CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
INCANTATIONS WITHIN
AKKADIAN MEDICAL TEXTS
M. J. Geller
T
he use of magical incantations within Akkadian medicine has long been recognised
as a characteristic feature of healing therapy in Babylonia, although often with
the wrong inferences being made. Historians of medicine have seen Babylonian
medicine as influenced by magic and less rational than its Greek counterpart (Sigerist:
1955 : I, 477 ff.). This misconception about Babylonian medicine stems from a period
when relatively few Babylonian medical texts (and medical incantations) had been
published, although significant progress had been made in publishing major Sumer-
ian and Akkadian magical texts, such as Utukku Lemnu ̄tu(Thompson 1903 ), Shurpu
(Reiner 1970 ) and Maqlû (Meier 1967 ). Recent publications on Babylonian medicine
(Stol 1993 and 2000 ; Heeßel 2000 ) allow for a more balanced view of Babylonian
magic and medicine, and we can assess how incantations within the medical corpus
affect our attitudes towards the rational nature of Babylonian medicine.
The usual supposition is that magic and medicine, although at times complementary,
represent different points on the scale of rational ‘science’. Hence, the oldest Sumerian
medical text known, from the end of the third millennium (Civil 1960 ), contains
recipes but not a single incantation. This text serves as the paradigm example of
‘medicine’ versus magic. Already by the Old Babylonian period, however, single
incantations appear with ‘medical’ themes, referring to illnesses of the eye, internal
organs, etc., and similar incantations with these same themes appear within medical
texts. It seems probable that the medical incantations, referring to physical symptoms
of an illness, were likely to have circulated in three phases: ( 1 ) orally transmitted and
recited incantations which ( 2 ) were committed to writing in the form of single-
column tablets containing one incantation and, finally, ( 3 ) medical incantations were
incorporated into longer tablets containing medical recipes or medical omens.
The question is how to distinguish a ‘medical’ incantation from any other type
of incantation. Medical incantations appear in both Sumerian and Akkadian, or
occasionally as Sumerian–Akkadian bilinguals, or as mixtures of both Sumerian and
Akkadian. In some ways, the distinction between a ‘medical’ incantation and other
types is not difficult to ascertain, since the main criterion refers to incantations that
have been incorporated into medical texts. Incantations on related themes referring
to health matters, such as snakebite, dogbite, scorpion bite, could be excluded on