“Incantation (against diseases) of the house of [the god] Ea: Concerning a man whom a snake attacks, or a scorpion attacks, or a rabid dog attacks, and to whom it passes its venom … (The water) shall be cleansed in his pure tube. Cast the spell into the water! Feed the water to the patient, so that the venom itself can go out (of the body).”
So reads a magical incantation from the ancient Babylonian “Tale of Ninurta-paqidat’s Dog Bite,” which describes how a man from the southern Mesopotamian city of Nippur attempts to ward off disease after being bitten by a rabid dog.
The Babylonians of the second and first millennia B.C. believed that rabid dogs were demons sent by the gods to punish mankind. They set images of snarling hounds on doors and gates, along with images of snakes and scorpions, to protect against evil. The Iron Age (c. 1200–600 B.C.) Assyrians, too, employed carvings of dogs as apotropaic figures—as well as making use of the natural ferocity of actual canines: The mastiffs depicted in the relief above, from a palace of the seventh-century B.C. king Ashurbanipal, were especially prized as hunters.
Even the most efficacious medicines were useless in treating rabies, so sufferers resorted to cures empowered by incantations offered to Ea and Asarluhi, Mesopotamian gods of healing. According to five second-millennium B.C. Old Babylonian incantations preserved in Akkadian cuneiform texts, demons entered the body in the form of “semen (that) coagulates on (the rabid dog’s) teeth … Where it has bitten, it (leaves) its puppy.” This “puppy” then “grows up” into a lethal, full-grown dog-demon that kills its host.
The ancients also tried to predict outbreaks of rabies by extispicy, that is, by examining the livers of sheep and oxen. According to a southern Mesopotamian text, if a hole is found on the right side of the liver, a man will contract rabies; if a hole is found in the middle, a priest or priestess will perish; and if a hole is found on the left side, a dog will succumb.
Other prognosticators included lunar eclipses and the position of Venus in the sky. One text tells us that if Venus appears at sunset during the 12th month, “disorder and misfortunes will occur in the land, people will sell their children for money … dogs will become rabid and bite (humans), oxen, sheep and asses. Those they bite will not survive.”
Thus, for the ancients, hydrophobia was not only a disease; it was a harbinger of social chaos and collapse. A Babylonian omen series called Summa Alu warns, “(If dogs) keep going mad and attacking everywhere (the people of) the city will be dispersed.”
“Incantation (against diseases) of the house of [the god] Ea: Concerning a man whom a snake attacks, or a scorpion attacks, or a rabid dog attacks, and to whom it passes its venom … (The water) shall be cleansed in his pure tube. Cast the spell into the water! Feed the water to the patient, so that the venom itself can go out (of the body).” So reads a magical incantation from the ancient Babylonian “Tale of Ninurta-paqidat’s Dog Bite,” which describes how a man from the southern Mesopotamian city of Nippur attempts to ward off disease after being […]
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