Introducing Assyrian medicine: healthcare fit for a king

This project makes available for the first time the world's most standardised, structured and systematised corpus of pre-Galenic medical literature, the Nineveh Medial Encyclopaedia from the library of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria (669-c630 BCE). Its broken condition and its use of cuneiform script mean that only glimpses of its content are accessible to medical historians almost 200 years after it was first discovered. This has meant that the importance of Assyria’s contribution to the history of medicine has been unrecognised.

While fragments of Ashurbanipal’s medical library have long been known, the existence of the encyclopaedia has only recently been recognised thanks to the reconstruction and translation of an ancient medical catalogue. This discovery has allowed us to reconstruct the whole encyclopaedia from its broken fragments and translate it in full. We will generate a complete index of drug names and technical vocabulary found in the compendium and correlate them against the symptoms they were designed to treat. 

This material will be made freely available in enriched digital form. The project will enable researchers to gain a clear understanding of ancient Assyrian medicine and its place in the broader history of medicine.