The first volume of „A Cultural History of Chemistry in Antiquity“ has been published in Open Access. It is a multi-author monograph by Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli and Sydney H. Aufrère, edited by Marco Beretta.
A Cultural History of Chemistry in Antiquity covers the period from 3000 BCE to 600 CE, ranging across the civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East. Over this long period, chemical artisans, recipes, and ideas were exchanged between Mesopotamia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. The flowering of alchemy in the Middle and Early Modern Ages had its roots in the chemical arts of antiquity. This study presents the first synthesis of this epoch, examining the centrality of intense exchange and interconnectivity to the discovery and development of sources, techniques, materials, and instruments.
The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Chemistry presents the first comprehensive history from the Bronze Age to today, covering all forms and aspects of chemistry and its ever-changing social context. The themes covered in each volume are theory and concepts; practice and experiment; laboratories and technology; culture and science; society and environment; trade and industry; learning and institutions; art and representation.
Table of Contents
Volume 1: A Cultural History of Chemistry in Antiquity Edited by Marco Beretta, University of Bologna, Italy Series Preface List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction, Marco Beretta 1.Theory and Concepts: The Mythological Foundation of Chemical Theories in Ancient Civilizations, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta 2.Practice and Experiment: The Conquest of Matter, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta 3.Laboratories and Technology: From Temples to Workshops: Sites of Chemistry in Ancient Civilizations, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta 4.Culture and Science: Gods, Myths and Religions, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta 5.Society and Environment: The Alteration of the Ancient Landscape, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta 6.Trade and Industry: The Circulation of Trade in the Mediterranean, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta 7.Learning and Institutions: The Invention of Chemical Recipes, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta 8.Art and Representation: The Iconographic Imprinting of Ancient Chemical Arts, Sydney H. Aufrère, Cale Johnson, Matteo Martelli, Marco Beretta Notes Bibliography Index
Mark Geller, Jewish Chronicle Professor of Jewish Studies, University College London, March 28, 2022
British Museum Department of Middle East Newsletter
The great Assyriological medical project that we have entitled NinMed has been running within the Department of the Middle East of the British Museum since 2020. Such international collaboration is not set up overnight, and here we sketch its origins and early development. The story began at Berlin with the Grossmeister of ancient Babylonian medicine, Franz Köcher. Herr Köcher was Professor for the History of Medicine at the Freie Universität Berlin, but he had almost no students and no colleagues who dared work with him, because of his intimidating reputation. He, it was generally accepted, knew everything there was to know about Babylonian medicine, for he had devoted his entire life to it (after five years as a tank commander in the Second World War). His office in his Berlin apartment in the Windscheidstrasse was effectively a university study room, complete with floor-to-ceiling card files recording every single word on every single Akkadian medical tablet. He also had stacks of transliterations and word-studies of Babylonian medicine, none of which came to be published. The Professor was too busy making hand copies (in six impressive tomes) of all cuneiform medical tablets from the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the British Museum, the two largest and most important collections in the world. And there was one more side to him which everyone then knew of but never talked about: in the last days before the Berlin Wall was constructed, Herr Köcher packed his suitcases with all his research papers on Mesopotamian medicine and crossed over from East to West Berlin. He never returned, even after the Wall came down.
Tere were two younger colleagues from London with whom he had regular contact, which was very exceptional. One was Irving Finkel, and the other was Mark Geller from UCL. Neither would ever consider visiting Berlin without visiting Herr Köcher and his wife in the Windscheidstrasse. Finkel had a particularly close and productive relationship with Herr Köcher over many years, since he regularly sent him transliterations of unpublished Babylonian medical tablets from the British Museum. Geller did the same, but Herr Köcher used to hint that Finkel’s transliterations were more accurate. The only student who was actually brave enough to study with Herr Köcher came to London in 1984, to the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale organised by Christopher Walker, then of the British Museum. She faithfully reported that Köcher had told her before departing, ‘regards to Finkel and Geller, but no one else!’
