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SUMERIAN MEDICINES
Added: (Wed May 14 2008)
SUMERIAN MEDICINES
May 14, 2008
By. Didik Marjadi
In the beginnings of medicine, diseases were visitions- the whims or revenge of affronted gods or spirits,as unpredictable as the elements. The priest and the and the physician were one and the same. What man might damage, men might try to repair-stanch the wound, rough-set a broken limb, or manipulate a dislocated joint-but, in early and right up to recent times, the surgeon was just the rude mechanic in the caste system of medicin.
In that graveyard of lost civilizations, in the region which is now called Mesopotamia or, on the map, Iraq, city cultures existed 5000 years ago. While the predynactis Egyptians were still working with flints, the Sumerians had already advanced to fine metals and delicate crafts-manship and to a prosperity which came from trade and a long-established craft tradition.
Before the Flood, and long before abraham left Ur to Become the Biblical Patriarch, there existe at Ur a culture with delicate painted pottery which preceded even the Sumerians. It had settled and grown on the rich alluvial silt brought down by the Euphrates. It has long been agreed that the story of the Flood as told in Genesis is based on the Sumerian legend of which the oldest written versions date from at least 2000 B.C But in 1929 Sir Leonard Woolley found proofs of the Flood. He had been excavating the graves of the kings and had been convinced that the advanced civilization which they represented must have had a long past behind it. So he sank his shaft deepar through buried rubbish until he reached clean clay, uniform throughout and of texture which showed that it had been laid there by water. The Arab workmen insisted that his was the bottom of everything - the river silt on which the original selttlement had been built, but Woolley did not believe it. The stratum was too high above what had been the original marsh. So he set them digging a gain and they cut through eight feet of clay and found themselves in an even older culture. This was rhe Ur which had been drowned by the Flood, over-whelmed by the waters as Herculaneum was engulfed by lava. A flood capable of depositing eight feet of clay must have a mighty one – enough to convince those who survived that the whole world had been engulfed. The date must have been not later than 2700 B.C.
The Chaldeans of Ur were a remarkable people, the founders of astronomy as ane xact science. A thousand years before Christ, Chaldean astronoers culculated the length of the year as 365 days, 6 hours, 15 minutes and 41 seconds – a measurement of which our modern precision instruments have corrected by only 26 minutes 26 seconds. The measurements of the diameter of the moon were more accurate than those of Copernicus, whom we accept as the founder of modern astronomy.
In a pit 37 feet by 24 feet were found the bodies of six men servants and sixty-eight women. The bodies were disposed in rows across the floor and there was evidence in the neat arrangement of the skeletons that there had been no violence and no terror. Many of the women wore neaddresses which were found in good order and undisturbed except by the pressure of the earth. That could not have been so if they had been knocked on the head or stabbed or had suffered the agonies of suffocation. The evidence is all against their having been killed outside the pits and in favor of voluntay sacrifice.
If, therefore, a coroner’s inquest were carried out on those eluquent bones of 4500 years ago, the verdict would be that the courtiers chose to die with their king and queen and than they drank some powerful sleeptng draught and composed themselves to sleep. Some attendant descended into the pit and with gentle care arranged harps un the breast and the gold leaves of the headgear before the pit was filled in with earth.
If we accept the evidence of the soporifics and of the cosmetics in the queen’s death chamber at Ur, we can assume also that the Sumerians of Erech, Ur Kish and Lagash had a system of healing drugs as well. Many small copper knives have been dug which would suggest that they were used by surgeons as scalpels. From Kish came a pictographic script of about 4200 B.C, and from the same site came tablets bearing on medicane. From Lagash came a physician’s seal of about 3000 B.C. Such seals were engraved on cylinders which were rolled in the wet clay and used as signatures for the tiles which were the records of the times. This one showed Iru, a god regarded as a form, or incarnation, of Nergal, the god of pestilence and disease. These records also show drains existed at Kish as early as 3000 B.C. Read More About this articles, visit http://www.1st-in-thearomatheraphy.com
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