Strahil Panayotov (Pforzheimer Senior Fellow, Oct ‘23 – Feb ‘24) shall talk about his research project on:

Comparative and interdisciplinary analyses of medical texts concerning coughing of phlegm: from the second Millennium BCE Mesopotamia, over Ashurbanipal to Hippocrates

7 December 2023 (Thursday) at 16:30 h.

Moderated by Dragos Năstăsoiu.

The winter fits Strahil’s talk. Who has not experienced people with cough-phlegm, lately?

My presentation will take the audience on a text critical journey of the most-ancient history of phlegm cough, as recorded in textual sources. I will present first the sources A), which will be followed by chosen cases of a textual critical scrutiny B):

A) I identified and deciphered unpublished cuneiform tablet from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Surprisingly, the Middle Babylonian text (ca. 1500-1200 BCE) turned out to be a forerunner to a medical treatise on Bronchial complaints from the Nineveh Medical Encyclopedia. The latter is the foremost collection of therapeutic writings from the Ashurbanipal Royal Library (7th century BCE), and the most important compendium of medical literature before Hippocrates. Moreover, cuneiform therapies against coughing phlegm as recorded on the Baghdad tablet bear unmistakable similarities to practices from the Hippocratic Corpus (post 4th century BCE).

B) The comparative and interdisciplinary scrutiny of the sources mentioned above offers a unique perspective for medical historians, since we can now comprehend that medical therapies for phlegm-cough, as recorded in the Graeco-Roman world, were already in use in the Ancient Near East, even during the 2nd Millennium BCE. This aligns with recent discoveries in Babylonian Medicine, Astronomy and Mathematics, showing that knowledge, which was recorded by the Ancient Greeks has in fact equivalents in earlier cuneiform.