This item is proffered as a fine case of the Niagara principle, whereby a single episode can imply a more widespread occurrence, for while it is at present unique I would infer that modelling abnormalities in bronze for reference was a regular practice on the grounds that, probably, there was a roomful somewhere in the Assyrian or Babylonian capitals of all manner of frightfulness done into metal for apprentices, later greeted with horror and melted down at once by conquering outsiders.
2. Magic and Medicine
Misfortune, sickness and disease were in the main attributed to demonic and supernatural forces, although human witches and malevolent practitioners were an additional threat. Incantations were available to combat most of these problems, either by staving them off or helping to exorcise them. Masters in such procedure called āshipus had the know-how to cope with everything from the overdue arrival of a baby to ensuring that a new tavern would turn a good profit. Their stock-in-trade of amulets, spells and rituals is known to us from a surprising number of magical tablets. Such healers worked side by side, and evidently in harmony, with a different group of specialists known as asûs, who were more expert in drugs, almost entirely plant-based, and therapeutic treatments.
Most of what we know about Babylonian medicine concerns what Tom Lehrer once lucidly referred to as the ‘diseases of the rich’. Almost all of our sources and other relevant medical information originate in major cities such as Ashur or Nineveh in the north of ancient Iraq, or Uruk and Babylon in the south, where healers treated members of the court circle, the high administration and powerful merchant families, as is reflected in the complexity of their ritual and the elaborate and no doubt costly requirements of their materia medica. The poor and unimportant, or those who lived in the countryside, would hardly ever encounter the highbrow stream of curative activity as we know it from written tablets, although itinerant doctors and local midwives undoubtedly brought comfort to many, and knew what to do if there was anything that could be done.
Medical praxis in town at its fullest relied on a blend of amulet or incantation with the administration of drugs. Again one is entitled to demand what curative understanding lay behind two thousand years of cuneiform healing documents. The same plants were consistently used for the same condition, and the careful re-copying and collecting of hard-won knowledge into large, many-columned library tablets where all information was arranged in a head-to-foot sequence demands the concession from us that Mesopotamian treatments were assuredly more beneficial than otherwise. As Guido Majno put it, most human ailments are self-healing anyway, but there was undoubtedly far more to Babylonian medicine than that. Mesopotamians fled from investigating inside the human body but they knew a good deal from the internal workings of sheep (and disembowelled soldiers) and they were expert observers of exterior manifestations. A good healer would recognise recurrent conditions and know what would in time right itself and what in his drug collection could help among all the astringents, balms, diuretics and emetics. Pharmacological plant knowledge was very extensive and carefully documented. The combination of āšipu and asû at the bedside of a worried chamberlain’s daughter must have been very effective, with swirling incense and muttered imprecations in the shadowy room, a pricey amulet to be pinned at the bed head, and foul-tasting preparations mixed from unspeakable things in vials that went down with reluctance and no doubt came up again soon after.
I think, having been immersed in these fascinating texts for decades, that the ancient Mesopotamian system can be summed up as simultaneously instinctive and observation-based, with a solid underpinning of long-endorsed pharmacological samples, while at the same time a good part of the whole was, unwittingly, placebic. Among it all there was good stuff to learn from them, for the Hippocratic Greeks were by no means above incorporating Babylonian ideas in their new-cast treatises.
MAGIC AND MEDICINE – A NIAGARA CASE
As time went by old magical spells in the Sumerian language were particularly valued by Babylonian exorcists, even though the words themselves were often no longer fully intelligible. Garbled spellings show that sometimes incantations had been learned by rote and written out by ear. A few spells are neither Sumerian nor Akkadian but true mumbo jumbo, the more foreign-sounding the better, especially if they come from the East, over the mountains in ancient Iranian Elam. There is an unusual yellowish tablet in large script in the British Museum inscribed with mumbo jumbo lines that were particularly effective for banishing unwanted domestic ghosts:
zu-zu-la-ah nu-mi-la-ah hu-du-la-ah hu-šu-bu-la-ah
These sonorous and outlandish words ending in -lah ‘sound’ like Elamite, and they can be found inscribed on other tablets or carved on obsidian amulets, frequently enough to show that this spell was popular over a long period. Collecting the examples together shows that the first magical word zu-zu-la-ah occurs in varying forms: si-en-ti-la-ah, zi-ib-shi-la-ah, zi-in-zi-la-ah and zi-im-zi-ra-ah. Neither the exorcist nor his client would have had any idea what these four words meant, but it just so happens that today we have the advantage over them. Around 2000 BC, Sumerian administrators imported fierce mastiffs from Elam over the border where such dogs were bred, and their handlers, who were very probably the only people who could handle them, had to come too.
