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In the middle of the 7th century BCE, a young man by the name of Kisir-Ashur trained to become a healer in the city Assur, located in the northern part of modern-day Iraq. As a member of a reputable family of “exorcists” (Akkadian ashipu), Kisir-Ashur had access to significant scholarly knowledge based on written traditions stretching back into the second millennium BCE. At least 73 manuscripts from his family’s massive library contain Kisir-Ashur’s name in the colophons, a subscript at the end of the text providing various information about the copyist and the contents. Due to this amount of written material from Kisir-Ashur’s own time, he is one of the earliest healers in world history for whom we have significant details pertaining to his career. My study of Kisir-Ashur’s medical manuscripts was recently published in a monograph entitled Medicine in Ancient Assur (available with open access). In this presentation I will outline my analysis of Kisir-Ashur’s education and practice in order to discuss various aspects of medicine in ancient Mesopotamia.
