Freie Universität Berlin

Vom 25. bis 27. August 2015 findet die 14. Christlich-Jüdische Sommeruniversität zum Thema “Der Eine und die Vielen. Messiaskonzeptionen im Judentum und Christentum” in Berlin statt.

BabMed-Projektleiter Prof. M.J. Geller ist mit einem Vortrag ‘The Birth of the Messiah by the River of Babylon” am Mittwoch, 26. August 2015 auf der Veranstaltung vertreten.

Weitere informationen und das vollständige Programm der 14. Christlich-Jüdischen Sommeruniversität finden Sie hier.

Agnes Kloocke

This international conference takes places at the University of Exeter, Devon, UK, 9- 11 September 2015.

Concepts and attitudes towards diet, health, and medicine in the Roman world were heavily influenced by Greek beliefs and practices. Later Greek and Roman medical writers such as Galen built upon a Greek foundation and followed existing traditions. Yet did Greek concepts of health and medicine spread to all regions of the Roman Empire?

The study of diet, health and medicine in the Roman world, from an archaeological perspective, has grown exponentially in the last few decades with the increased study of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological remains as well as advances in isotopic analysis. Nevertheless, the impact of Greek concepts on Roman beliefs and practices has never been fully explored, and at present, there has been no amalgamation of the literary and archaeological evidence. How do we assess Greek influence archaeologically? Can the claims of both Greek and Roman authors concerning health be reconciled with the existing bioarchaeological and material evidence?

This conference will examine the impact of Greek thought on Roman notions of diet, health and medicine from both the literary and archaeological perspectives with the goal of forming a more holistic understanding of the activities taking place to maintain good health amongst both the elite and non-elite members of Roman society.

For a provisional program please click here.

Tanja Hidde

This conference will take place from October 1-3, 2015 at St. Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin. Its organizers seek original contributions from scholars working on any aspect of the mutual exchange between medical theory and philosophical argument in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Recent PhDs or advanced graduate students especially encouraged. Keynote speakers are Heinrich von Staden, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, and R.J. Hankinson, Professor of Philosophy and Classics at The University of Texas at Austin.

For further information please click here. Questions should be directed to Joel E. Mann, joel.mann@snc.edu, or Ravi Sharma, rsharma@clarku.edu.

Tanja Hidde

This book by Hynek Bartoš on Philosophy and Dietetics in the Hippocratic ‘On Regimen’ was published recently by Brill: “It offers the first extended study published in English on the Hippocratic treatise On Regimen, one of the most important pre-Platonic documents of the discussion of human nature and other topics at the intersection of ancient medicine and philosophy. It is not only a unique example of classical Greek dietetic literature, including the most elaborated account of the micro-macrocosm and phusis–technē analogies, but it also provides the most explicit discussion of the soul-body opposition preceding Plato. Moreover, Bartoš argues, it is a rare example of an extant medical text which systematically draws on philosophical authorities, such as Heraclitus, Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and which had a decisive influence on both physicians, such as Galen, and philosophers, most notably Plato and Aristotle.”

Tanja Hidde

Visitors to Room 55 in the British Museum (London), the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gallery of Mesopotamia 1500–539 BC will find a radically transformed display. Often the galleries struggle to match the impact of temporary exhibitions, but over the last year a team of curators, designers, interpretation officers, conservators, assistant collections managers and others have worked hard to breathe fresh life into the permanent displays. In the south-east corner of Room 55 sits case 8, otherwise known as ‘The Ashurbanipal Library Case’. These are clay tablets from the cuneiform library of Ashurbanipal, 7th century BC king of Assyria.

Read more about this topic here.

Marius Hoppe

At the meeting of the European Biblical Association (EABS) in Cordoba (12.-15.7.2015), Prof. Florentina Badalanova Geller (TOPOI excellence cluster, Freie Universität Berlin) will present her work about “The Folk Bible”. Berlin researcher Lennart Lehmhaus (from SFB 980 project A03 run by Prof. Philip van der Eijk and BabMed Principal Investigator Markham J. Geller) shall talk about the interaction between rabbis and non-Jewish experts of medicine in early Jewish traditions as well as strategies of authorisation and authorship in Rabbinic texts.

Full conference programme and further information about the EABS congress available here.

L. Lehmhaus

BabMed Annual Workshop 2: Healing  through Fumigation in Mesopotamia and the Ancient World.

Workshop programme: FUMIGATION_final programme_ BabMed Annual Workshop 2015

Egyptian and Jewish Magic in Antiquity
Contexts, Contacts, Continuities and Comparisons – A Collaborative International Conference in Ancient Magic

Time and Place
6th-9th July, 2015, University of Bonn (In cooperation with the Tel Aviv University)

The topics adressed at this collaborative conference will be the continuity and changes in  Pharaonic, Greco-Roman, Coptic-Christian, Jewish and Islamic magic as well as their relation among themselves. Aside from the textual evidence, the archaeology of magic will be a point of discussion. In order to make these subjects accessible to scholars of other ancient magical traditions, six academic workshops open to interested scholars and students are planned, aiming to develop a methodology of cooperation.

The papers will include presentations of specific magical rituals concerning funerary magic, aggressive magic, defensive magic, love magic, oneiric magic, transformative magic, necromancy, demonology and, of course, healing magic.

For further information and full conference program see here

Till Kappus

“Towards a History of Epistemic Genres: Textbook and Commentary, Case and Recipe in the Making of Medical Knowledge” is the title of the conference on Medical History held at Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte on Friday 26 and Saturday 27 June 2015.

The hosts Yvonne Wübben (Freie Universität Berlin) and Gianna Pomata (Johns Hopkins University Baltimore) are aiming to explore the role of genres in the production and transmission of scientific knowledge, focusing on four basic textual forms: the textbook, the commentary, the case and the recipe.

For further information and full conference programme see here.

Till Kappus & John Schlesinger

The II CHAM International Conference with the keynote theme “Knowledge Transfer and Cultural Exchanges will” take place 15-18 July 2015, in Lisabon. Dr. des Lennart Lehmhaus (SFB 980) und Tanja Hidde, M.A. (BabMed) will participate in the panel “Medical knowledge in motion: exchange, transformation and iteration in the medical traditions of the Late Antique Mediterranean world“, 16 July 2015.

Throughout their legal-religious discussions, the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim deal also with medical issues. In the Babylonian Talmud one can discern not only traces of Greek medicine, but also of earlier Mesopotamian medicine. This presentation focuses on the category of “Diet & Regimen” within the medical passages of the Talmudim and its connection to older medical systems. The genre of “Diet & Regimen”, emphasizing proper nutrition and physical exercise as prerequisites for a healthy constitution, is a distinct medical genre in the corpus of Greek medicine, but almost absent in Mesopotamian medicine. When the Babylonian Talmud was composed, Mesopotamia was under Sassanian rule, and although it is commonly assumed that Mesopotamia resisted Hellenization, a bulk of medical advices concerning “Diet and Regimen” within rabbinic literature is preserved in the Babylonian Talmud. Medical knowledge about “Diet & Regimen” in the Babylonian Talmud has to be analyzed together with rabbinic literature from Palestine which was closer to the Greco-Roman cultural realm. We will ask if this knowledge was transmitted and transefered into the Babylonian Talmud through Palestinian rabbis.

Tanja Hidde