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‘Weaving Together Loose Threads’

On the Serialisation of the Therapeutic Corpus at Nineveh

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Abstract

This article provides an overview of the development of the therapeutic text corpus in the Ashurbanipal Library. It explores the editorial steps taken to produce new standard editions of the therapeutic texts for the Library through a systematic investigation of the layout and format of tablets with pharmaceutical remedies as well as the colophon types used in the corpus. To facilitate the study of the available source material, the texts are divided into four groups. The classification is based on ductus and the different colophons used in the Ashurbanipal Library, yielding four groups: the ‘Babylonian group’, ‘mixed group’, ‘q-group’, and ‘dedicatory group’. As argued here, the tablets in these four groups represent different stages of the editing process.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: Sept. 2, 2024 | Accepted: Sept. 12, 2024 | Published Dec. 19, 2024 | Language: en

Keywords Tablet layout and format • Library colophons • Cuneiform medicine • Ashurbanipal Library • Pharmaceutical remedies • Scribal remarks on editing process

Copyright © 2024 Krisztián Simkó. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/KASKAL/5235-1939/2024/01/018