Introducing Assyrian Medicine: healthcare fit for a king (360G-Wellcome-220149_Z_20_Z)

This project makes available for the first time the world’s most standardised, structured and systematised corpus of medical literature prior to Galen: the "Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia" from the library of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria (669-c.630 BC). Its broken condition and its use of cuneiform script mean that, almost 200 years after their first discovery, still only glimpses of its content are accessible to medical historians. As such the importance of Assyria’s contribution to the history of medicine remains unrecognised. While fragments of Ashurbanipal’s medical library have long been known, the existence of the Encyclopaedia has only recently been recognised thanks to the reconstruction and translation of an ancient medical catalogue. This discovery allows us now to reconstruct the whole Encyclopaedia from its broken fragments and translate it in full. We will then generate a complete index of drug names and technical vocabulary as found in the compendium, and correlate them against the symptoms they were designed to treat. All this material will be made freely available in enriched digital form. The project will therefore enable researchers to gain a clear understanding of ancient Assyrian medicine and its place in the broader history of medicine.