The Healing Goddess Gula Culture and History of the Ancient Near East
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The Healing Goddess Gula Culture and History of the Ancient Near East Founding Editor M.H.E. Weippert Editor-in-Chief Thomas Schneider Editors Eckart Frahm (Yale University) W. Randall Garr (University of California, Santa Barbara) B. Halpern (Pennsylvania State University) Theo P.J. van den Hout (Oriental Institute) Irene J. Winter (Harvard University) VOLUME 67 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/chan The Healing Goddess Gula Towards an Understanding of Ancient Babylonian Medicine By Barbara Böck LEIDEN • BOSTON 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bock, Barbara. The healing Goddess Gula : towards an understanding of ancient Babylonian medicine / by Barbara Bock. pages cm. — (Culture and history of the ancient Near East, ISSN 1566-2055 ; volume 67) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-26145-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26146-4 (e-book) 1. Medicine, Assyro-Babylonian. 2. Magic, Assyro-Babylonian. 3. Healing. 4. Gula (Assyro-Babylonian deity) I. Title. R135.3.B63 2013 610.935—dc23 2013029434 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1566-2055 ISBN 978-90-04-26145-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-26146-4 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. 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To †Erika and †Franz Köcher CONTENTS Preface ................................................................................................................. ix 1 Introduction ............................................................................................... 1 1.1 Presentation of the Study ............................................................ 1 1.2 Scope and Structure of the Book ............................................... 4 2 The Healing Goddess Gula: A Portrait ............................................... 7 2.1 Gula’s Position in the Pantheon and Her Appearance in Literature .......................................................................................... 7 2.2 Gula in the Life of the Ancient Mesopotamians .................. 15 2.3 Gula’s Dog ......................................................................................... 38 3 Gula’s ‘Hand’ in the Handbook of Diagnosis and Prognosis, Sakikkû ......................................................................................................... 45 3.1 Sakikkû VI: 19 ................................................................................... 49 3.2 Sakikkû XII iv: 16 ............................................................................. 50 3.3 Sakikkû XIII i: 55’ ............................................................................ 51 3.4 Sakikkû XXXIII ................................................................................. 51 3.5 Sakikkû XL ........................................................................................ 62 3.6 ‘Ninurta’s Hands’ ............................................................................ 69 4 Gula and Healing Spells .......................................................................... 77 4.1 Healing Spells Appealing to Gula ............................................. 78 4.2 Healing Spells Referring to Gula and Her Dog ..................... 98 4.3 Incantations about Simmu, Skin Sore ...................................... 109 4.4 Standard Formulas in Healing Spells Referring to Gula .... 113 4.5 The Metaphorical Language of Healing Spells ...................... 115 5 Gula’s Healing Plants ............................................................................... 129 5.1 The Buʾšānu Plant aka Lišān Kalbi Plant ................................ 131 5.2 The Ṣaṣuntu Plant .......................................................................... 158 6 The Cultural Setting of Ancient Babylonian Medicine ................. 165 6.1 The Healing Goddess in the Medical Literature: A Recapitulation ............................................................................. 165 6.2 Religion, Magic, Medicine ........................................................... 176 viii contents Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 197 Index of Names and Subjects ....................................................................... 211 Index of Words Discussed ............................................................................. 214 Incantation Incipits ......................................................................................... 215 Texts Cited ......................................................................................................... 216 PREFACE As is well known, Franz Köcher was, up to the time of his death, pre- paring the edition of the extant cuneiform text material dealing with the Babylonian-Assyrian medical lore which was to appear in the series, Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen, which he founded. The work is extensive including the editiones principes of the plant encyclopaedia uru.an.na: maštakal, named after its first line, the ‘(plant whose) place is in heaven: maštakal’, the plant descriptive text Šammu šikinšu, ‘On the appearance of the medicinal plant’, vade mecum texts or Lists of Simple Drugs, and all those medical prescriptions that rec- ommend one single ingredient. In the late 1990s F. Köcher entrusted me with the completion of his lifetime project. Since his death in November 2002 I have not only been revising and completing the various text editions but also adding a study of the textual material which F. Köcher did not accomplish.1 In the course of this work I stumbled upon an intriguing line in one of the cuneiform texts dealing with the use of medicinal plants when employed as simple drugs, namely u₂ ḫab mu!-šu₂ ur.gi₇ dnin.gi.zi.bar.ra The plant, ḫab / buʾšānu, its alternative name is ‘Ninigizibara’s dog’.2 The present contribution grew out of the commentary to this very line exploring the issue of the possible motivations for associating a plant 1 To be published as †F. Köcher & B. Böck, The Assyrian-Babylonian Drug Lore. J.V. Kin- nier Wilson refers in his contribution “Notes on the Assyrian Pharmaceutical Series URU. AN.NA: MAŠTAKAL,” JNES 64 (2005) p. 45 to a letter he received in June 1989 in which F. Köcher writes, “meine Gesundheit ist in der Tat nicht die beste (. .) Trotzdem versuche ich, meine Uru.an.na-Ausgabe fertigzustellen. Im Druck ist sie seit 1974!” Indeed, many parts of the uru.an.na text edition he refers to in this letter had already been typeset by the Walter de Gruyter publishing house. However, F. Köcher’s access from the late 1980s to the middle of the 1990s to the extensive cuneiform material of the Sippar and Babylon collections housed in The British Museum forced him not only to completely revise the uru.an.na edition but also to include new material and to excerpt from the medical pre- scriptions all those recipes that recommend simple drugs. He hoped that the cuneiform medical texts from Sippar and Babylon would appear in volumes BAM VII and BAM VIII, which explains, why he planned to publish the texts on medicinal plants in BAM IX. A final study was envisaged to appear in BAM X. 2 The text is BAM I 1 iii: 20. See also Chapter 5.1.1 The buʾšānu plant. x preface with the healing goddess Gula (with whom the goddess Ninigizibara was identified) and her dog. This entailed the question of the general impact of Gula in Ancient Babylonian medical literature and prompted me to examine the afflictions attributed to her as well as the range of diseases that were cured with her plant(s). I soon realised that the results of the research would throw a new light on our understanding of the Ancient Mesopotamian system of medicine. I therefore decided to present this work first, at the cost of delaying the edition and study of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian medical lore of healing plants. Since the present book is intimately linked with Franz Köcher’s edi- tion of cuneiform medical and pharmacological texts it is dedicated to his memory. Throughout more than ten years I have had the privilege of conversing with Erika Köcher about the work her husband could not fin- ish, and many other matters. Her constant interest and encouragement to carry on with the enormous amount of material her husband had brought together over fifty years have been very dear to me. This is why the book is also dedicated to her. I wish to thank the Trustees of The British Museum for the permis- sion to study and publish texts here. I presented some of the preliminary results in June 2011 in the lecture series Die Heilkunst des