A Comparison of Commentaries on Ancient Mesopotamian and Ancient Egyptian Medical Texts by Scribes of the Period

Abstract

The tradition of commentary in ancient Mesopotamia became evident in the early first millennium BC, during the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods (eighth century BC). It continued into the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods (up to the first century BC). Almost all of the basic texts for which commentary was written are considered to belong to the “canonical” corpus of first-millennium BC Mesopotamian literature. Commentaries became a necessity in the seventh century BC, in order to provide updated comprehensives and detailed meanings for archaic expressions whose meanings were no longer known and whose original authors had used them almost a thousand years earlier. Other factors that gave rise to commentaries were historical, social and political conditions. During the Neo-Assyrian period, scholars and academia were subject to political powers, and the research conducted for the canonization process of works was primarily aimed at advising the king, at times necessitating interpretation. With the freedom that emerged as a result of the change of political authority in the Achaemenid period, an independent internal scholastic system emerged, consisting of scholars who studied and interpreted the corpus of canonical texts. While recent studies examining the history and typology of these commentaries from a multidisciplinary perspective have given little attention to the Babylonian and Assyrian commentaries, the present study attempts to compare commentaries from two different disciplines from this perspective. This study aims to compare commentaries on medical texts from ancient Mesopotamia with those appearing in the Edwin Smith medical papyrus in terms of the physical text organization and the hermeneutics applied to provide explanations in the commentaries.