ReOrienting Histories of Medicine

Encounters along the Silk Roads

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781472512499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Asiatische Geschichte

It is rarely appreciated how much of the history of Eurasian medicine in the premodern period hinges on cross-cultural interactions and knowledge transmissions. Using manuscripts found in key Eurasian nodes of the medieval world – Dunhuang, Kucha, the Cairo Genizah and Tabriz – the book analyses a number of case-studies of Eurasian medical encounters, giving a voice to places, languages, people and narratives which were once prominent but have gone silent. This is an important book for those interested in the history of medicine and the transmissions of knowledge that have taken place over the course of global history.

1

Narrating Eurasian origins of medical knowledge

When cultural prestige is at stake, nations are not interested in historical truth.¹

One angle which can help us think about a more Eurasian approach to the history of medicine is an analysis of narratives which tell a Eurasian account of the history of medicine.² Such narratives are found as part of medical texts, recounting their origins in some way, or as part of a separate genre of origin narratives. Narratives alluding specifically to Eurasian origins of medical knowledge raise the complicated question of whether – and to what extent – such accounts actually reflect the nature of the knowledge they describe. In other words, they raise questions like: when and why does a culture/religion/state ideology choose to present/construct itself as multicultural? Are there correspondences between being multicultural and of declaring a culture as such?

Narratives on the origins and history of medicine have a long and illustrious history.³ Origin narratives recount the origin/s of a field of knowledge, the motivation for ‘inventing’ or ‘establishing’ that kind of knowledge and the field’s subsequent development. They can reveal important political, religious, economic and cultural factors at play at the time of their construction. Such narratives have also had a lingering effect on the historiography of medicine and on roads taken – or not – in the study of the history of medicine.

One reason that these narratives have not yet made the impact they deserve in the historiography of medicine, is the way they appear to intertwine what is conventionally termed ‘mythical’ and ‘historical’. While we cannot read hagiographies and mythical accounts as straightforward historical narratives, we can – and should – take some cues from such texts as they often serve as pointers to strata otherwise forgotten or else rewritten by later historical accounts.

Celebrating foreignness: Narrating Eurasian origins of medicine in the Hebrew Book of Asaf

The Hebrew text referred to as Sefer Refu’ot (Book of Remedies) or Sefer Asaf (Book of Asaf) is a very important text not only in the history of the Hebrew medical sciences but also in the history of medicine as a whole.⁴ The text is an extensive medical compendium – its longest version runs to 277 folios – containing a kind of ‘medical history’, sections on anatomy, embryology, pulse and urine diagnosis, seasonal regimen, a medical oath and a long materia medica section. The text has long been a great enigma with regards to fundamental questions such as the date and place of its composition.

Recent research has located at least the core part of the text as deriving from Syriac material of the Church of the East deriving from a Persian cultural milieu.⁵ As such, it belongs to a small group of science writings which were composed in Hebrew somewhere around the eighth to ninth centuries in the Middle East.⁶ Sefer Asaf subsequently arrived in southern Italy, where apparently more sections were added to it.⁷ Beyond Italy, it then circulated in central and northern Europe, locations where we now find its many extant manuscripts.⁸ There are also two fragments which appear to be quotes from Sefer Asaf from the Cairo Genizah, and which may help us to construct the older, Middle Eastern core of the text: two folios which have been dated to the tenth to twelfth centuries from the Solomon Schechter Collection of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which probably came from the Cairo Genizah (JTS 10160), and a Cairo Genizah rotolus which contains a number of recipes from Sefer Asaf, identified by Emunah Levy (JTS ENA 957.8).⁹

Sefer Asaf was widely used in Ashkenaz, and known both to Jewish and non-Jewish European medieval authors.¹⁰ Deriving from a Persian cultural milieu, from circa eighth century and transmitted to Hebrew via Syriac, the Hebrew Book of Asaf is thus an important ‘bridge of knowledge’ in the transmission of medical knowledge. Its compiler/s were in conversation with a breadth of foreign ideas, situating its knowledge as deriving from the medical systems of the Indians, the Greeks, the Syrians and the Persians.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this text is its mentions of India as a source of medical knowledge. Indeed, in the introduction of the text, the compiler/s of the Book of Asaf situate/s its knowledge as a Eurasian enterprise, deriving from the medical systems of the Indians, the Greeks and the Persians:

(fol. 1v) This is the Book of Medicine translated by the first sages from the Book of Shem son of Noah, which was given to Noah at the Luvar Mountain, one of the Ararat Mountains¹¹ after the flood.

Since in those days and in that time, the evil spirits began to torment the sons of Noah, to deviate and terrorise and blow with illnesses and pain and all sorts of destructive and deadly ailments.

Then all the sons of Noah came together with their offspring and told their father Noah about all their ailments.

And they told him about the sicknesses visible in their offspring.

And Noah was terrified and he knew that it is due to human iniquity and the path of misconduct that they would contrive all sickness and ailments.

Then Noah blessed his sons and their offspring [and his household?] together.

And he went to the altar and brought sacrifice and prayed to God.

And he granted his wish and sent him one of the Angels of Presence (

), of the holy ones, and his name – Rafa’el,

to extinguish the evil spirits under the heaven, so as not to harm humans any longer.

