From left to right: T. Hidde, C. Johnson, M. Hoppe, U. Steinert, M. Geller, M. Lorenz, S. Panayotov, E. Schmidtchen Photo by: F. Badalanova Geller, 2013
BabMed represents the first ever comprehensive study of ancient Babylonian medical science since the decipherment of cuneiform, comprising the largest ancient collection of medical data before Hippocrates. The latest phase of Babylonian medicine, as preserved in Aramaic in the Babylonian Talmud, has never been systematically studied in the light of older cuneiform materials. The absence of accessible cuneiform medical literature has forced recent medical histories to bypass Babylonian medicine, while Aramaic medicine in the Babylonian Talmud has largely been ignored. BabMed tests a number of ‘high risk’ propositions, including two key hypotheses:
1) cuneiform survived much longer than previously suspected, and
2) Aramaic medicine in the Babylonian Talmud mostly derives from Akkadian medicine.
BabMed will introduce a new paradigm for knowledge transfer which will recognise the barriers between ancient arts of medicine and how they were overcome in antiquity. One such barrier was script and language.
The BabMed Project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC Grant agreement no. 323596.
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