The problem with this situation was that everyone knew that, in the well-worn phrase, ‘Köcher is working on medicine’, and no one dared rival his dominance of the field. Two things changed the status quo. One was Köcher’s untimely death, aged 85. The second was Geller’s appointment as Guest Professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin, on secondment from UCL, from 2010–2018, under the auspices of a major 10-year research cluster, Topoi, funded by the Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft, which employed some 200 researchers on all aspects of antiquity. Geller’s main programme in Berlin was to carry on Köcher’s research by launching the task of publishing editions and translations of Assyrian and Babylonian medicine, which was greatly facilitated by a five-year grant from the European Research Council for the project known as BabMed.
Published copy by A.H. Sayce of lines 6-10 of a Babylonian medical text (K.191+) in the British Museum.Modern digital photograph of K 191+.Hand copy of the same cuneiform tablet.
With an excellent BabMed team assembled, including Strahil Panayotov and later Krisztian Simko, something very unexpected happened. Before he passed away, Franz Köcher had sent to Finkel and Geller an invaluable reconstruction of a group of related tablet fragments from Yale, which turned out to be a unique catalogue of approximately 90 medical treatises from about 700 BC, from the city of Ashur. One additional fragment of the work from the Oriental Institute in Chicago had previously been copied by Finkel in the 1970s. This carefully structured catalogue with composition titles and line totals revealed that Mesopotamia possessed a highly systematic and extensive corpus of medicine more than two centuries before Hippocrates, often considered to be the father of modern medicine. The BabMed team began working on this catalogue, and eventually Strahil Panayotov realised that there was a parallel relationship between the Ashur catalogue of all the titles and the existing Assyrian medical tablets in Ashurbanipal’s Royal Library in Nineveh. Instead of being a large but random collection, as it had seemed, the Nineveh medical tablets could now be shown to constitute a medical encyclopaedia, organised into the same 12 major genres of medical literature set out in the Ashur medical catalogue. This discovery meant that, after the Berlin BabMed project concluded, the crucial next task was to reconstruct the medical library of Nineveh against the background of the ancient catalogue.
The problem was to find funding to assemble a new research team with sufficient knowledge and experience of working with Akkadian medical texts. Even experienced Assyriologists experience difficulty in reading cuneiform medical texts, due to the technical nature of the language and writing style. Fortunately, the years of work on medicine in Berlin provided the expertise which was needed, in Panayotov and Simko. The obvious choice for funding was to turn to the Wellcome Trust, which announced grant programmes for major research projects in Medical Humanities. The Trust has inspiring grant programmes which are well organised, with Wellcome staff even offering useful advice to applicants on how to create a successful application. The advisors warned, however, that final decisions on grant applications were made by special panels, and these panels changed regularly and were not always interested in all the topics submitted. They also gave sound advice: to make the application for Nineveh medicine more general than a simply textual project, but to show how important the material was for other fields, such as the history of medicine and various aspects of anthropology. The application was sent to two senior researchers at UCL who worked in other fields of medical history and who themselves had won Wellcome awards. Both were enthusiastic about the value of the project, and their further suggestions were incorporated into our submission.
After our initial submission was turned down, and a brief telephone call to Jon Taylor and Irving Finkel, it was decided that a new proposal could be submitted directly from the British Museum to the Wellcome Trust, to make this valuable treasure trove of medical history accessible and available, through digital editions and translations of Nineveh medicine. That proved successful.
During the first six months of the NinMed project, substantial textual material has been gathered, edited, and worked through, with the aim of providing accurate readings and translations of each text. Weekly online meetings of the entire team (the two researchers Panayotov and Simko, plus Taylor, Finkel and Geller) greatly facilitate the results. Two colleagues from Paris, two more from Berlin, and one from Geneva, also join this weekly working group, which reads through each text line-by-line with problematic passages analysed and discussed. The idea is to create translations which are not only meant for specialists but will also be meaningful to medical historians and members of the public, especially doctors who have an interest in ancient or Middle Eastern medicine. The aim is to have all major texts in the Nineveh medical library transliterated and translated by the end of the project.
