A Retrospective History of Babylonian Medicine

The usual surveys of Babylonian medicine follow standard historical chronologies of Mesopotamia, beginning in the early 2nd millennium BCE and ending at some point in the Seleucid or Hellenistic centuries of the late 1st millennium BCE, assuming a rather abrupt end to Akkadian medical writings. This chapter argues that the substantial weight of traditional Akkadian medical theory and practice impacted medicine of Late Antiquity. The very first entry in the third section of the Syriac Book of Medicine is sufficiently diagnostic to indicate the medical background of the recipe. In any case, the residual influences of Akkadian on Syriac can be detected only within the applied medicine recipes, with little or no information regarding any theoretical foundations of earlier Babylonian medicine. Apart from medical prescriptions, one of the main sources of Akkadian medicine was a 40-tablet composition of diagnostic symptoms, conveniently labeled as the Diagnostic Handbook.