And the angel did so.

And he locked them up in the house of justice.

But one out of ten – he let go in the land before the Prince of Animosity (

)

to reign them, the evil ones, to cause illness and pain.

And the angel told Noah about the remedies for human ailments and all sorts of ailments –

how to heal with the trees of the land and the plants

(fol. 2r) of the earth and its roots (

).

And he sent the remaining Princes of Spirits (

) to show Noah and instruct him regarding the trees of medicine along with their grass and their herbs and their vegetables and their seeds and their roots – the reason for their creation, and to teach him every detail of their healing properties.

And Noah wrote all these things in a book, and gave it to Shem, his older son. And from this book, the early sages translated and wrote many books, each one in his own language. And the knowledge of medicine increased in the land, amongst all the peoples who studied the books of medicines – [i.e.] amongst the sages of India and the sages of Macedonia¹² and the sages of Egypt.¹³ The sages of India took to wandering in order to find the trees of medicines and perfumes, and the sages of Aram discovered the herbs – [i.e.] all their kinds and their seeds – in order to cure. And they translated the meaning of the books into Aramaic [i.e. Syriac]. And the sages of Macedonia were the first to cure in the land, and the sages of Egypt began to calculate¹⁴ and perform divinations with the stars and constellations, to teach¹⁵ the book of Babylonian wisdom, copied by Kangar son of Ur son of Kesed¹⁶ as well as all the deeds of the magicians (khartumim).¹⁷ And their wisdom grew until Asclepius came, one of the Macedonian sages and forty men with him among the magicians (khartumim), learned in the translated books and they went in the land, passing beyond India to a land (fol. 2v) east of Eden to find some of the trees of life in order to increase their glory among the sages. And when they came to that place, they found the healing trees and the trees of the tree of life.

And they stretched their hand to take them and God thrust upon them the flame of the swirling sword.¹⁸ And they all burnt in the sparks of lightning and no one escaped.

And medicine was deserted by the doctors. And the wisdom of doctors ceased for 630 years, until the reign of Artaxšaçā (Artakhshashtah,

, Greek: Artaxerxes) the King. And in the days of Artaxšaçā the King, there rose a clever and wise man, who studied the knowledge of the books of medicines and his name: Ippocrat (Hippocrates) the Macedonian and the rest of the gentiles’ sages, and Asaf the Jew and Dioscorides of Ba‘al¹⁹ and Galenos of Caphtor²⁰ and many other sages and they renewed the glory of medicine, and it is living till this day …²¹

Universality

The introduction to Sefer Asaf is in conversation with narratives concerning ancient Jewish sciences, such as the apocryphal texts Jubilees and Enoch, as well as with Sasanian and the Abbasid empire-building narratives on universal knowledge.²² The text also appears to be in conversation with the broader spectrum of Syriac Introduction texts, as well as narratives of chains of transmission, and the genre of philosophical histories.²³ The universality it constructs is created through the superimposition of the notion of a universal antediluvian knowledge predating language and culture divisions, together with concrete references to the known world. The theme of translation from divine antediluvian knowledge into human languages constructs a direct link between what is represented as universal knowledge and the Book of Asaf: Asaf’s medical knowledge is presented as a renewal of a lost universal knowledge.

Claims that before the flood humankind possessed precious knowledge, then lost in the flood and subsequently available only to some fortunate few, have fascinated humankind for as long as flood narratives existed in ancient Babylonia. The king of Assyria wrote in the seventh century BCE: ‘I studied inscriptions from before the flood’.²⁴ Alien to our own notion of the progression of science and knowledge, origin narratives such as these reveal an emphasis on priority. The Babylonian scholar Berossus, writing in Greek about Babylonian culture in the late fourth or early third century BCE, claims to have ‘found’ the ancient writings hidden before the flood on Cronos’ order to Xisutros (the ‘Sumerian Noah’).²⁵ In the Hellenistic period claims of priority played a major role in the cultural battle between nations on the origins of the arts and sciences. There is also a Hermetic topos of stelae containing primordial wisdom, inscribed in a sacred language from before the flood which was translated after the flood.²⁶

The motif of a stela or book in which a legendary or pre-historian figure inscribes some form of human science to preserve the world’s ancient wisdom and to withstand future world destructions by water or fire is a common topos in many Jewish and Christian sources of the first centuries CE.²⁷ Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, speaks about a stela which preserves ancient knowledge, located in a mysterious place in the East, probably China:²⁸

And they discovered the science with regard to the heavenly bodies and their orderly arrangement. And in order that humanity might not lose their discoveries or perish before they came to be known, Adamos having predicted that there would be an extermination of the universe, at one time by a violent fire and at another time by a force with an abundance of water, they made two pillars, one of brick and the other of stone...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Transliterations and abbreviations
• Introduction: Medical encounters along the Silk Roads
• 1 Narrating Eurasian origins of medical knowledge
• 2 Of dice and medicine: Interactions in Central Asian ‘contact zones’
• 3 Myrobalans: The making of a Eurasian panacea
• 4 Tibetan moxa-cautery from Dunhuang: Practices and images on the move
• 5 Medicine of the Bakhshis: Cross-pollinations in Buddhist Iran
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint