Illness, Healing and Care in Ancient Assyria
Illness in ancient Assyria could involve household care, treatments copied for specialists and consultation at the royal court. Assyria’s core lay in northern Mesopotamia, around Assur and Nineveh in present-day Iraq, while Assyrian communities also lived and worked farther west. The evidence spans the Old Assyrian period, around 2000 to 1700 BCE; the Middle Assyrian period, around 1400 to 1050 BCE; and the Neo-Assyrian empire, around 900 to 609 BCE. A merchant household at Kanesh, an Anatolian town near modern Kültepe in Turkey, reveals the effects of illness on a family, while later medical tablets and court letters preserve treatment instructions and specialists’ reports.
Recognizing illness and preparing treatment
Assyrian healers interpreted bodily signs and used medicines, spoken formulas and protective rites. Neo-Assyrian texts name the asû, a healer who prepared therapeutic remedies, and the āšipu, a learned ritual healer who recited incantations and performed protective procedures. The roles could overlap: an āšipu might treat a sick person through a combination of physical care and ritual action. The titles marked learned practices that could work together.
At Assur, the healer and scholar Kiṣir-Aššur learned by copying medical and ritual tablets as he advanced through stages of practice; notes on his tablets identify his professional rank. One group of medical instructions he copied begins with head complaints such as headache, throbbing temples and ringing ears, then connects signs with named conditions and treatments. The entries taught a practitioner how to compare a patient’s symptoms with a learned description and choose a response.
A baked-clay tablet from the Middle Assyrian period lays out a more specific sequence. It prescribes treatment for a pregnant woman suffering from colic, or abdominal pain and cramping. The first two subsections give remedies for consecutive days, another offers a next step if those treatments failed, and a final subsection supplies an additional treatment. A separate section contains two incantations for use in childbirth, taken from another source. The tablet shows how care could proceed in stages while spoken ritual addressed childbirth.
Babylonian scholarly material also travelled into Assyria. A child-calming incantation copied at Assur addresses Lamaštu, a being feared as a danger to infants. A related copy by the scholar Kiṣir-Nabû says its source was a writing-board from Nineveh, perhaps, which had itself been copied at Nippur in Babylonia. The tablet’s closing note preserves one route by which ritual learning moved between Babylonian and Assyrian centers; the two versions differ in detail.
Illness at home and at court
An Old Assyrian memorandum from Kanesh records expenses for the burial of an Assyrian merchant’s wife in the nineteenth century BCE. Her will named two sons living with her and a daughter who served as a priestess at Assur. The sons probably died from the same illness as their mother, leaving the daughter to inherit. The record shows how illness and death could change what remained within a merchant household linked to Anatolia and Assur.
A seventh-century tablet from a healer’s family archive at Assur gives a closer view of bedside ritual. It describes a house-call procedure for a patient whose heels were swollen and who could not walk. The āšipu was to recite an incantation, purify the patient, place two wax figures of the gods Marduk and Ninurta at the head and foot of the bed, and burn juniper during the rite. The figures and fumigation sought divine protection; they were not a way to identify the bodily cause of the swelling. The directions place a learned ritual healer beside an individual patient in a household setting.
Letters from the reign of Esarhaddon, a seventh-century BCE Assyrian king, show the chief physician Urad-Nanaya coordinating treatment at court. In one letter he reports that he could not clarify the king’s symptoms during an audience, so he sealed a fuller explanation for the king to hear. Urad-Nanaya says he had prepared an oil lotion two or three times and sends further medicine, a salve, or ointment, and protective amulets called phylacteries, to be worn around the king’s neck. He instructs palace attendants to draw a curtain when the medicine arrives, then says he will enter and guide its use. The letter shows the sequence of diagnosis, preparation, delivery and administration, with attendants handling care under a physician’s direction.
Another letter records an infant patient’s progress. Urad-Nanaya says he had fastened an absorbent dressing loosely against an abscess behind the baby’s ear. In his report, he describes removing the dressing and finding pus on it; he says the baby was much better and predicts recovery within seven or eight days. The court letters show how specialists explained their decisions, dispatched medicines and gave palace attendants a role in the treatment.