Postscript: the progress of scholarship after 171 years (1850–2021)
In describing our great new Project on the cuneiform medical texts of the Nineveh library, it is fitting to acknowledge which of the many such tablets in the British Museum was the first to be discussed in print by one of the Assyriological pioneers of the 19th century. The answer proved to be the large Nineveh tablet numbered K 191+, a study and translation of which was given as early as 1850 by the Oxford Assyriologist and polymath A.H. Sayce (1846–1933), who published his article entitled ‘An ancient Babylonian Work on Medicine I’ in the journal Zeitschrift fur Keilschriftforschung II/1: 1–14. Curiously, it is exactly this tablet, part of the ancient medical therapeutic series entitled ‘If a man suffers from a cough’, that the international team were jointly reading under the editorship of Dr. Krisztian Simko when this Newsletter report was prepared. It is only fitting to state that everyone was astonished when they saw what Sayce had been able to accomplish at so early a stage of Assyriological work, for he had achieved an extraordinary level of understanding of this ancient technical literature with no published work by other scholars to depend on, although it is probable that T.G. Pinches, then in the department, might have helped. In tribute to our early predecessor, we illustrate Sayce’s treatment printed in a cuneiform font, a hand copy of the same text and a modern digital photograph for comparison.
Over the next few months, I would like to offer a series of brief reports on shamanism, including its role in everyday life and healing. As an introduction, I would like to give a short overview of shamanism and early shamanic research in this blog.
Shamanism, as we know it today, is concentrated in Northeast Asia, North and South America, and Northern Europe. Rooted in ancient tribal culture, the native beliefs in these areas cannot be described as a single particular religion, but the religious practices in theses region have an important commonality: shamanism. Especially in Siberia and Central Asia shamanism has been the dominant religious practice since ancient times.
Whether the French priest André Thévet first visit to Brazil in 1557 or the colonization of Siberia in the 17th century by the Russians (Narby; Huxley 2001, 1), seen from the point of view of early travelers and enlightenment scholars, shamanism represented a form of religion which is “uncivilized, wild and untouched by culture.” (Tomaskova 2013, 87) It was not until the late 19th century that some anthropologists began to study these societies from a neutral point of view. Since the beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists have improved their methods of examination, which led them to write many detailed reports about shamanism and its practices (Narby; Huxley 2001, 3). Not to be overlooked at this time is the Greenlandic – Danish anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, “father of Eskimology”. Knud Rasmussen’s expeditions from 1902 to 1934 and his boyhood life experiences in Greenland provided primary sources of Inuit culture and traces of its shamanic aspects. With this kind of continuous refinement of observation methods, many scholars have tried to redefine shamanism by improving their theories during this period.
In 1964 (first published in French in 1951) Mircea Eliade published his famous book “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy,” and shamanism suddenly became a worldwide popular topic. First, he identified shamanism as the oldest form of human religion, but with evolutionary and primitivistic overtones. Second, he focused attention on shamanism exclusively in terms of the psychological states produced during the practice. He saw the shamanic trance of individual shamans as a general feature of shamanism around the world (Eliade 1989). Eliade’s theory inspired a generation of academics and created a new public fascination with the field of comparative religions.
In the meantime, anthropologists had also developed a new research methodology: field study or ethnography. This method required anthropologists to live with local people, to participate in their activities, and thus to observe them objectively and impartially. Through these careful observations of shamanic activities, anthropologists found a rich and internally consistent way of understanding the shamanic world. Since then, scholars interested in indigenous beliefs have started to explore the history of shamanism worldwide (Tomaskova 2013).
