ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

New discoveries on phlegm and sputum: A common medicine from cuneiform to Hippocrates

• In Event: The Shared World of Ancient Medicine: A Conceptual Framework for Technical Circulation and Exchange in Eurasia and North Africa

English Abstract

This presentation examines two recent cuneiform discoveries that reframe the relationship between Mesopotamian and Greek medicine. A large Babylonian tablet from the later second millennium BCE (ca. 1500–1200 BCE) constitutes the earliest known systematic treatise devoted to phlegm and sputum worldwide. It anticipates first-millennium Assyrian medical compendia on phlegm from Ashur and Nineveh, including texts from the Library of Ashurbanipal. In addition, a Late Babylonian fragment, contemporaneous with the formation of the Hippocratic corpus (ca. fifth–fourth centuries BCE), preserves the same phlegm- and sputum-centered medical technique, creating a continuous documentary bridge from the second millennium into the classical period. Together, this cuneiform evidence demonstrates that medical procedures practiced across the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean for over a millennium were incorporated into, and adapted by, Greek medicine. These and other correspondences with Hippocratic writings support the existence of shared, common medical systems and technical repertoires that predate the Hippocratic treatises, inviting a reassessment of the origins and circulation of medical knowledge in antiquity.

Author

• Strahil Panayotov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences