Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Cultures

The topic of a potential relationship between Babylonian and Greco-Roman medicine has been discussed for a long time, yet it is notoriously difficult to give it flesh and bones by means of concrete examples. The main goal of this study is to identify real elements in the therapeutical traditions of the one system that can be connected to those of the other, which would confirm a certain degree of practical knowledge-sharing between the two cultures.

By analyzing Dreckapotheke (filthy medicaments) and similarly perplexing medical ingredients, and by exploiting the concept of misunderstandings in translation, I show how elements of Assyro-Babylonian therapy were still present or emerging in the pharmaceutical compositions of the Early Roman Empire, ultimately supporting the idea of at least occasional transfers of medical knowledge between the two cultures.

With its positive findings, this study contributes to a broader reconstruction of the context within which ancient medicine developed. It also finds reciprocal explanations of obscure passages and fuels further questions regarding the medical interrelations/interconnections between these neighboring ancient cultures.

Proclus’ Hypotyposis Astronomicarum Positionum, a late antique astronomical treatise, has been transmitted through Byzantine codices which usually record it among mathematical, philosophical or historical works. In the modern era, specific passages of the Hypotyposis have attracted the interest of historians of Greek astronomy and of scholars dealing with Neoplatonic cosmology, while the greatest part of it has been strikingly neglected. The present book offers a close reading of the entire Hypotyposis and an overall interpretation of its aim and scope within the framework of Greek mathematical treatises and Proclus’ works. It re-examines individual topics already touched upon in the secondary literature and sheds light on aspects of the treatise that have gone unnoticed. It includes the Greek text with an English translation, and a full-scale philosophical and mathematical commentary, framed by an introduction and a study of the astronomical diagrams and illustrations accompanying the text of Byzantine manuscripts. The book aspires to re-introduce the Hypotyposis to the scholarly community, by lifting obstacles emerging from the technical character of the treatise and by revealing its hidden treasures.

As of yet, the remarkable and highly influential textual form of Euclidean mathematics has not been considered from a literary-aesthetic perspective. By its extreme standardization and seeming non-literariness it appears to defy such an approach. This book nonetheless attempts precisely a literary-aesthetic study of the language and style of Euclid’s Elements, focusing on book I. It aims to find out what is literary about the form and what motivates this form as form. In doing so, it employs the concept of clarity, asking: How is the textual form related to logical and communicative clarity? That is, how far is the omnipresent standardization necessary for the accomplishment and successful communication of the proofs? Based on a close analysis of the standardization at all levels of the text (lexicon, grammar, structure, and especially diagram), it argues that the textual form of the Elements is standardized beyond logical-communicative purposes, and that it is in this sense ‘aesthetic’. The book exposes the unexpected literary dimension of Euclid’s Elements, provides a new interpretation of the peculiar form of the work, and offers a model for determining the role of clarity (not only) in Greek theoretical mathematics.

Terminologies present various challenges to their inventors and to their users, ranging from epistemic adequacy over linguistic concerns to matters of strategy and group construction. With respect to historical terminologies, however, research has been dominated by linguistic approaches. Breaking new ground, Coming to Terms collects eleven articles that combine an interest in the history of knowledge, mostly ancient Greek, with research on scientific terminologies. They all share an interest in terminological practices, that is, questions such as how and when to coin a term and then what to do with it. Among the fields discussed are astronomy, the Roman surveyors, Aristotelian science, Renaissance and modern biology, contemporary medicine, ancient Chinese philosophy, 20^th-century physics, and colonial linguistics. Confronting ancient with modern terminologies, the collection intends to test integrative interpretive approaches. Thus, the collection documents how rich ancient (and modern) terminologies are and shows that they are, beyond lexicography, worth being studied per se.

In earlier scholarship, the late antique medical compilations of Oribasius of Pergamon, Aetius of Amida and Paul of Aegina were rather neglected and were believed to add nothing new themselves to what Galen, in particular, had to say. By now, scholarship has undergone a positive change in attitude towards these authors and their works. This book contributes to this modern picture of late antiquity as a vibrant and fascinating period through close analysis of the work of Aetius of Amida (6th century CE). It offers the very first modern translation of chapters 1–10 of the sixth book of Aetius’ Libri medicinales as well as a detailed commentary on these chapters. Together with an extensive introduction it thus makes Aetius’ treatise accessible to a wider audience and takes into account Aetius’ craft as a compiler by analyzing his literary and compilation techniques. Book 6 of Aetius’ compilation is especially interesting because it deals with diseases of the brain and thus also discusses mental illnesses such as phrenitis, melancholia or mania. Therefore, this volume also sheds light on the treatment of brain diseases in late antiquity and furthers our understanding of the history of mental disorders in ancient medical texts.

Biological literature of the Roman imperial period remains somehow ‘underestimated’. It is even quite difficult to speak of biological literature for this period at all: biology (apart from medicine) did not represent, indeed, a specific ‘subgenre’ of scientific literature. Nevertheless, writings as disparate as Philo of Alexandria’s Alexander, Plutarch’s De sollertia animalium or Bruta ratione uti, Aelian’s De Natura Animalium, Oppian’s Halieutika, Pseudo-Oppian’s Kynegetika, and Basil of Caeserea’s Homilies on the Creation engage with zoological, anatomic, or botanical questions. Poikile Physis examines how such writings appropriate, adapt, classify, re-elaborate and present biological knowledge which originated within the previous, mainly Aristotelian, tradition. It offers a holistic approach to these works by considering their reception of scientific material, their literary as well as rhetorical aspects, and their interaction with different socio-cultural conditions. The result of an interdisciplinary discussion among scholars of Greek studies, philosophy and history of science, the volume provides an initial analysis of forms and functions of biological literature in the imperial period.

Who is afraid of case literature? In an influential article ("Thinking in Cases", 1996), John Forrester made a case for studying case literature more seriously, exemplifying his points, mostly, with casuistic traditions of law. Unlike in modern literatures, case collections make up a significant portion of ancient literary traditions, such as Mesopotamian, Greek, and Chinese, mostly in medical and forensic contexts. The genre of cases, however, has usually not been studied in its own right by modern scholars. Due to its pervasiveness, case literature lends itself to comparative studies to which this volume intends to make a contribution. While cases often present truly fascinating epistemic puzzles, in addition they offer aesthetically pleasing reading experiences, due to their narrative character. Therefore, the case, understood as a knowledge-transmitting narrative about particulars, allows for both epistemic and aesthetic approaches. This volume presents seven substantial studies of cases and case literature: Topics touched upon are ancient Greek medical, forensic, philosophical and mathematical cases, medical cases from imperial China, and 20th-century American medical case writing. The collection hopes to offer a pilot of what to do with and how to think about cases.

Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period.
This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these modalities of description in antiquity.

Mathematics is among the most important cultural achievements of ancient Greece. Precisely when and where did it originate? The ancient view that Plato, along with Thales and Euclid, played an important part in its development has long been dismissed as fiction. This book takes a new look based on modeling theory and comes to a contrary conclusion: Plato is, in fact, the creator of deductive mathematics.

This volume brings together a number of leading scholars working in the field of ancient Greek mathematics to present their latest research. In their respective area of specialization, all contributors offer stimulating approaches to questions of historical and historiographical ‘revolutions’ and ‘continuity’. Taken together, they provide a powerful lens for evaluating the applicability of Thomas Kuhn’s ideas on ‘scientific revolutions’ to the discipline of ancient Greek mathematics. Besides the latest historiographical studies on ‘geometrical algebra’ and ‘premodern algebra’, the reader will find here some papers which offer new insights into the controversial relationship between Greek and pre-Hellenic mathematical practices. Some other contributions place emphasis on the other edge of the historical spectrum, by exploring historical lines of ‘continuity’ between ancient Greek, Byzantine and post-Hellenic mathematics. The terminology employed by Greek mathematicians, along with various non-textual and material elements, is another topic which some of the essays in the volume explore. Finally, the last three articles focus on a traditionally rich source on ancient Greek mathematics; namely the works of Plato and Aristotle.

For the first time, this work explores the thread of astrology that runs through Syrian-Orthodox literature. Astrology’s disreputable position among the sciences is gainsaid by extensive textual examples from different genres. The richest source is the Syrian Book of Medicine, which elucidates the practice of divination, revealing itself as a treasure trove of Syrian texts (including translations of Hippocrates and the Geoponica).

The ‘Science of properties’ represents a large and fascinating part of Arabic technical literature. The book of ʿĪsā ibn ʿAlī (9th cent.) ‘On the useful properties of animal parts’ was the first of such compositions in Arabic. His author was a Syriac physician, disciple of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, who worked at the Abbasid court during the floruit of the translation movement. For the composition of his book, as a multilingual scholar, he collected many different antique and late antique sources. The structure of the text itself—a collection of recipes that favoured a fluid transmission—becomes here the key to a new formal analysis that oriented the editorial solutions as well. The ‘Book on the useful properties of animal parts’ is a new tile that the Arabic tradition offers to the larger mosaic representing the transfer of technical knowledge in pre-modern times. This text is an important passage in that process of acquisition and original elaboration of knowledge that characterized the early Abbasid period.

