This talk will address the question whether Babylonian and Graeco-Roman Medicine shared pharmacological treatments and the resulting implications. First a general overview of how pharmacology developed in Mesopotamia and in the Graeco-Roman world in the late 1st millennium BCE will be provided. Some specific cases of healing recipes will then be presented from Babylonian and Graeco-Roman sources that have identical objectives and pharmacological constituents. The comparison of such examples will be used to bolster the argument that some pharmacological knowledge, the traces of which were still surviving in the Graeco-Roman world at the beginning of our era, had somehow been shared between the two cultures.
Seminar
Animal-based pharmacology from the Babylonian to the Graeco-Roman world
Maddalena Rumor