Kushumma & Kushippu

With his stylus of sharpened reed, the physician made neat, wedge-shaped marks on a clay tablet, carefully compiling a pharmacopoeia. His calligraphy was better than most doctors': he got more than a dozen formulas on the two sides of a tablet little bigger than a modern picture postcard. Then the sands of the desert covered the great Sumerian city of Nippur (90 miles southeast of Babylon), and the physician's secrets were lost for thousands of years.

Last week the University of Pennsylvania announced that after many years of effort, one of its scholars had succeeded in translating part of the oldest-known pharmacopoeia, dating from about 2100 B.C. The university's Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer needed the help of Pennsylvania State College's Dr. Martin Levey, a specialist in the history of science, to figure out the materia medica which the ancient physician was prescribing. Most were dissolved in wine or beer, e.g.: "Grind to a powder pear-tree wood and the moon plant, then pour kushumma wine over it and let [plain] oil and hot cedar oil be spread over it."

Also: "Grind to a powder the seed of the carpenter plant, the gum resin of the markazi plant, and thyme, then dissolve it in beer and let the man drink."

The Sumerian pharmacologist neglected to sign his work. It is also disappointing in another respect, the patient translators note: he failed to say what diseases his remedies were for. But along with such oddities as the ground-up skin of the kushippu bird, he also used salt and saltpeter, which had some value as antiseptics and astringents.

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