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August 20, 2007

A Structure for the Ages

After the work of translating the Ugaritic veterinary text KTU 1.85, I thought I'd tackle one of the easier but more important topics of interpretation; the structure of the text and its relationship to omens, wisdom literature, law codes and related genres.

I have previously posted a "gateway" to this series in which I provide a translation of the Ugaritic text and links to my more detailed studies.

At the highest level, the text has the following structure:

I. Heading or Title (spr . nʿm . śśwm)
II. List of ten hippiatric instructions

Each hippiatric instruction has the following structure:

1) Symptom (the protasis)
2) Treatment (the apodosis)
      2a) Components and preparation
      2b) Administration of medication

I will confine my remarks in this post to the structure of the individual units and the list itself. In a future post, I may take up the heading and the highest-level structure of this text.

While discussing the structure of the individual units and the list itself, I will rely heavily on ideas presented in a number of articles by Jean Bottéro, now translated and collected in an abnormally interesting book, Mesopotamia. While I will try to indicate where I am using him, the best thing to do is to assume that I am stealing his ideas and applying them to the Ugaritic veterinary text on a wholesale basis. Because of its accessibility, I will cite the book rather than the individual articles. I want to thank Jim Getz for reminding me of Bottéro's work and suggesting that his work is applicable to this text.

Bottéro's asks us to consider what at first glace looks like a very diverse collection of literature from Mesopotamia: omens, legal texts, medical texts, even much of the wisdom literature (specifically collections of proverbs). These collections, often called series, are commonly many tablets long. The Assyrian Dream Book (series ^dZip'iq) from the Assurbanipal library once contained hundreds of dream (oneirocritical) oracles spread over 12 tablets (actually the first and last tablets likely didn't contain any omens but prays, exorcisms and the like). One medical series fills forty tablets. And Hammurabi's stele contains 282 generalized verdicts, as Bottéro, 164, would like us to see them. And of course, that is not the only known Mesopotamian legal collection. What all of these collections have in common is the protasis-apodosis structure. Bottéro sees in the various collections of items so structured a kind of "science," an attempt to generalize from many specific examples using a purely deductive method. Of course, this is not our science. It lacks both inductive and abductive methodologies and, therefore, in many ways resembles what we commonly call pseudo-science. Even so, Bottéro, 131f, believes that some individual items may have had empirical origins. The ancients may well have noticed that certain important events occurred with or after other seemly (to us) unrelated events. On occasion, these paired events may have developed from fairly trivial life experiences and observations. Ancient scholars well may have recorded such paired events in the form of a conditional statement. There is some evidence in support of this speculation. Bottéro, 132, cites this "gem" from a collection of Old Babylon omen texts,

The wife of that man, pregnant by another man, will not cease to implore the goddess Ištar and say to her while looking at her husband: "May my child look like my husband!"

But as scribes and practitioners collected the various conditional statements, they filling in the missing gaps with what often appear to us as having been made from whole cloth. These collections grew into substantial treatises that, while incomplete in the absolute sense, provided enough detail by way of example to allow someone skilled in the art to fill in the missing pieces as new, even more unusual, cases that were came to light or where thought up.

Another important point (and I don't think Bottéro makes it specifically but he does strongly imply it) is that the protasis and the apodosis can not be separated. They are a unit and must be understood together. It was the collection that had the force of generalization, not the individual units. Even if they were to be understood in some literal sense, the individual units, the individual protasis followed by its individual apodosis, were only examples.

So, how does this apply to the ten individual treatments listed on the Ugaritc veterinary text? At the individual "line item" level, they seem to work in exactly the same way. They are "deductive science." They provide the practitioner with the collected experience of those who came before him. But in one way, this text does is not as exhaustive (and exhausting) as the great series that Bottéro considers. In this regard, I speculate that our text may be an excerpt from a larger, now unknown, (Akkadian?) series. I'll have more to say about this when I take up its possible use as a scribal exercise and the possible prehistory of the text. Here, I will only note that such excerpts were very common in antiquity. In archives from Ugarit, Amarna and elsewhere in the Late Bronze Age west there are excerpts of classical works and series in Akkadian.

As far as I know, this veterinary text is the only Ugaritic text that rigorously follows the internal structure of a Mesopotamian "scientific" document or manual. To be sure, Akkadian wisdom texts found at Ugarit, RS 22.439 also known from Emar and Bogazkoy (in Hittite) for example, conform to the protasis-apodosis structure. But again, there is nothing like our text in the Ugaritic language.

While each unit of the Ugaritic veterinary text has the protasis-apodosis structure, the apodoses themselves have a two part sub-division, 'Components and preparation' and 'Administration of medication.' Fisher, 218, notes this finer structure in the 1530 CE Hippiatrica. And also in two quotes from Mago of Carthage that are included in the Hippiatrica. Mago of Carthage's work is from the mid 2nd century BCE. In fact, Fisher, following Honeyman, 77-82, notes another strong affinity between one of the Mago quotes and our text. The apodosis in Latin reads, "per nares infundatur, cieri urinam", "It is poured through its nostrils, urine will flow." Compare the whole quote with KTU 1.85:9-11, my section IV. On this passage, also see chapter 10, page 7, of Brown where he agrees with Fisher's analysis,

It seems plain that Ugaritic veterinary medicine was continued in Phoenicia and Carthage, recorded by Mago, and somehow resurfaced in the Renaissance!

See also Brown's note 17 on the same page. I'll have a lot more to say on this when I look at the role of our text or its genre in the history of more recent antiquity.

References

Posted by Duane Smith at August 20, 2007 9:17 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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