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In the Wake of the Compendia presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia. This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian \"rationality, \" epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.

Standard histories of medicine identify Hippocratic texts such as Epidemics as the earliest medical case histories in human history. In contrast to the Hippocratic case histories, it is often stated that Babylonian medicine made no use of individual case histories. In this paper, I investigate ‘depersonalized case histories’ in the Babylonian therapeutic corpora (ca. 800–600 BCE, although in many cases probably based on earlier lost sources). On the face of it, the suggestion that certain complex collocations of symptoms derive in a straightforward way from individual cases might seem far-fetched, or at minimum not a demonstrable interpretation. Comparison of Babylonian therapeutic texts with the treatment of ‘cases’ in Mesopotamian law, in particular in so-called imperial rescripts in which an individual case is converted into a general statute, suggests that certain clusters of symptom descriptions actually represent ‘depersonalized’ case histories in which personal details have been intentionally omitted from the tradition in order to make these cases suitable for inclusion within authoritative(or as I suggest we call them infrastructural) technical corpora. The identification of this process of ‘depersonalization’ may also play an important role in bringing epistemological critiques of one kind or another (Foucault on ‘the clinical sciences’ or Forrester on ‘thinking incases’) into a fruitful dialogue with Mesopotamian materials.

In the Wake of the Compendia examines the composition of technical literature in the ancient Semitic-speaking world. Compendia on astrology, magic, medicine, lexicography, and alchemy were composed in several languages and relate to earlier Mesopotamian models. This volume offers new perspectives on the early history of these compendia and their subsequent transmission into later post-cuneiform compilations, curricula, and scholarly writings.

This contribution investigates the phraseology of descriptions of efficacy (efficacy phrases) in Mesopotamian medical texts, concentrating on the qualification latku ‘tested, tried, proven’, which implies that knowledge of effective drugs and remedies had been acquired through practical experience and repeated trials. The occurrence of latku-qualifications in different types or formats of medical manuscripts and in recipes that are duplicated in one or more historical periods will be analyzed, so as to raise questions regarding the role that ‘tested’ remedies played in the formation and transmission of Mesopotamian medical compendia. I also look at information about drug testing from outside the medical corpus, as for instance in several letters from Old Babylonian Mari, the role of efficacy labels from a cross-cultural perspective and the use of efficacy labels in connection with colophons. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relatively high frequency with which extract tablets make use of ‘tested’ remedies and the categorical role of the label in designating certain sections of medical compendia.

This paper looks at how empirical knowledge was assembled and interpreted in Babylonian academies and investigates two Neo-Assyrian plant lists: KADP 2 and KADP 4. These two lists are not simple collections of scholastic information but represent examples of theoretical botany and pharmacology. It is suggested that KADP 4 is a kind of proto-commentary, in which glosses represent key-words for hermeneutical elaborations. The paper concludes with an annotated transliteration and translation of KADP 4.