46).ĭifferent demons were associated with different diseases. If at the time of possession his mind is awake, the demon can be driven out if at the time of his possession, his mind is not so aware, the demon cannot be driven out (Porter, 1997, p. If at the time of his possession, while he is sitting down, his left eye moves to the side, a lip puckers, saliva flows from his mouth, and his hand, leg and trunk on the left side jerk like a slaughtered sheep it is migtu. A Babylonian medical text of about 650 BC, for example, describes epileptic seizures as being caused by demons: Those healers who used divination saw diseases and their accompanying symptoms as arising from demon spirits. Another aspect to divination was for the diviner to ask for divine intervention to ward off evil. Various objects or events may serve as media of divination. There were three types of medical activities performed by healers in ancient Mesopotamia: divination, incantations and exorcisms, and medical practices such as bandaging and surgeries.ĭivination is the art or technique of gaining knowledge of future events or distant states by means of observing and interpreting signs. Medicine and disease in ancient Mesopotamia In 539 BC Cyrus captured Babylon, making it part of his Persian empire. In 608 BC Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, rebelled against his grandfather, the Mede King Astyages, and took over his kingdom. He started a museum there that contained objects and statues from his and earlier empires. Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian king, (reign 605-562) rebuilt and enlarged Babylon and made it his capital city. In 612 BC the Babylonians along with the Medes, a group of ancient Iranians, conquered the Assyrains and divided the empire between them. When Ashurbanipal died in 631 BC the Assyrian empire weakened. The tablets included letters, legends, dictionaries, histories, astronomical observations, and medical texts-all a source for historians to access the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia. Assurbanipal collected a library of around 25,000 clay tablets in his palace at Nineveh. The Assyrian kingdom reached its height under kings Sennacherib (reign 705-681 BC) and Assurbanipal (r. During that time Hammurabi conquered cities throughout Mesopotamia creating the Babylonian empire.ĭuring the 9th century BC the Assyrian kings gradually took over all of Mesopotamia, eventually extending their kingdom southward to the Mediterranean sea and Egypt. He established his reign over the area until around 1750 BC. Hammurabi, an Amorite, became king of Babylon around 1792 BC. In 1894 BC on the Euphrates river in what was then Akkadia, the Amorites made their capital Babylon. Cuneiform was the writing system used in Mesopotamians for over 300 years, with the last known cuneiform text written by Babylonians in the 2nd century AD.Īround 2004 BC the Amorites, a group of Semitic people from the west of Mesopotamia in Arabia invaded Sumer and established several of their own city states in the region. Later Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians used these cuneiform signs to transcribe their languages. They first used pictrgrams and then cuneiform signs that consisted of around 600 wedge-shaped elements representing Sumerian syllables and numbers. The Sumerians invented writing around 3100 BC. A key area of population growth for the Assyrians was in and around the city Assyria, later called Nineveh, located on the Tigris River, near Mosul in modern Iraq. The Assyrians, a third group, lived in northern Mesopotamia. In central Mesopotamia were a group called Akkadians. The Sumerians lived in southern Mesopotamia, an area known as Sumer, around 100 miles upriver from the Persian Gulf in what is now Iraq. At around 3500 BC, in Mesopotamia, there arose several important cities and civilizations.
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