In our modern, image-conscious world, going bald is many men’s worst nightmare.
Now clay tablets from 2,600 years ago suggest that people in ancient societies also fretted over their follicles.
The physicians of an Assyrian king appear to have set down an early attempt at a cure for baldness in what is thought to be the world’s first encyclopaedia for medicine.
The tablets have been residing in the British Museum after being smashed during a ransacking in the seventh century BC.
The medical secrets within them, including a bizarre remedy for hair loss, are now being revealed. As part of a project funded by the Wellcome Trust, the tablets are finally being pieced back together and translated into English for the first time.
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Treatments for various parts of the body, from the head, through the kidneys, to the toes, can be found in the encyclopaedia. One example — a cure for baldness — calls for the head to be bandaged with pulverised cress for three days before being shaved on the fourth day. The head is then washed with alkali and then anointed repeatedly with oil.
This is followed by a further three days of anointing with crushed cedar and cypress oil. Once this is complete, the encyclopaedia claims, the patient will recover. Another cure suggests that a man “whose eyes are full of jaundice” can be cured by pounding pomegranate peel and blowing it into his eyes.
They came from the library of Ashurbanipal, a king known for his scholarly pursuits who reigned over the Neo-Assyrian Empire between 669-631 BC. Yet, despite being discovered in the 19th century, it was not until 2018 that researchers from a separate project were able to recognise that the tablets were connected to each other.
Now the NinMed Projectis building on this discovery to organise and piece together the fragments in the British Museum. “We are able to transliterate the larger tablets as well as the fragments,” said Dr Krisztian Simko, curator of the project.
“Now we know they are connected, we can then find where this fragment fits and recreate the whole tablet.”
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The work really is quite the puzzle. “With them being clay, the fragments also physically click together,” said Professor Mark Geller of University College London. “It’s like a huge jigsaw with thousands of pieces.”
The tablets are written in the Akkadian language using cuneiform, an ancient script with wedge-shaped characters. Today, however, there are only a handful of people who can understand the Akkadian language and cuneiform in a medical context. Both the language and script were abandoned over 2,000 years ago.
The medical information contained within is even older. “Mesopotamia had a very long tradition of collecting medical information,” said Simko.
“The first medical text we have comes from around 2000 BC. This long tradition went on and culminated in this encyclopaedia. It contains a huge amount of knowledge with roots from thousands of years ago.”
The remedies being uncovered today may sound strange or even disgusting to a modern reader, yet this can often be deceiving.
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“We don’t know what many of the plants or other ingredients are, because ancient and modern taxonomy don’t work the same way,” said Dr Taylor. “Some of the ingredients, such as faeces or bodily fluids, may be folk names or even secret names to protect medical knowledge. If someone untrained in medicine took the recipes literally, their treatments would not work and they would be exposed as frauds.”
What is obvious, however, is that, contrary to popular belief, ancient medicine was not just steeped in magic. “There are incantations, yet they are usually explanatory,” said Geller. “What we have here are actually lots of medical recipes and drugs. It is real medicine.”
It is believed that war between the Assyrians and Babylonians in 612 BC led to the fragmentation of the tablets. However, whether the entire library was destroyed is questionable. “When we piece the fragments back together, we often don’t end up with complete tablets,” said Dr Jon Taylor, the curator of cuneiform collections at the British Museum.
“Maybe we’re working with what was left over after the Babylonians took what they wanted.”
Geller added: “I believe the bulk of the library is somewhere else. Archaeologists just haven’t found it yet.”
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Translations can be found at oracc.org/asbp/ninmed
