A presentation within

BabMed Seminar 2

Greek and Babylonian Medicine – A Comparative View
Winter Semester 2015/2016

Tuesday, 6-8 pm, Bibliothek TOPOI-Haus, Hittorfstraße 18, 14195 Berlin

Convened by Markham J. Geller/Principal Investigator BabMed

This talk will address the question whether Babylonian and Graeco-Roman Medicine shared pharmacological treatments and the resulting implications. First a general overview of how pharmacology developed in Mesopotamia and in the Graeco-Roman world in the late 1^st millennium BCE will be provided. Some specific cases of healing recipes will then be presented from Babylonian and Graeco-Roman sources that have identical objectives and pharmacological constituents. The comparison of such examples will be used to bolster the argument that some pharmacological knowledge, the traces of which were still surviving in the Graeco-Roman world at the beginning of our era, had somehow been shared between the two cultures.

The BabMed Seminar 2 is being organised in cooperation with TOPOI excellence cluster Berlin Dahlem.