The new book “Gastrointestinal Disease and Its Treatment in Ancient Mesopotamia” by J. Cale Johnson (Freie Universität Berlin) and Krisztián Simkó (British Museum, London) is now made available as Open Access publication by de Gruyter Publishers in the series initiated by Franz Köcher „Die Babylonisch-Assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen“.

This volume contains the first comprehensive edition of the most important medical compendium on gastrointestinal ailments, bile-induced diseases, and fever from ancient Mesopotamia: the Stomach Treatise from Ashurbanipal’s royal library at Nineveh. Assembled three millennia ago from symptom descriptions, drug recipes, incantations, and healing rituals, this treatise formed part of the only authoritative source of knowledge on therapeutic medicine at the time, the Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia. With numerous textual improvements based on first-hand examinations of the manuscripts and more than a dozen new joins, the Stomach Treatise now finds its rightful place alongside the Ebers Papyrus and the Greco-Roman medical traditions as one of the key representatives of ancient medical thought.

This book is part of the BAM series, Franz Köcher’s magnum opus on Babylonian and Assyrian medicine, which was envisioned to include cuneiform copies, translations, and commentary. Unfortunately, it was unfinished at his death in 2002 with six volumes of cuneiform copies accompanied by brief introductory comments and citation of parallels and duplicates. Publication of the series is being resumed, under the editorship of Robert Biggs and Marten Stol, beginning with Renal and Rectal Disease Texts (BAM 7). The new volumes include full translations and philological commentary, thus making Babylonian and Assyrian medical texts accessible to historians of ancient medicine in up-to-date studies.