Healing Priestesses
When I started writing, I depicted my main character, Briseis, as a healing priestess who used magical medicines. I’d found the model for that calling in the cuneiform texts left by the Hittites and Mesopotamians. I read weird and bizarre rites for expelling curses, curing impotency, soothing burning eyes, and a host of other instructions. To a modern sensibility, these rites combined “medicine” and “magic.” However, to the ancient practitioner no such distinction existed. Thus, in my healing priestess’s view, a salve rubbed on the eyes and a wax model of a tongue she burnt in a fire were equally useful materials for healing. The main character of my most recent books, Tesha, although a different kind of priestess, participates in these magical/medical rites as well.
Plants used as Magical Medicines Lost to Time
When I read translations of many of the medical texts, I was frustrated to find that the translators left the names of the plants and minerals in transliterated Hittite or Akkadian. I wanted to know which plants. Juicy, precise details for my writing. It did not take me long to realize why scholars followed this annoying habit. They had no more idea than I did how to identify the actual plant. The ancient languages died out millennia ago. We’ve deciphered them, but there are limits to what knowledge researchers can resurrect.
This meant for me that I sometimes had to make a plausible guess. Scholars leave a trail of footnotes and unsettled issues. Storytellers have to follow the breadcrumbs into the past as best they can. When the birds eat all the crumbs, informed creativity takes over.
When They Call for an Onion in Labor & Delivery
So, for example, the procedure for a breech birth involved a bulb of some sort, but I had to guess beyond “bulb.” I decided the gist of the rite was an example of analogic magic. Analogic magic is one of the foundational ideas of Hittite religion and medicine. In this case the analogy was a comparison of the baby in the womb to the inner layer of a bulb with at least two layers. So, the healer made the inner layer of the bulb turn and said prayers/incantations to give that action the power to similarly turn the baby in the womb. I chose to write this bulb as an onion–it had to be some specific bulb. My readers can readily picture an onion. Also, they existed in that time and place.
But other tantalizing lists of ingredients are less amenable to reasonable guessing/substitution. It feels like being taunted by a scribe who’s been dead for three millennia, although I’m sure that wasn’t the original intent.
Saving One Magical Medicine from the Sands of Time
All of this explanation is a round about way to explain why I had such fun reading this article in The Ancient Near East Today “The Medico-Magical Squill.” One of those illusive, puzzling plants found in the Mesopotamian medical texts was “a plant that the Sumerians called Ú SIKIL, the “pure/purifying plant,” which from the 2nd millennium BCE was known as sikillu in Akkadian” (to quote from the article). The texts indicated an onion-like appearance. They believed it worked against witchcraft and other situations when purifying is needed.
But to the rescue came the Greek medical tradition of people like Dioscorides. (He’s imaginatively depicted at the top of this post, painting taken from a 1906 medical textbook.) I will leave the story of the detective work to the article, which is brief and fun. It involves the tangled webs of magic and medicine. It seems safe to say that the bulb the Mesopotamians used was a sea squill. Connecting all the dots across centuries, allows us to trace the way cultural memory maintained and lost the fascinating ways this plant was used.
Here for a fuller discussion of Hittite midwifery and magical practices.