The Importance of Clay and Medicine to the Sumerians

Just as our own economic and social system—our books, court and tax records, commercial contracts, marriage certificates, and so on—depends on paper, Sumerian/Mesopotamian life depended on clay.

Temples, courts, and trading houses had their scribes ready with tablets of wet clay on which to inscribe decisions, agreements, letters, or calculate prices, wages, the area of a field, or the number of bricks required in a construction.

Clay was also a crucial raw material for the manufacture of utensils for daily use and containers for storage and transportation of goods.

It was also used to make bricks—another Sumerian “first,” which made possible the building of houses for the people, palaces for the kings, and imposing temples for the gods.

Reinforcing and firing are technological breakthroughs credited to the Sumerians.

• These combined lightness with tensile strength for all clay products

Modern architects have discovered that reinforced concrete, an extremely strong building material, can be created by pouring cement into molds containing iron rods.

Long ago, the Sumerians gave their bricks great strength by mixing the wet clay with chopped reeds or straw.

They also knew that clay products could be given tensile strength and durability by firing them in a kiln.

The world’s first high-rise buildings and archways, as well as durable ceramic wares, were made possible by these technological breakthroughs.

6,000 BC: Fuels for Metallurgy

The invention of the kiln—a furnace in which intense but controllable temperatures could be attained without the risk of contaminating products with dust or ashes—made possible an even greater technological advance: the Age of Metals.

It has been assumed that man discovered that he could hammer “soft stones”— naturally occurring nuggets of gold as well as copper and silver compounds—into useful or pleasing shapes, sometime about 6000 B.C.

The first hammered-metal artifacts were found in the highlands of the Zagros and Taurus mountains.

However, as R. J. Forbes (The Birthplace of Old World Metallurgy) pointed out, “in the ancient Near East, the supply of native copper was quickly exhausted, and the miner had to turn to ores.”

This required the knowledge and ability to find and extract the ores, crush them, then smelt and refine them—processes that could not have been carried out without kiln-type furnaces and a generally advanced technology.

The art of metallurgy soon encompassed the ability to alloy copper with other metals, resulting in a castable, hard, but malleable metal we call bronze.

The Bronze Age, our first metallurgical age, was also a Mesopotamian contribution to modern civilization. Much of ancient commerce was devoted to the metals trade; it also formed the basis for the development in Mesopotamia of banking and the first money—the silver shekel (“weighed ingot”).

The many varieties of metals and alloys for which Sumerian and Akkadian names have been found and the extensive technological terminology attest to the high level of metallurgy in ancient Mesopotamia.

Sumer did not have metal ores, yet metallurgy definitely began there because it had energy.

Smelting, refining, alloying, and casting need ample supplies of fuels to fire the kilns, crucibles, and furnaces.

Mesopotamia was rich in fuels.*

The ores were brought to the fuels. This explains many early inscriptions describing the bringing of metal ores from afar.

The fuels that made Sumer technologically supreme were bitumens and asphalts, petroleum products that naturally seeped up to the surface in many places in Mesopotamia.

R. J. Forbes (Bitumen and Petroleum in Antiquity) shows that the surface deposits of Mesopotamia were the ancient world’s prime source of fuels from the earliest times to the Roman era.

His conclusion is that the technological use of these petroleum products began in Sumer circa 3500 BC.

He shows that the use and knowledge of the fuels and their properties were greater in Sumerian times than in later civilizations.

The Sumerians used these petroleum products as fuel and as road-building materials, for waterproofing, caulking, painting, cementing, and molding.

The Sumerian language had terms for every genus and variant of the bituminous substances found in Mesopotamia.

The names of bituminous and petroleum materials in other languages—Akkadian, Hebrew, Egyptian, Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit—can clearly be traced to the Sumerian origins; for example, the most common word for petroleum—naphta—derives from napatu (“stones that flare up”).

The Sumerian use of petroleum products was also basic to an advanced chemistry. We can judge the high level of Sumerian knowledge not only by the variety of paints and pigments used and such processes as glazing but also by the remarkable artificial production of semiprecious stones, including a substitute for lapis lazuli.

Bitumens were also used in Sumerian medicine, another field where the standards were impressively high.

The Akkadian texts employ Sumerian medical terms and phrases extensively, pointing to the Sumerian origin of all Mesopotamian medicine.

The library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh included a medical section.

The texts were divided into 3 groups:

1. Bultitu (“therapy”)
2. Shipir bel imti (“surgery”)
3. Urti mashmashshe (“commands and incantations”).

Early law codes included sections dealing with:

• fees payable to surgeons for successful operations
• penalties to be imposed on them in case of failure.

A surgeon, using a lancet to open a patient’s temple, was to lose his hand if he accidentally destroyed the patient’s eye.

Some skeletons in Mesopotamian graves bore marks of brain surgery.

A partially broken medical text speaks of the surgical removal of a “shadow covering a man’s eye,” probably a cataract.

Another text mentions the use of a cutting instrument, stating that “if the sickness has reached the inside of the bone, you shall scrape and remove.”

Sick persons in Sumerian times could choose between:

• an A.ZU (“water physician”)
• an IA.ZU (“oil physician”).

A tablet excavated in Ur, nearly 5,000 years old, names a medical practitioner as “Lulu, the doctor.”

There were also veterinarians-known either as “doctors of oxen” or as “doctors of asses.”

A pair of surgical tongs is depicted on a very early cylinder seal, found at Lagash, that belonged to “Urlugaledina, the doctor.”

The seal also shows the serpent on a tree—the symbol of medicine to this day. (Fig. 14) An instrument that was used by midwives to cut the umbilical cord was also frequently depicted.

Sumerian medical texts deal with diagnosis and prescriptions. They leave no doubt that the Sumerian physician did not resort to magic or sorcery.

He recommended cleaning and washing; soaking in baths of hot water and mineral solvents; application of vegetable derivatives; rubbing with petroleum compounds.

Medicines were made from plant and mineral compounds and were mixed with liquids or solvents appropriate to the method of application.

If taken by mouth, the powders were mixed into wine, beer, or honey; if “poured through the recturn”—administered in an enema—they were mixed with plant or vegetable oils.

Alcohol, which plays such an important role in surgical disinfection and as a base for many medicines, reached our languages through the Arabic kohl, from the Akkadian kuhlu.

Models of livers indicate that medicine was taught at medical schools with the aid of clay models of human organs. Anatomy must have been an advanced science, for temple rituals called for elaborate dissections of sacrificial animals—only a step removed from comparable knowledge of human anatomy.

Several depictions on cylinder seals or clay tablets show people lying on some kind of surgical table, surrounded by teams of gods or people. We know from epics and other heroic texts that the Sumerians and their successors in Mesopotamia were concerned with matters of life, sickness, and death.

Men like Gilgamesh, a king of Erech, sought the “Tree of Life” or some mineral (a “stone”) that could provide eternal youth. There were also references to efforts to resurrect the dead, especially if they happened to be gods:

Were some ultramodern methods, about which we can only speculate, known and used in such revival attempts?

That radioactive materials were known and used to treat certain ailments is certainly suggested by a scene of medical treatment depicted on a cylinder seal dating to the very beginning of Sumerian civilization.

It shows a man lying on a special bed; his face is protected by a mask, and he is being subjected to some kind of radiation. (Fig. 15)