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Medicine in Ancient Assur – A Microhistorical Study of the Neo-Assyrian Healer Kiṣir-Aššur By Troels Pank Arbøll

MEDICINE IN ANCIENT ASSUR

Introduction

This monograph approaches ancient medicine through the study of a single individual who practised magico-medical healing in ancient Mesopotamia. The healer’s name was Kiṣir-Aššur and he was the grandson of Bāba-šuma-ibni, the patronymic ancestor of a family of exorcists.

We know nothing about Kiṣir-Aššur’s birth and death, except that he lived around the middle of the  7th century BCE in the ancient city of Assur, located some 100 kilometres south of Nineveh, present-day Mosul.

Here he resided in the family home, the so-called “N4 house”, and practised the family trade, namely the exorcist’s craft. Little is known about his personal life, but due to an abundance of textual sources relating to his profession, it is possible to reconstruct and evaluate aspects of his education, career and practice as an exorcist (Akkadian āšipu/mašmaššu).

By the 7th century BCE, Assur was the religious centre of the Neo-Assyrian (NA) Empire whereas Nineveh was the political and intellectual capital.

Although Assur had earlier been the political capital as well, it retained a special position, as it was still home to the temple of the national deity Aššur and the burial site of the NA kings.

It was within this old city that Kiṣir-Aššur and his family practised their trade as exorcists for private individuals and possibly also for official institutions.

Here, the Bāba-šuma-ibni family assembled a large and private text collection pertaining to their profession as āšipus, which provides information about their education, practice, and professional interests. In particular, the texts from this collection provide information regarding Kiṣir-Aššur’s career.

This study focuses on how the Mesopotamian healer Kiṣir-Aššur was educated, how he practised his craft, and how he produced and organized his knowledge, as revealed by his texts.

Although some information is now lost, and although the N4 collection spans several generations and does not only contain texts that exclusively concern Kiṣir-Aššur’s training and practice, the texts assigned to him can be allocated to specific phases of his career.

They, therefore, provide information about his education and practice that can be used to discuss his production and use of scholarly texts.

Through this mode of investigation, this study provides a rounded analysis of all aspects of an ancient healer’s profession, and in turn, assesses the socio-cultural aspects of healing in combination with analysing the magico-medical content. The monograph will thus improve our understanding of the functional aspects of