ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Ideological commitments long dissuaded scholars from acknowledging connections between Greek and Roman knowledge traditions and those further to the east in Mesopotamia, Persia, Central Asia, and India. Even as the conceptual divide between western and eastern traditions has started to dissolve in the past several decades, considerable disciplinary and technical challenges make securely identifying shared knowledge networks quite difficult. Medical and technical practitioners used different languages, worked within different intellectual contexts, and preserved their knowledge by varying means. This panel brings together three scholars working across this divide to challenge traditional narratives of intellectual isolation in ancient medical traditions. By illustrating how Mesopotamian healers were already theorizing illness caused by phlegm and sputum in the second millennium BCE, one paper illustrates the wider context in which Hippocratic humoral theories emerged. By examining lore surrounding the Persian magus Ostanes, another paper reveals continuous lines of transmission between cuneiform sources in the 7th c. BCE into the 3rd c. CE Greco-Roman world. A final paper illustrates how antidotes and toxicological techniques circulated from India via Egypt and into the Mediterranean from the Hellenistic period onward, shaping Greek and Roman pharmacology and ideas about the nature of disease. Through these case studies, this panel explores the mechanisms of trans-Eurasian exchange, and lays the groundwork for establishing a fuller, more intercultural understanding of medicine in antiquity.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Colin Webster, UC Davis

Individual Presentations

• New discoveries on phlegm and sputum: A common medicine from cuneiform to Hippocrates - Strahil Panayotov, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

• In Search of Ostanes through Medical and Chemical Techniques - Maddalena Rumor, Case Western University

• Toxicological Exchanges from India to Greece (4th c. BCE to 2nd c. CE) - Colin Webster, UC Davis