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November 4, 2007

2800 Years Down a Horse's Nose

This post continues my series on KTU 1.85, the Ugarit veterinary text. You can find more information on this text and links to other posts in the series at the gateway post. I touched on the main point of this post earlier but now I want to spell it out in more detail. From the 1530 CE edition of Ruellius' Hippiatrica one reads the following quotation that is attributed to a Mago the Carthaginian (this text is also known from a Greek version published in 1537 CE);

asserit autem,
cum urinae difficultate torqueatur equus,
si priorum pedum ex infimis unguibus delimata scobis in hemina vini,
per nares infundatur, cieri urinam (Ruellius, p. 44 apud Honeyman, 80)

He (Mago) claims,
1) When a horse suffers with difficulty in passing urine,
2a) if a powder scraped from the ends of the hooves of its front feet in a half-sextarius of wine
2b) is poured through its nostrils, urine will flow. (trans., Brown, 7)

The Roman Senate ordered Mago of Carthage's works translated from Punic to Latin in 140 CE. See Fisher, 210, who, correctly in my view, suggests that it may well be this Latin translation that survives in Ruellius. Note, contra, Cohen and Sivan, 17, there is not reason to think that Mago's work was ever on a "Latin inscription from Carthage." The date of Mago's activity, or even who he was, is uncertain. As Fisher, 212, points out, he could possible by the great Punic general and youngest brother of Hannibal. That would put him in the late 3rd century BCE. Or he could the Mago "by whose exertions the power of Carthage, the extent of its territories, and its military glory was much increased. (Marcus Junianus Justinus [aka Justin], XVIII:7)." That would put him as early as the late 6th century BCE. Janick identifies him with a certain Mago who was active circa 350 BCE.

Now consider KTU 1.85:9-11;

w . k . l . yḫru . w . yṯtn . śśw
[ms]s . št . qlql . w . št . ʿrgz
[yd]k . aḥdh . w . yṣq . b . aph

1) And when a house does not defecate or urinate,
2a) one crushes together the extract (sap) of a measure of Cassia and a measure of ʿRGZ nut,
2b) and pours it into its nose.

No one is claiming the Latin of Mago's work and the Ugaritic text say the same thing. But, aside from the prescription (2a), the structure, part of the symptom and the method of administration are clearly in the same tradition. In my previous post, I quoted Brown, 7, who said,

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

We have a veterinary tradition that lasted some 2800 years, but do we have a literary tradition that lasted that long? First, let me say that one can never be certain when faced with this kind of evidence. In this specific case, it is clear that the Latin is not a translation via Punic of the Ugaritic text. They clearly have different prescriptions. However, one cannot use this difference to dismiss a literary connection between Mago's work and the text from which KTU 1.85 was an excerpted. On the text of KTU 1.85 being an excerpt of a larger work, see my post "A Possible Prehistory of KTU 1.85." KTU 1.85 has a couple of sections that repeat symptoms with differing prescriptions (compare KTU 1.85:5-6 and 7-7 [pain?] and KTU 1.85:18-19 and 30-32 [mange?]). If I am correct that KTU 1.85 is an excerpt, then it is clear that whatever it was excerpted from had occasionally multiple prescriptions for the same symptom. It is also possible that Mago or some earlier practitioner substituted what was thought to be a more effective prescription for the one in KTU 1.85:9-11. Mago was not a veterinarian. He was a complier of knowledge that relating to agriculture including the care of domestic animals. Another thing that one can say with certainty is that Mago viewed the veterinary material that he documents as a kind of professional manual for veterinarians and not as a scribal exercise. Fisher, 207-220, has an important discussion of the transmission of this material from Ugarit (and perhaps earlier) to the Renaissance. And while I may differ with Fisher on certain details (e.g. that Rashapabu, among whose archives the KTU 1.85 tablet was found, was "responsible for veterinary services [p. 208]"), I do agree that the tradition from which KTU 1.85 was excerpted was indeed a literary (written) tradition that made up a professional manual for the care of horses; a literary tradition that began during or before the Late Bronze age and continued for over 2500 years; a literary tradition that, while certainly continuous, was only documented near the beginning and the end of its life. I also agree that texts like KTU 4.382, from the royal palace, support that fact that there were veterinarians (bṭr) at Ugarit. It is not reasonable to assume either coincidence or oral tradition when considering the transmission of this tradition from the Bronze Age to Mago to Ruellius. Therefore, I strongly believe that a written tradition was involved. The exact details of that tradition are now lost.

In the next post in this series, I plan to look at the nature of professional manuals in antiquity and consider their relationship to other examples of "deductive science" including examples from the Hebrew Bible. I conclude this post with a couple of questions whose answers can only be speculative and are, in the current scholarly environment, controversial. First, if a written tradition can span over two millennia without any known intervening instantiations, how sure can we be sure that other written traditions of which we only have relatively late exemplars were not based on written material even more ancient? Remember, this is a question and not an answer. The answer, of course, depends on the text and what additional evidence one might bring to the question. Second, is there ever reason to assume an oral tradition behind a literary product when there is a demonstrable parallel written tradition for other related literary products? Again, it depends on many factors, some of which will always be mysteries. Do I have examples in mind? Yes, but I will save them until I take up the question of professional literature in my next post on LTU 1.85.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at November 4, 2007 8:22 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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Posted by: Glen Gordon at November 6, 2007 11:37 PM

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