This monograph begins with a puzzle: a Babylonian text from late 5th century BCE Uruk associating various diseases with bodily organs, which has evaded interpretation. The correct answer may reside in Babylonian astrology, since the development of the zodiac in the late 5th century BCE offered innovative approaches to the healing arts. The zodiac-a means of predicting the movements of heavenly bodies-transformed older divination (such as hemerologies listing lucky and unlucky days) and introduced more favorable magical techniques and medical prescriptions, which are comparable to those found in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos and non-Hippocratic Greek medicine. Babylonian melothesia (i.e., the science of charting how zodiacal signs affect the human body) offers the most likely solution explaining the Uruk tablet.

Previous volumes of Franz Koecher'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. Mostof 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.