K. 263+10934, A Tablet with Recipes Against the Abnormal Flow of a Woman’s Blood

Abstract

In this article I am using an unpublished Babylonian gynaecological text from the 1st millennium BC as a point of departure to advocate a comparative and historical approach to the study of cuneiform medicine.1 A standard text edition of K. 263+10934 will be combined with a discussion of its contents and parallels to other texts on women’s ailments (found in other cuneiform texts as well as in Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Jewish sources), especially those concerned with the abnormal flow of blood, but also including medical recipes against other forms of haemorrhage. The hitherto unpublished tablet K. 263+10934 contains medical recipes and a ritual against the abnormal flow of a woman’s blood (in rev. 37, it offers the rubric [ka.ini]m.ma mud munus ana tar-su). Although this text contains elements that are typical for Babylonian therapeutic texts on women’s illnesses, K. 263+ also exhibits some unusual features to be discussed. It is a one-column-tablet in Neo-Babylonian script from the Nineveh collection, possibly dating to the early Neo-Babylonian period and later brought from Babylonia to Nineveh during Assurbanipal’s reign.2 Its top left-hand corner and bottom right-hand corner are still missing. The joined fragment K. 10934 forms the top right-hand corner. The handwriting is rather large, adding together with a few missing signs to the impression that this tablet could form an excerpt collecting recipes exclusively dealing with gynaecological haemorrhage.3