The Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia is a 2,600-year-old Assyrian handbook for medicine containing thousands of descriptions of diseases and symptoms, together with therapeutic prescriptions.
Some remedies use treatments we’d recognise today like using a bandage and salve or cream to help skin conditions. Others were developed from theories based on analogies taken from their surroundings – like the ‘canal inspector’.
In a medical spell recorded in the encyclopaedia, a physician would send minute creatures to the ‘canal inspector’ living in the patient’s stomach, tasking them with opening up blocked pathways – just as a labourer would dig a canal clear.
‘May they open up the canals so that the whirlwind in his innards can come out and see the sun’
The Encyclopaedia was huge – each of its 50 clay tablets contained at least 250 lines of cuneiform writing, making a total of more than 10,000 lines of text and thousands of treatments.
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