Objective
BabMed represents the first ever comprehensive study of ancient Babylonian medical science since the decipherment of cuneiform, comprising the largest ancient collection of medical data before Hippocrates. The latest phase of Babylonian medicine, as preserved in Aramaic in the Babylonian Talmud, has never been systematically studied in the light of older cuneiform materials. The absence of accessible cuneiform medical literature has forced recent medical histories to bypass Babylonian medicine, while Aramaic medicine in the Babylonian Talmud has simply been ignored. BabMed tests a number of 'high risk' propositions, including two key hypotheses: 1) cuneiform survived much longer than previously suspected, and 2) Aramaic medicine in the Babylonian Talmud mostly derives from Akkadian medicine. BabMed's methodology relies upon native taxonomies rather than modern biomedical disease classifications, countering flawed retrospective diagnoses that obviate the entire history of medicine. Comparisons with neighbouring medical systems challenge the prevalent Eurocentricity of current histories, in which Greek medicine has become the standard for all ancient medicine. BabMed will introduce a new paradigm for knowledge transfer which will recognise the barriers between ancient arts of medicine and how they were overcome in antiquity. One such barrier was script and language, and BabMed proposes that Babylonian medicine survived the death of cuneiform script and was preserved in part in the local Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud, a unique text which straddles the borders of Greco-Roman Palestine and Persian Babylonia and mirrors the scientific thinking of both worlds.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
ERC-2012-ADG_20120411
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Funding Scheme
ERC-AG - ERC Advanced GrantHost institution
14195 Berlin
Germany