Melothesia in Babylonia

Download or read book Melothesia in Babylonia written by Markham Judah Geller and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph begins with a puzzle: a Babylonian text from late 5th century BCE Uruk associating various diseases with bodily organs, which has evaded interpretation. The correct answer may reside in Babylonian astrology, since the development of the zodiac in the late 5th century BCE offered innovative approaches to the healing arts. The zodiac—a means of predicting the movements of heavenly bodies—transformed older divination (such as hemerologies listing lucky and unlucky days) and introduced more favorable magical techniques and medical prescriptions, which are comparable to those found in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos and non-Hippocratic Greek medicine. Babylonian melothesia (i.e., the science of charting how zodiacal signs affect the human body) offers the most likely solution explaining the Uruk tablet.