SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Temple May Hold Clues to Origins of Medicine : Archeology: Babylonian ruins date to as early as 3000 BC. They are believed to have been the center of activities focusing on the goddess of healing.
A newly discovered Babylonian temple dedicated to a goddess of healing is yielding new insights into the origin of the practice of medicine.
The football-field-sized temple, about 60 miles southwest of Baghdad, Iraq, in the ancient religious center of Nippur, dates from the reign of the Kassites, who ruled Mesopotamia from 1600 BC to 1200 BC.
The temple was probably the center of elaborate economic activity, with people bringing offerings to the temple to help in healing and purchasing clay figurines at the door to offer to the goddess Gula, according to University of Chicago archeologist McGuire Gibson, who headed the study.
Beneath the Gula temple, portions of which were unearthed earlier this year, Gibson expects to find as many as 15 earlier versions of the temple, with the earliest probably dating to Sumerian times, before 3000 BC.
In those earlier temples, it is likely that clay tablets will be discovered, which may “tell us more about the ancient Mesopotamian approach to medicine than we have known,” he said.
“The great significance of this discovery,” said archeologist David Hansen of New York University, “is that we have a temple we know and can prove belongs to the goddess Gula, and hopefully, during the excavation, some medical texts will appear. This is also a very well-preserved building of the Kassite period, which is not a period we know much about architecturally.”
Researchers have already gleaned quite a bit of knowledge about the practice of medicine in Mesopotamia from cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets previously excavated at Nippur and other sites. Those tablets indicate that there were two types of medical practitioners in the area.
The first type was a herbal healer who gathered herbs and prescribed them for specific ailments--typical medicine that was practiced in many primitive cultures. “There was apparently very little ritual associated with this type of healing,” Gibson said. “The healer would simply give the patient the herbs and say to rub them on at certain intervals.”
The second type of healer was a magician who operated on the assumption that a demon had gotten into the body of the afflicted individual and he was going to drive it out.
“We don’t know the relationship of these two types of healers to each other and to the temple, or what went on in the temple itself,” Gibson said. “That’s what we are trying to find out.”
American archeologists have been digging at Nippur since researchers from the University of Pennsylvania began excavations in the 1890s. The University of Chicago took over the site in 1948, and Gibson became director of the project in 1972.
Shortly after he took over, the team discovered the outer wall of a building that is now known to be the temple. “It was clear it was not a private house and that it was probably something religious because of the architecture,” Gibson said. “We were able to get into one room, go down for four or five levels, and show we had a sequence going down to as early as 1800 BC. But we had to stop digging because sand dunes were moving into the area.”
The field of shifting sand dunes, which extends for about 100 miles in an east-west direction and even farther north and south, covered the area for 15 years, but finally began moving away in 1988.
“In 1973, we found a few tablets of unbaked clay with Sumerian and Babylonian writing on them,” Gibson said. “The tablets didn’t tell much, they were simply accounts of things going in and coming out. We did find a couple of dog figurines, but we didn’t attach much importance to them at the time.” The dog is the symbol of Gula.
No one is sure why the dog is associated with Gula, but Gibson speculates that “because dogs lick their own wounds and get well from doing it, people assume that they have some sort of curative power.”
“When we went back in this time, we found 10 of the little dog figurines, as well as other figurines of humans holding on to their throats, their eyes, their stomachs, and so forth, obviously showing the goddess where it hurts. These were made of clay and carefully fired. Obviously, somebody was making and selling these to the people, and they are being left as a reminder to the goddess that this person is sick,” Gibson said.
“We know from cuneiform tablets that the ancient Mesopotamians used figurines in a number of rituals, but we don’t know much about their use in healing. I am reminded of figurines that are left in Mexican churches, even today, as reminders to the saints to help cure someone.”
Pilgrims made regular visits to the site from as far north as modern Turkey, as far east as Iran and as far west as Syria seeking the healing help of Gula, he said.
What clinched the identification of the site as a temple was the discovery of a piece of a lapis lazuli disk, an azure-blue stone 1 to 1 1/2 inches in diameter, which said “To Gula.” “Such stones have frequently been found in other temples, and normally give the name of the king who presented it,” Gibson said. “In this case, the name of the king had been broken off, but we expect to find the foundation box for the temple which will tell who commissioned it.”
In addition to completing the excavation of the temple, Gibson and his colleagues plan to spend the next five years exploring the neighborhood around the sacred building to learn more about the daily lives of the priests, administrators and service personnel who worked in the temple.