The development of science in the modern world is often held to depend on such institutions as universities, peer-reviewed journals, and democracy. How, then, did new science emerge in the pre-modern culture of the Hellenistic Egyptian monarchy? Berrey argues that the court society formed around the Ptolemaic pharaohs Ptolemy III and IV (reigned successively 246-205/4 BCE) provided an audience for cross-disciplinary, learned knowledge, as physicians, mathematicians, and mechanicians clothed themselves in the virtues of courtiers attendant on the kings. The multicultural Greco-Egyptian court society prized entertainment that drew on earlier literature, mixed genres and cultures, and highlighted motion and sound. New cross-disciplinary science in the Hellenistic period gained its social currency and subsequent scientific success through its entertainment value as court science. Ancient court science sheds light on the long history of scientific interdisciplinarity.

With a clear comparative approach, this volume brings together for the first time contributions that cover different periods of the history of ancient pharmacology, from Greek, Byzantine, and Syriac medicine to the Rabbinic-Talmudic medical discourses. This collection opens up new synchronic and diachronic perspectives in the study of the ancient traditions of recipe-books and medical collections. Besides the highly influential Galenic tradition, the contributions will focus on less studied Byzantine and Syriac sources as well as on the Talmudic tradition, which has never been systematically investigated in relation to medicine. This inquiry will highlight the overwhelming mass of information about drugs and remedies, which accumulated over the centuries and was disseminated in a variety of texts belonging to distinct cultural milieus. Through a close analysis of some relevant case studies, this volume will trace some paths of this transmission and transformation of pharmacological knowledge across cultural and linguistic boundaries, by pointing to the variety of disciplines and areas of expertise involved in the process.

In the Wake of the Compendia presents papers that examine the history of technical compendia as they moved between institutions and societies in ancient and medieval Mesopotamia.
This volume offers new perspectives on the development and transmission of technical compilations, looking especially at the relationship between empirical knowledge and textual transmission in early scientific thinking. The eleven contributions to the volume derive from a panel held at the American Oriental Society in 2013 and cover more than three millennia of historical development, ranging from Babylonian medicine and astronomy to the persistence of Mesopotamian lore in Syriac and Arabic meditations on the properties of animals. The volume also includes major contributions on the history of Mesopotamian “rationality,” epistemic labels for tested and tried remedies, and the development of depersonalized case histories in Babylonian therapeutic compendia. Together, these studies offer an overview of several important moments in the development of non-Western scientific thinking and a significant contribution to our understanding of how traditions of technical knowledge were produced and transmitted in the ancient world.

This monograph begins with a puzzle: a Babylonian text from late 5th century BCE Uruk associating various diseases with bodily organs, which has evaded interpretation. The correct answer may reside in Babylonian astrology, since the development of the zodiac in the late 5th century BCE offered innovative approaches to the healing arts. The zodiac—a means of predicting the movements of heavenly bodies—transformed older divination (such as hemerologies listing lucky and unlucky days) and introduced more favorable magical techniques and medical prescriptions, which are comparable to those found in Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos and non-Hippocratic Greek medicine. Babylonian melothesia (i.e., the science of charting how zodiacal signs affect the human body) offers the most likely solution explaining the Uruk tablet.

Scientific and technological texts have not played a significant role in modern literary criticism. This applies to Classics, too, despite the fact that a large part of the field’s extant texts deal with questions of medicine, mathematics, and natural philosophy. Focusing mostly on medical and mathematical texts, this collection aims at approaching ancient Greek science and its texts from the cross-disciplinary perspective of authorship. Among the questions addressed are: What is a scientific author? In what respect does scientific writing differ from ‘literary’ writing? How does the author present himself as an authoritative figure through his text? What strategies of trust do these authors employ? These and related questions cannot be discussed within the typical boundaries of modern academic disciplines, thus most of the sixteen authors, many of them leading experts in the fields of ancient science, bring a comparative perspective to their subjects. As a result, the collection not only offers a new approach to this vast area of ancient literature, thus effectively discovering new possibilities for literary criticism, it also reflects on our current forms of scientific and scholarly written communication.