Healing Through Fumigation
BabMed Annual Workshop 2
Healing Through Fumigation in Mesopotamia and the Ancient World
Contact/Organizer: Strahil V. Panayotov, strahil.panayotov@fu-berlin.de
Freie Universität Berlin, BabMed – Babylonian Medicine
The second BabMed Workshop aims to bring together a group of specialists on Ancient Medicine and Magic and to elucidate different practices of fumigation from both a local (individual) and cross-cultural perspective. The first day will be devoted to papers and group discussions concerning fumigation in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece and China. After these sessions, there will be a visit to the workshop of the Archaeobotanist Reinder Neef, in the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, where we will learn more about plants used for fumigation in Iraq. During the second day cuneiform texts on fumigation will be read, discussed, and interpreted in round-table format at the Topoi-Haus-Bibliothek.
Fumigation in Mesopotamia – a brief outline
Fumigation played an important role in the magico-medical therapies of Mesopotamia. Most of our evidence today reflects the practices of the 1st millennium BC, when healing through fumigation was widespread and a healer could fumigate the patient against a variety of maladies, e.g. fevers, ghosts, demons, witchcraft, depression, headache, eye illnesses, ear illnesses, hamstring problems, foot illnesses, haemorrhoids, or even female illnesses.
As a rule the fumigants (simple substances or mixtures) were poured or scattered over embers, in a censer or onto the ground. Then the fumes reached the body parts that were to be healed. Inhaled the fumes also had immediate physical effects on patients, being a swift way of administering drugs. In general, we can now differentiate between ‘pleasant’ and ‘pungent’ fumigation. For example, nicely smelling fumigants such as conifers were used, and this treatment might have had psychological effects comparable to modern aromatherapy. Pungent, bad-smelling fumigants consisting of Dreckapotheke (e.g. excrements, blood) and bizarre ingredients were also used. Their strong smell aimed to remove the grip of tough, intractable illnesses, ghosts or demons. Often pungent fumigation was combined with rubbing the body with ointments, and sometimes the patient even devoured the fumigatory mixtures.
For a long time, fumigation was used alone or in combination with other forms of medical therapy. The accumulation of knowledge led to systematization of the medical prescriptions and incantations, and during the 4th century BC, in the ancient city of Uruk, the Neo-Babylonian scholar Iqīšâ compiled a distinct series on magico-medical prescription dealing with fumigation and ointments. Iqīšâ simply named the series ‘fumigation’ (qutāru in Akkadian). This series seems to be an innovation within the history of Mesopotamian medicine, since we know of no other therapeutic series on treatments with fumigation from earlier periods. In this respect, The Fumigation Series is comparable to another innovative series that is usually known by the Akkadian term muššuʾu ‘to rub (the body with ointments)’ that has thematic similarities with The Fumigation Series since both therapies of fumigations and ointments were frequently combined. Yet, in order to build up his new Fumigation Series, the exorcist Iqīšâ compiled material known and tested for centuries in Mesopotamian medicine. The systematization and accumulation of medical knowledge at that time led ancient Babylonian scholars to create commentaries explaining texts in The Fumigation Series. Moreover, lists of drugs were compiled on cuneiform tablets devoted to the special ingredients used for fumigation and/or ointments. In addition to the physical practice of fumigation, incantations for this therapy were also assembled; these were meant to consecrate and activate the power of the substances or to be chanted along with the fumigation. Collections with such incantations are known from different cities, but it was in Babylon, at the time of Alexander the Great, that the scribe Tanittu-Bēl compiled an important tablet with fumigatory incantations contemporary with the series assembled by Iqīšâ in Uruk. This was the period of Hellenism, a period in which the globalization of knowledge took centre stage, and it provides us with an important starting point for comparing Mesopotamian fumigation practices with its counterparts from Ancient Egypt, Greece or China. Moreover, for centuries substances for fumigation had become an important part of international trade, which undoubtedly led to cross-cultural borrowings of fumigatory ingredients and practices.