Ancient Mesopotamian medicine: the ear was treated with "luck" from the temple

A new study has revealed that individual medical prescriptions explicitly instructed the patient to go to the shrine of a particular deity to "get good luck" - and only then to continue therapy. The cuneiform prescriptions were analysed by Assyriologist Truels Punk Arböll; the work was published in the journal Iraq.

Arböll studied the corpus of medical texts and found that such instructions are very rare: only 12 prescriptions in six manuscripts (on six separate tablets) dating back to the 1st millennium B.C. It is significant that such instructions are almost never found in the whole corpus of medical tablets, and therefore their role remained unclear for a long time.

Most notably, the "temple step" does not appear for all diagnoses, but for almost only two groups of problems: diseases of the ear and ailments of an organ labelled ṭulīmu in the texts (interpreted in the study as spleen/pancreas). In the prescriptions, patients were directed to the shrines of the gods Sina, Ninurta, Shamash, Ishtar and Marduk, and the purpose was described with a formula like "to see luck/favour" - that is, to change the patient's "fortunes" in the right direction.

According to the author's interpretation, such visits could be a way to bypass unfavourable days for treatment (when therapy was considered "unlucky" according to the calendar), or to receive favourable omens for diagnostic and prognostic conclusions. A separate nuance is that in one of the texts the wording allows for a reading as "on the 6th day" or as "six days": it is not entirely clear whether the "luck" is supposed to come on a particular day or "hold" for several days while the treatment works.

The study also emphasises that 'sanctuary' did not necessarily mean a large temple: the term could also refer to small places of worship, probably including household shrines. And in the cult centre of the healing goddess Gula, archaeologists have found votive figurines, which may speak of the practice of "leaving objects" in the temple as a request for help.

Why exactly the ear and spleen are so prominent is an open question. Arböll believes that the ear in representations could be associated with the perception of wisdom and messages, and ear inflammations with unpredictable course and risk of severe complications. The author emphasises that more research is needed to understand more precisely how the roles were divided between "treating" specialists (asû and āšipu) and sanctuaries, and why a similar mechanism is almost never found in other ailments.