Monthly rations records preserve the name and title of one such Elamite dog-handler, zi-im-zi-la-aḫ, ‘dog warden’, provoking, it cannot be denied, a trenchant ‘Aha!’ For this single name reveals the independent, mundane source of what later became an item of powerful magic. Some old record of Elamite personnel must have been discovered a thousand years or more later during a building operation – for Mesopotamians, unlike certain archaeologists, were always finding old tablets – and eventually brought to someone who could read. The bizarre run of unintelligible names in neat old signs could only be an irresistible spell of great antiquity, and it is not hard to imagine how the tablet itself would have been prized and its message ultimately incorporated into regular exorcistic practice: Now this is a really old spell from faraway in the East … I am not going to pronounce these words aloud for we should only whisper them, but if we write them on a stone and you wear it, or hang it up over there, there will be no more visitations …
There is another odd thing about Mesopotamian magical amulets of stone. The inscriptions are often in truly atrocious handwriting, with cuneiform signs split in half or even divided over two lines, both heinous betrayals of scribal convention. Fortunately the worst specimens have been properly excavated on ancient sites, otherwise everyone would just say they were forgeries. Of course one could argue that these were not the work of scribes as such, but of illiterate craftsmen who engraved the scene on one side and blind copied the text from a master draft on the other. This explanation, however, will not wash. Magical inscriptions conventionally need to be free of error to be effective, and figural carvings on amulets are, in stark contrast to the written signs, often of such a high standard that they showcase the capabilities of craftsmen who could never have been satisfied with shoddy distortion of the signs. Hard stones were never cheap and even people who could not read at all would likely sense that such sloppy writing quality didn’t really justify the cost. At the same time, however, cuneiform spells on amulets can employ the rarest sign usages, reflecting highly learned input, and I think there must be another explanation to reconcile such incompatible evidence. Some incantations, like those against the she-demon Lamashtu who preyed on newborn babies, occur on many amulets, which list her seven cover names showing that everyone knew who she was. Perhaps the Babylonians had the idea that, if a common spell were legibly or beautifully written, Lamashtu, who had seen it all before, would recognise it from afar and be undeterred, as it was unfamiliar, whereas she might tell herself that a hard-to-identify incantation with distorted signs and obtuse spellings might be something dangerous, and move away to another house, just to be on the safe side. Identifying a familiar cuneiform inscription from twenty paces is perfectly possible: it is quite
fun to do it when visitors bring in a stamped Nebuchadnezzar brick, which can be completely translated into English before it is halfway out of the wrapping.
3. Ghosts
It is an arguable proposition that human beings, whatever they may say, believe in ghosts. With the Babylonians there can be no doubt at all; their attitude to the restless dead is matter-of-fact and unselfconscious, and no one ever quizzically asked a neighbour waiting at a fruit stall if they ‘really believed’ in them. Ghosts were a common trouble, for anyone who died in dramatic circumstances or was not properly laid to rest or just felt abandoned by their descendants could come back and hang about disturbingly. At some periods dead family members were buried under house floors, and offerings had to be made to them via a special pipe. Seeing a ghost was troublesome; hearing them speak was much more worrying and the āšipu practitioner had a whole bag of tricks for sending ghosts back where they belonged once and for all. A typical ritual involved furnishing a little clay model of the ghost that was to be buried with a partner – male or female as was appropriate – and setting them up with all they needed for the return journey and peaceful retirement when they got there. These rituals, too, are elaborate; one exorcist determined to give clear instructions to a follower included a drawing of a ghost as a guide in making the model (see this page).
There was another, more worrying side to ghostly presence. Many diseases and illnesses in the medical omens were attributed to the ‘hand’ of a god, a goddess or other supernatural entities. Frequently mentioned among these is the Hand of a Ghost, which caused, among other afflictions, hearing problems (by slipping in via the ears) and mental disturbance. Unhappy ghosts whose legitimate needs were not attended to turned vengeful and became much more dangerous.
THE RIGHT END OF THE TELESCOPE
This huge mass of written cuneiform testimony, assorted religious texts, omens, medical and magical texts especially, is chock full of human ideas, for they represent the ways in which sentient individuals tried to make sense of their world and cope with it on all levels. The structure through which their data is presented is formulaic without being synthetic. Mesopotamian ideas, and therefore their sum of knowledge, come down to us in a specific kind of packaging. This packaging is above all practical, for its sole purpose was to present what was inherited from earlier times in usable, retrievable form. Knowledge derived from observation and its amplification was extensive and diverse but the fruit of the whole was never, or hardly ever, subjected to the type of analytical synthesis that a modern person, or an ancient Greek, would take for granted. No statement of principle or theoretical summary comes out of the cuneiform resources at our disposal.
This characteristic provokes the enquiry, difficult to satisfy, of the extent to which such intellectual processes took place at all. My own view is that the intelligent human mind is not always fettered by tradition, and I find it much harder to believe that no Babylonian ever asked himself philosophical or even non-conformist questions and that what we happen to have of the Babylonian mind on clay is all there was. It is far from valueless to consider how Babylonian ideas came about and functioned, and, to some extent, to visualise their practitioners.
