Remedies for a Prince with a Nosebleed

K 1452, a previously unpublished tablet from the Kouyunjik Collection in the British Museum, contains pharmaceutical remedies and incantations against nasal haemorrhage. The format of this tablet suggests that it was prepared for practical purposes. Neo-Assyrian medical letters offer the closest parallels in Nineveh, and two of them, SAA 10, 321 and 322, record remedies for a prince suffering from a heavy nosebleed. The former letter also mentions a text ( mašṭaru ) sent by the chief physician. In this paper, it is argued that K 1452 may very well be the text mentioned in SAA 10 321. Work on this paper has benefitted from two text-reading seminars, where I had the opportunity to present my preliminary edition of K 1452. I want to express my sincere thanks to the organisers, Mark Weeden (London Cuneiforum) and Mark Geller (NinMed – Nineveh Medicine), and everyone who participated in these two online reading groups. I want to thank Irving Finkel, who has graciously given his time discussing difficult philological problems and numerous questions at the interpretative level. I am also grateful to Cale Johnson for his many corrections and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Jon Taylor for providing me with valuable insights into the handwriting of texts in the Kouyunjik Collection. The research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (AH/T012773/1) as part of the project ‘Reading the Library of Ashurbanipal: A Multi-Sectional Analysis of Assyriology’s Foundational Corpus.’ The abbreviations follow the Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie (RlA)

Traditional medicine · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Ancient Near East History · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Medicine · Psychology