such rituals, and depictions of
technical specialists on seal impressions and in later Greco-Roman
iconography. Several essays focus on Egalkura: rituals of entering
the court, meant to invoke a favorable impression from the
sovereign. These include detailed surveys and comparative studies
of the genre and its roots in the emergent astrological paradigm of
the late first millennium BC. The different media and modalities of
interaction between technical specialists and their clients are
also a central theme explored in detailed studies of the sickbed
scene in the iconography of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and the
transmission of specialized pharmaceutical knowledge from the
Mesopotamian to the Greco-Roman world. Offering an encyclopedic
survey of ritual clients attested in the cuneiform textual record,
this volume outlines both the Mesopotamian and the Greco-Roman
social contexts in which these rituals were used. It will be of
interest to students of the history of medicine, as well as to
students and scholars of ancient Mesopotamia. In addition to the
editor, the contributors include Netanel Anor, Siam Bhayro, Strahil
V. Panayotov, Maddalena Rumor, Marvin Schreiber, JoAnn Scurlock,
and Ulrike Steinert.
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