The Healing Goddess Gula: Towards an Understanding of Ancient Babylonian Medicine

233 Pages·2013·1.59 MB·English

by  Barbara Böck

The Healing Goddess Gula
Culture and History of the
Ancient Near East
Founding Editor
M.H.E. Weippert
Editor-in-Chief
Thomas Schneider
Editors
Eckart Frahm (Yale University)
W. Randall Garr (University of California, Santa Barbara)
B. Halpern (Pennsylvania State University)
Theo P.J. van den Hout (Oriental Institute)
Irene J. Winter (Harvard University)
VOLUME 67
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/chan
The Healing Goddess Gula
Towards an Understanding of
Ancient Babylonian Medicine
By
Barbara Böck
LEIdEN • BOSTON
2014
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ISSN 1566-2055
ISBN 978-90-04-26145-7 (hardback)
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To †Erika and †Franz Köcher

CONTENTS
Preface  ................................................................................................................. ix
1 Introduction  ............................................................................................... 1
1.1 Presentation of the Study  ............................................................ 1
1.2 Scope and Structure of the Book ............................................... 4
2 The Healing Goddess Gula: A Portrait  ............................................... 7
2.1 Gula’s Position in the Pantheon and Her Appearance in
Literature  .......................................................................................... 7
2.2 Gula in the Life of the Ancient Mesopotamians  .................. 15
2.3 Gula’s dog ......................................................................................... 38
3 Gula’s ‘Hand’ in the Handbook of diagnosis and Prognosis,
Sakikkû  ......................................................................................................... 45
3.1 Sakikkû VI: 19  ................................................................................... 49
3.2 Sakikkû XII iv: 16  ............................................................................. 50
3.3 Sakikkû XIII i: 55’  ............................................................................ 51
3.4 Sakikkû XXXIII  ................................................................................. 51
3.5 Sakikkû XL  ........................................................................................ 62
3.6 ‘Ninurta’s Hands’  ............................................................................ 69

4 Gula and Healing Spells .......................................................................... 77
4.1 Healing Spells Appealing to Gula  ............................................. 78
4.2 Healing Spells Referring to Gula and Her dog  ..................... 98
4.3 Incantations about Simmu, Skin Sore  ...................................... 109
4.4 Standard Formulas in Healing Spells Referring to Gula  .... 113
4.5 The Metaphorical Language of Healing Spells  ...................... 115
5 Gula’s Healing Plants  ............................................................................... 129
5.1 The Buʾšānu Plant aka Lišān Kalbi Plant  ................................ 131
5.2 The Ṣaṣuntu Plant  .......................................................................... 158

6 The Cultural Setting of Ancient Babylonian Medicine  ................. 165
6.1 The Healing Goddess in the Medical Literature:
A Recapitulation  ............................................................................. 165
6.2 Religion, Magic, Medicine  ........................................................... 176
viii contents
Bibliography  ...................................................................................................... 197
Index of Names and Subjects  ....................................................................... 211
Index of Words discussed  ............................................................................. 214
Incantation Incipits  ......................................................................................... 215
Texts Cited  ......................................................................................................... 216
PREFACE
As is well known, Franz Köcher was, up to the time of his death, pre-
paring the edition of the extant cuneiform text material dealing with
the Babylonian-Assyrian medical lore which was to appear in the series,
Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen, which
he founded. The work is extensive including the editiones principes of
the plant encyclopaedia uru.an.na: maštakal, named after its first line, the
‘(plant whose) place is in heaven: maštakal’, the plant descriptive text
Šammu šikinšu, ‘On the appearance of the medicinal plant’, vade mecum
texts or Lists of Simple Drugs, and all those medical prescriptions that rec-
ommend one single ingredient.
In the late 1990s F. Köcher entrusted me with the completion of his
lifetime project. Since his death in November 2002 I have not only been
revising and completing the various text editions but also adding a study
of the textual material which F. Köcher did not accomplish.1
In the course of this work I stumbled upon an intriguing line in one
of the cuneiform texts dealing with the use of medicinal plants when
employed as simple drugs, namely
u₂ ḫab mu!-šu₂ ur.gi₇ dnin.gi.zi.bar.ra
The plant, ḫab / buʾšānu, its alternative name is ‘Ninigizibara’s dog’.2
The present contribution grew out of the commentary to this very line
exploring the issue of the possible motivations for associating a plant
1 To be published as †F. Köcher & B. Böck, The Assyrian-Babylonian Drug Lore. J.V. Kin-
nier Wilson refers in his contribution “Notes on the Assyrian Pharmaceutical Series URU.
AN.NA: MAŠTAKAL,” JNES 64 (2005) p. 45 to a letter he received in June 1989 in which
F. Köcher writes, “meine Gesundheit ist in der Tat nicht die beste (. . .) Trotzdem versuche
ich, meine Uru.an.na-Ausgabe fertigzustellen. Im druck ist sie seit 1974!” Indeed, many
parts of the uru.an.na text edition he refers to in this letter had already been typeset by
the Walter de Gruyter publishing house. However, F. Köcher’s access from the late 1980s
to the middle of the 1990s to the extensive cuneiform material of the Sippar and Babylon
collections housed in The British Museum forced him not only to completely revise the
uru.an.na edition but also to include new material and to excerpt from the medical pre-
scriptions all those recipes that recommend simple drugs. He hoped that the cuneiform
medical texts from Sippar and Babylon would appear in volumes BAM VII and BAM VIII,
which explains, why he planned to publish the texts on medicinal plants in BAM IX. A final
study was envisaged to appear in BAM X.
2 The text is BAM I 1 iii: 20. See also Chapter 5.1.1 The buʾšānu plant.