Monat: September 2018

Reading schedule for October 2018 and Week 1

One of the goals of the Rereading BabMed Blog is to encourage the far-flung network of people who are interested in Babylonian medicine to read through the corpus together, even if they cannot meet in person. In order to keep things simple, let’s try to read through a column per week. For a normally formatted Assurbanipal Library tablet, we might expect 60-70 lines per column, with four columns per tablet. So, one column (or its equivalent in fragmentary contexts) per week comes to roughly 10 lines per day, and if all goes well, we should make it through a tablet every month. So for the month of October that means BAM 480 and duplicates (= CRANIUM 1). I’ll try to post the necessary links to primary sources and available editions each week and, hopefully, we can find some interesting passages to discuss on the blog.

Week 1 — Oct 1-7 — BAM 480, column 1, and duplicates

A photo and Köcher’s handcopy are available on CDLI: https://cdli.ucla.edu/P365742

The BabMed page has the basic parallels and hopefully we’ll be able to get a transliteration there soon as well: http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/babmed/Corpora/BAM-5/BAM-5_-480/index.html

For the first column the main parallels are: BAM 1, 3 — BAM 1, 4 — BAM 1, 12 — the „Jastrow“ Tablet and ND 44506/16. As Krisztian Simko pointed out in a earlier comment, before diving in, we should all have a look at a couple of recent contributions to JMC 27 and 28 from Strahil Panayotov, available at his academia.com page:

https://www.academia.edu/28888477/2016._Fragments_of_the_Nineveh_Medical_Composition_IGI_join_UGU_Le_Journal_des_Médecines_Cunéiformes_2016_n_27

https://www.academia.edu/31803953/2016._Addenda_and_Corrigenda_to_Fragments_of_the_Nineveh_Medical_Composition_IGI_join_UGU_JMC_27_Le_Journal_des_Médecines_Cunéiformes_2016_n_28

JoAnn Scurlock’s collations of the „Jastrow Tablet“ are available on the JMC page under the year 2003 (= JMC 2): http://medecinescuneiformes.fr/?page_id=15

 

Worthington’s edition of UGU 1

Thanks to the editors of JMC, we have permission to repost Martin Worthington’s edition of UGU 1, i.e. CRANIUM 1, the first tablet of the Assur Medical Catalogue, here:

Worthington — UGU 1 — JMC 5

As well the corrections to this edition that Worthington published in JMC 9:

Worthington — JMC9 — corrections to UGU1

The first of these is also available through the JMC website at the following website: http://medecinescuneiformes.fr

As we work through CRANIUM, readers might also want to compare notes with Scurlock’s Sourcebook for Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine, available to some through jstor (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287mwm), although others may be able to access it through a local library.

CRANIUM 1: First steps

We start with the first chapter or tablet of the first treatise in the Assur Medical Catalogue. We will try to assemble some key materials for CRANIUM 1, leading up to October 1st. Thanks to the efforts of a number of different scholars over the years, but most recently the BabMed team, in particular Ulrike Steinert, we now have a comprehensive edition of the Assur Medical Catalogue (AMC) here:

https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/477148

On p. 209, in the second line, is the first incipit, which corresponds to the first tablet/chapter of CRANIUM. It is entirely reconstructed in AMC, but reads as follows: [DIŠ NA UGU-šu2 KUM2 u2-kal]. The rest of the line, which is only partially reconstructed, corresponds to the second tablet.

On p. 286, we have the table of sources, which for Nineveh, lists the following: BAM 480, BAM 4, BAM 481 and AMT 5/3. But no transliteration of BAM 480 on the BabMed website as yet. The most recent edition of CRANIUM 1 is found in Martin Worthington’s contribution in JMC 5.