PATIENTS SEEKING OUT SANCTUARIES OF DEITIES IN MEDICAL PRESCRIPTIONS

Medical prescriptions from ancient Mesopotamia occasionally provide instructions for patients to seek out the sanctuaries of deities in order to gain good fortune. Though these statements have been discussed since the 1960s, their exact function in the healing process remains unclear. The recent discovery of additional related symptom descriptions provides an opportunity to re-evaluate the function of seeking out places of worship in ancient medical therapy. This article collects and examines relevant prescriptions to contextualise and incorporate them properly into our reconstruction of medicine in the first millennium B.C.E. By analysing the terminology employed, particularly the word aširtu , referring to a place of worship, as well as the phrase dumqu / damiqtu amāru “to see good fortune”, indicating that seeking out places of worship could alter a patient’s fortune, the paper proposes that such instructions were intended to circumvent inauspicious days for healing. Alternatively, the visits may have granted the patient auspicious omens for diagnostic-prognostic purposes. Finally, the article discusses the context of the individual manuscripts to assign the practice of their contents to the two primary medical professions, namely the asû and āšipu .