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E-book Medicine in Ancient Assur : A Microhistorical Study of the Neo-Assyrian Healer Ki?ir-Aššur

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Penilaian

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This monograph approaches ancient medicine through the study of a single individual who practiced magico-medical healing in ancient Mesopotamia. The healer’s name was Ki?ir-Aššur and he was the grandson of B?ba-šuma-ibni, the patronymic ancestor of a family of exorcists. We know nothing about Ki?ir-Aššur’s birth and death, except that he lived around the middle of the 7th century BCE in the ancient city of Assur, located some 100 kilometres south of Nineveh, present-day Mosul. Here he resided in the family home, the so-called “N4 house”, and practiced the family trade, namely the exorcist’s craft. Little is known about his personal life, but due to an abundance of textual sources relating to his profession it is possible to reconstruct and evaluate aspects of his education, career and practice as an exorcist (Akkadian ?šipu/mašmaššu).By the 7th century BCE, Assur was the religious centre of the Neo-Assyrian (NA) Empire whereas Nineveh was the political and intellectual capital. Although Assur had earlier been the political capital as well, it retained a spe-cial position, as it was still home to the temple of the national deity Aššur and the burial site of the NA kings. It was within this old city that Ki?ir-Aššur and his family practiced their trade as exorcists for private individuals and pos-sibly also for official institutions. Here, the B?ba-šuma-ibni family assembled a large and private text collection pertaining to their profession as ?šipus, which provides information about their education, practice, and professional inter-ests. In particular, the texts from this collection provide information regarding Ki?ir-Aššur’s career.This study focuses on how the Mesopotamian healer Ki?ir-Aššur was edu-cated, how he practiced his craft, and how he produced and organized his knowledge, as revealed by his texts. Although some information is now lost, and although the N4 collection spans several generations and does not only contain texts that exclusively concern Ki?ir-Aššur’s training and practice, the texts assigned to him can be allocated to specific phases of his career. They therefore provide information about his education and practice that can be used to discuss his production and use of scholarly texts. Through this mode of investigation, this study provides a rounded analysis of all aspects of an ancient healer’s profession, and in turn assesses the socio-cultural aspects of healing in combination with analysing the magico-medical content. The monograph will thus improve our understanding of the functional aspects of texts in their specialist environment. The microhistorical description of Ki?ir-Aššur’s education and career offered here is the first analysis with this level of detail of a single Mesopotamian healer’s training and practice. Furthermore, to my knowledge, this work situates Ki?ir-Aššur as the earliest healer in world history for whom we have such details pertaining to his training and practice, which originates from his own time. Before examining the Mesopotamian magico-medical sources, practices and beliefs, as well as the problems related to studying Mesopotamian scholar-ship, it is necessary to understand how Ki?ir-Aššur is identified as a copyist and owner of the source material. Ki?ir-Aššur’s cuneiform tablets can be identified through a subscript at the end of the texts called a colophon.1 Colophons con-sisted of more or less formulaic elements describing from what manuscript the text was copied,2 who copied, checked or owned the tablet, and what titles these individuals held at the time.3 It is assumed that the copyists themselves wrote them.Colophons from private text collections tend to be less formulaic than their official counterparts, for example, from the library of Assurbanipal, even though they do in some cases employ somewhat formulaic expressions.4 As Ki?ir-Aššur is the subject of this study, the elements of his colophons are inves-tigated throughout this work. The colophons enable us to examine the knowl-edge that was part of Ki?ir-Aššur’s education and career and are therefore the basis for this work. For the purpose of this study, I use the terms “education”, “training”, and “career”. The first two terms are used interchangeably to refer to Ki?ir-Aššur’s written and practical schooling. The term “career” is used to designate progression in Ki?ir-Aššur’s titles.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

902 ARB m

Penerbit

Leiden : BRILL., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

433 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789004436084

Klasifikasi

902

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Miscellany of History

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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