Hyperthyroidism in ancient Mesopotamia.

Abstract

799 “IF HE CONSTANTLY TWISTShis fingers and his eyes are protruded . . .”—so reads a fragment from an ancient cuneiform tablet from a Mesopotamian medical handbook. These two symptoms raise the possibility that the disease being described is hyperthyroidism. These words were written in Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew and Arabic. They were written on a clay tablet using cuneiform signs. The words read “summa ubānātiIsu uzâr o nāsI u ittanaqapa.” Writing was invented by the end of the fourth millennium B.C. in ancient Sumer, which is present day Iraq, and then spread throughout the fertile crescent to other peoples who had contact with the Sumerians. The oldest cuneiform medical text found to date is from the third millennium, unearthed in a vast royal archives in northern Syria; it was written in two languages—the Sumerian language and a variation of the Akkadian language called Eblaite. The Sumerians disappeared from history around 2000 B.C. but their traditions and legacy, including medical knowledge, were carried forward and further developed by Akkadian speakers such as the Babylonians and the Assyrians. The Akkadians did not develop their own script but instead adapted their own language to the Sumerian cuneiform writing system. By the Middle Babylonian and the Middle Assyrian periods (c. 1430–1050 B.C.), there was sufficient elaboration of medical knowledge to allow the preparation of a separate diagnostic handbook. By the reign of Marduck-apla-iddina—the biblical Merodach-Baladan 721–710 B.C.—this handbook had grown to more than 40 tablets. Of this series, we have a little less than half and that is largely because of the scholarly interests of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668–627 B.C.) who collected medical and other scientific texts in his famous library. The fragment quoted here is from the diagnostic handbook.