Why This Page Exists
This archive only treats a claim as strong when it is anchored to a specific tablet, a museum record, and a published edition or transliteration. This page lists those anchors and the gaps that remain.
Core Sumerian Medical Tablet
P269190 (CBS 14221) is the archive’s core Sumerian medical object. The Penn Museum record titles it “Medical Tablet,” identifies Sumerian as the inscription language, gives Nippur as provenience, dates it to Early Dynastic IIIB, and describes medical prescriptions.
Current evidence in the archive:
- CDLI artifact record + JSON export
- Penn Museum object records
- CDLI tablet photographs
- eBL fragment page (rendered)
That object record establishes the tablet’s cataloguing and context. It does not establish a modern “elixir” interpretation.
Sumerian Incantation Tablets (Ritual Layer)
These tablets are not prescriptions, but they are the closest ritual-language parallels to medical practice that we can document in Sumerian for now.
Logged tablets:
- OECT 05, 19–24 (Bod‑S.296–301)
- Ur III incantation from Umma (BM 111089)
- Old Babylonian incantations from Me‑Turran (ASJ 17, 097 and 099)
Later Comparative Corpora (Context Only)
These corpora are later and are used for comparative vocabulary and structure only.
- Nineveh Medical Encyclopaedia fragments (Neo‑Assyrian)
- Thompson, Assyrian Medical Texts (1923)
- Thompson, Assyrian Herbal (1924)
Missing Primary Editions (Access Needed)
These editions are required to extract authoritative transliterations and translations.
- Civil 1960 (RA 54): “Prescriptions Médicales Sumériennes”
- Civil 1961 (RA 55): “Une nouvelle prescription médicale sumérienne”
- OECT 5 (Gurney & Kramer, 1976)
- ASJ 17 (entries 097 and 099)
- Fs Sigrist 024
Interpretive Guardrails
- “Elixir” language is not assumed. It must be explicit in the primary text.
- Ingredient lists in secondary summaries are treated as provisional until verified in the editions.
- Later Akkadian corpora do not substitute for Sumerian evidence.
Evidence Files (Local)
research/sources/cdli-p269190.jsonresearch/sources/penn-museum-object-218008.htmlresearch/sources/ebl-cbs-14221-rendered.htmlresearch/sources/cdli-p345800.jsonresearch/sources/cdli-p345801.jsonresearch/sources/cdli-p345802.jsonresearch/sources/cdli-p345803.jsonresearch/sources/cdli-p345804.jsonresearch/sources/cdli-p345805.jsonresearch/sources/cdli-p376869.jsonresearch/sources/cdli-p430949.jsonresearch/sources/cdli-p430950.jsonresearch/sources/ebl-bod-s-296-rendered.htmlresearch/sources/ebl-bod-s-297-rendered.htmlresearch/sources/ebl-bod-s-299-rendered.htmlresearch/sources/ebl-bod-s-300-rendered.htmlresearch/sources/ebl-bod-s-301-rendered.html
The local Bodleian/eBL snapshot set currently lacks ebl-bod-s-298-rendered.html; the gap is recorded rather than silently implied complete.