There are two principal strands to knowledge storage. One is sign and word lists, which – as already indicated – I would categorise as reference works, the other a more intellectual branch which I would like to call If-thinking. Underlying both systems is a tacit principle of textual balance.
Lexical compositions are set up so that a word in the left-hand column is equated with another on the right. Lexical lists thus actually look like what they are, the juxtaposed entries neatly opposite one another. (An exception sometimes occurs in school texts when lazier pupils wrote out the whole of the left column before the right column; halfway down, the entries no longer match properly, with very unhelpful results.) Two juxtaposed words in a lexical text, most commonly Sumerian equated with Akkadian, do not necessarily share lexical identity to the point that word A means absolutely the same as B, but the system indicates rather that there is a strong overlap between them: A can and often does translate best as B, but not always. The same phenomenon occurs in translating between any two languages today; it is curiously difficult to pair words whose full range of nuanced meaning is identical in both cases.
The desire for balance or equation underpins several categories of Akkadian compilations which begin with the word ‘If’. This is no classification invented by me, for there is actually a Babylonian technical word that means ‘a composition beginning with the word “if”,’ – šummu. It derives from šumma, the normal word for ‘if’ itself, and we can see that the collected paragraphs of a law collection or diagnostic medical omens were known to librarians as the šummus.
Laws in codes such as that of Hammurabi represent the most stripped-down manifestation of the idea:
If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.
One deed or event leads unambiguously and inexorably to its consequence, in this case exemplifying the Bible-like eye-for-an-eye ruling (even if the literal penalty was not always exacted). This is straightforward. The same structural format of ‘If A then B’, however, applies equally to two much broader fields: divination and medicine.
DIVINING WITH ‘IF’
Let us imagine that the king of Babylonia in the second millennium BC was contemplating a punitive raid over the Elamite border to the east. His first move would be to turn to his court diviner to establish whether this projected foray would go over well with the gods and which day would be fortuitous. The diviner’s training would lead him to identify sufficient diagnostic data on the various freshly extricated sheep’s organs (allowing for the internal hierarchy) to enable him to predict that the king should be victorious and Thursday should be good.
The diviner’s job under such circumstances was always complex: he had to tell the king authoritatively, in accordance with traditional lore and perhaps backed up with reference works, whatever he judged that the king wanted to hear without being obvious about it, and doing so in such a way that he and his colleagues always had a let-out in case of disaster. In a non-Versailles type of court the king, if a powerful man, might be served by a loyal court diviner who would do his best to manoeuvre conscientiously through the pitfalls; at Arabian-Nights Nineveh, where there was an abundance of talented and ambitious diviners with more than one agenda between them, it is not hard to imagine the subtle play of loyalty and testimony that would circle around all state-level omen taking; wonderful letters come out of that courtly world.
HEALING WITH ‘IF’
The same formal ‘If A then B’ structure is fundamental to Mesopotamian healing literature for,
(a) cause-of-symptom analysis by medical omens:
If a sick man’s body is hot and cold and his attack changes a lot:
Hand of Sin the Moon God.
If a sick man’s body is hot and cold but he does not sweat,
Hand of a Ghost, a message from his personal god.
(b) nature-of-symptom analysis to prescribe therapy:
If a woman has difficulty in giving birth, bray a north-facing root of ‘male’ mistletoe, mix in sesame oil, rub seven times in a downward direction over the lower part of her abdomen and she will give birth quickly.
If during a man’s sickness an inflammation affects him in his lower abdomen, pulverize together sumlalu and dog’s-tongue plant, boil in beer, bind on him and he will get better.
(c) nature-of-symptom analysis to predict outcome:
If his larynx makes a croaking sound he will die.
If during his illness either his hands or his feet grow weak, it is no stroke:
he will recover.
Predictions vary from ‘he will get better’ to ‘he will die’ with many variants in between.
Actually it has worried me for years that cuneiform scholars today invariably translate omen predictions within the ‘If A then B’ system after the model the king w
ill triumph over his enemy, and medical prescriptions are made to promise he will get better. How is it that either system could allow certainty? Blithe predictions that someone will get better after a calculated interval or even an unspecified interval are probably more than any professional doctor would care to make nowadays. I think we must assume that all professional prognostications in ancient Mesopotamia were delivered with such riders as ‘in as much as we can judge …’ or ‘features like this tend to suggest …’ The whole process of taking or interpreting omens was, as I see it, delicately orchestrated with immense flexibility and subtlety, both physical and intellectual. We might also realistically assume that any military decision concerning a military plan which derived from omen work would never see the army setting out on a march there and then; level-headed input would always be required from the king’s chief of staff, who might privately have a low opinion of ‘gut-readers’ and much prefer their own sober assessment of arms, armour, chariotry and supplies before agreeing to any departure date.
The Ark Before Noah Page 7