Mircea Eliade. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton Univers. Press
How can we determine that any particular indigenous belief belongs to the category of shamanism? Scholars before Eliade saw shamanism as a regional cultural phenomenon in Siberia, North America, and its adjacent regions. After Eliade proposed his trance theory, it became a defining criterion for shamanism. Although current academics have other points of view about this theory, it still undeniably inspired many scholars at that time. According to this criterion, the shamanic phenomenon can be found in most parts of the world and it is, therefore, a global phenomenon. Eliade also introduced the concept of “substratum”, maintaining that shamanism, which is widespread in Asia and America, originated from the substratum of the Palaeolithic cultures of Asia and Europe. Whether shamanism actually existed since Palaeolithic, is still a major point of discussion by present-day researchers. But, at least, based on evidence such as the deer stone at Ushkin User (Fitzhugh 2009) and deer-bovine at Kalbak-Tash (Jacobson 1992), we may be able to track the history of shamanism back to the bronze age.
As the world has become more and more interconnected, the study of shamanism has spread to other regions beyond Siberia. The American anthropologist Peter T. Furst further proposed an “Asian-American shamanism” model based on Eliade’s substratum theory. In his view, there are many commonalities between Asian and American shamanic forms, both in general and in specific characteristics. The main commonalities include body deformation and transformation, the three-level universe, the “axis mundi” that connects the different levels of the universe, trance during the ritual practice, animal spirit as the helper, and the use of hallucinogenic drugs (Furst 1973/1974). In short, shamanism can be applied to customs that are thought to have arisen independently in different parts of the world (Lewis 1971).
More recently the research of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on Shamanism in the Amazonian region has garnered a lot of attention. In one article of his from 2004, he especially noted the non-differentiation between humans and animals, as described in mythology. Many “natural” species or entities were originally human. Many animal species as well as non-human beings, are supposed to have a spiritual component that qualifies them as “people”. The physical form of each species is a shield that conceals an internal humanoid form, usually only visible to the particular species or of “trans-specific” beings such as shamans. This internal form is the soul or spirit of the animal. Besides the relationship between humans and animals, he also mentioned the relationship between humans and nature. For example, cultivated plants may be conceived as blood relatives of the women who tend them, or game animals may be approached by hunters as family members. Shamans can treat animals and other non-human being creatures as either supporters or an enemy (Viveiros de Castro 2004, 463-484).
These non-human spirits and their forms, names, and numbers differ from region to region. However, it is generally through that these spirits would protect the shamans during their trances and act as a “messenger” which speaks through the shaman’s voices and brings the god’s answer (Eliade 1989, 89). Jacobson also mentioned in his article that shamans may be given protection and power through implements and clothing formulated in terms of bodies and powers of sacred animals. “The shamans did not only assume the powers of animal helpers during a shamanic ritual but also became that animal and were reborn into its body and knowledge (Jacobson 1992).”
There is an integral element that regularly appears in cultures in which shamanism plays a role and, that is, of course, the shaman. So, who are the shamans and what role do they play in shamanic practices of daily life and society? And what specific gender do they belong to? Is there only one shaman, or are there many different types of shamans? In my next blog, I will focus on shamans in some typical shamanic cultures, namely in North and Northeast Asia, America, and North Europe.
Bibliography
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2004. Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies. In: Common Knowledge. Duke University Press. Pp. 463-484.
Eliade, Mircea. 1989. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Arkana.
Fitzhugh, William W. 2009. Stone Shamans and Flying Deer of Northern Mongolia: Deer Goddess of Siberia or Chimera of the Steppe. In: Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 1/2. University of Wisconsin Press. Pp. 72-88.
Jacobson, Esther. 1992. In Search of the Animal Mother: Pre-Shamanic, Shamanic, and Mythic Tradition. In: The Deer Goddess of Ancient Siberia. Brill. Pp. 171 – 213.
Lewis, I. M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Narby, Jeremy; Huxley, Francis. 2001. Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge. Tarcher/Putnam.
Peter, T. Furst. 1973/1974. The Root and Continuities of Shamanism. In: Stones, Bones, and Skin: Ritual and shamanic art. Society for Art Publications.
Tomaskova, Silvia. 2013. Wayward Shamans: The Prehistory of an Idea. University of California Press. Pp. 79-113.
