Ulrike Steinert - Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues: Medicine, Magic and Divination

Assyrian and Babylonian Scholarly Text Catalogues

Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen

Begrndet von Franz Kcher
Herausgegeben von
Robert D. Biggs und Marten Stol

Band 9

The work on this volume as part of the project BabMed Babylonian Medicine has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/20072013; Project No. 323596).

ISBN 978-1-5015-1363-3

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0491-4

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0487-7

Library of Congress Control Number 2018935702

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche

Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2018 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin

Cover image: Florentina Badalanova Geller

www.degruyter.com

This volume contains the results of both collaborative work and individual research by the members of the BabMed Project, established under the aegis of Markham Geller with the objective to advance the reconstruction and edition of the corpus of Mesopotamian medical texts. The core of the book presents the first complete edition and reconstruction of the so-called Assur Medical Catalogue (AMC). Assyriological work on the AMC began in the 1970s, when Irving Finkel discovered and identified the Chicago fragment A. 7821 in 1978. Franz Kcher and Finkel recognised that this text fragment belonged together with four AMC fragments in the Yale Babylonian Collection, which were still unpublished then. After the publication of the Yale fragments by Gary Beckman and Benjamin Foster (1988), Franz Kcher sent to Geller and Finkel his own preliminary edition of AMC, based on photographs of the tablets. When Geller spent a year in Paris at the EPHE in 2005-2006, he introduced this material to Annie Attia and Gilles Buisson, and they read through the text together and made identifications. Afterwards, Attia and Buisson continued to work on the text and made further identifications.

When BabMed began its work in 2013, Geller suggested that the entire team read through AMC, and take it into account in our work on the medical texts. On the basis of these team readings, a new edition of the text was prepared by Strahil Panayotov and myself. The crucial importance of AMC for the reconstruction of Mesopotamian therapeutic texts and the existence of other comparable text catalogues that have never received a joint discussion, led BabMed to the idea of publishing the AMC text edition as part of a comprehensive study on scholarly catalogues listing corpora and compendia of ancient Mesopotamian healing specialists and divination experts, and I took on sole responsibility for the overall editorship of the volume.

The book offers editions of the three central catalogues associated with the text corpora of the Mesopotamian healing disciplines: AMC, the Exorcists Manual and the catalogue of the diagnostic and physiognomic omen series ( Sakikk and Alamdimm ), which form the basis of several thematic studies investigating the relationships between catalogues and the development of scholarly text corpora in the 1 st millennium BCE. The contributions published here offer a collection of differing views and multiple, at times conflicting perspectives on the catalogues and text corpora reflected in them. I would like to thank all BabMed team members for their contributions to the plurality of voices represented in the book. Special thanks are due to Francesca Rochberg and Irving Finkel who agreed to supply the volume with two additional contributions, which have considerably enriched and broadened the scope and theoretical thrust of the book. Thus, Rochbergs article includes a new treatment of two catalogues of the astrological omen series Enma Anu Enlil , while Finkel presents hitherto unpublished texts in his discussion of three tablet inventories.

In March and May 2014, I had the opportunity to collate the AMC tablet fragments in the Yale Babylonian Collection as well as the fragment in the Oriental Institute Chicago, which formed the basis for new copies of all AMC fragments. I am grateful to Walter Farber for the kind permission to publish A. 7821 here for the first time. My warmest thanks are also due to Ulla Kasten, Benjamin Foster, Elizabeth Payne and Eckart Frahm for their support and hospitability during my stay at the Yale Babylonian Collection.

In October 2014, a preliminary edition of AMC was presented and discussed at the first BabMed Workshop at Freie Universitt Berlin. I wish to thank all workshop participants who contributed with feedback during and after the workshop. Special thanks are due to Gilles Buisson, Nils Heeel, Daniel Schwemer, Henry Stadhouders and Marten Stol who supplied critical notes and alternative suggestions on individual readings.

I also wish to thank the editors of the series Babylonisch-assyrische Medizin , Robert Biggs and Marten Stol, for accepting this volume for publication in the series, as well as for their review of the manuscript and their numerous helpful comments.

Ulrike Steinert

Berlin, April 2018