The present tablet contains the first 19 lines of a commentary on the fourth tablet of the diagnostic medical series Sagig. It belongs to the British Museum’s “Sippar Collection,” but it is likely to stem from Babylon or Borsippa and to date to the Hellenistic period.
No fewer than eight lines of commentary (ll. 1-8) are devoted to elucidating the very first line of the tablet, which reads:
¶ sag.ki ḫe-si-ma kúm-im u ⸢sed⸣ [šu] dkù-bi
If (the patient) is battered (around) his temple, and is warm and cold – hand of Kūbu.
In its first entry, the commentary explains the symptom “he is battered” (ḫesī-ma) by means of synonyms. The second entry relates the “temple” to the moon god, an entry that is then justified by means of a quotation from Lugale. The third entry explains that the rare god Kūbu (some sort of demonic representation of a miscarriage), who in the base text is said to be responsible for the patient’s disease, is in fact a name of a more common god. According to the commentary, this god can be either Nergal or the Anunnaki, and this dual identification is then justified by quoting a line from an unknown literary text (l. 3).
The next entry apparently tries to demonstrate the internal coherence of the line by proving that Kūbu is elsewhere related to the temples (l. 4). The fifth commentarial entry provides a notarikon explanation for the name of Kūbu: according to it, it means “he who goes from darkness (i.e., from the mother’s womb) into light”; this etymology is then demonstrated by means of a quotation from an unknown text in which a midwife is instructed to bring the baby “like Kūbu” from [darkness] to light (ll. 5-6). An alternative etymography of the name Kūbu is then given in line 7, according to which it would mean “he who guards the Netherworld”: this explanation is demonstrated by quoting a line from the Šamaš Hymn in which both Kūbu and the idea of “guarding” or “controlling” the Netherworld appear.
Line 8 explains the paradoxical symptom “it is warm and cold” (which in some manuscripts is ostensibly related to the god Pabilsag) by citing a line from the astronomical compendium Mulapin, according to which when the sun is in the Pabilsag constellation (i.e., Sagittarius, thus from November 21 to December 21), it is winter. In order to explain the medical symptom, the commentary thus resorts to an astronomical phenomenon that features the same elements: “warmth” (the sun), “cold” (the winter) and Pabilsag (in the shape of his constellation, Sagittarius).
The rest of this commentary’s explanations are more straightforward. One of them, which is discussed elsewhere in this website (click here), justifies the internal coherence of an omen in which a disease that provokes the patient to cry “my belly, my belly!” is said to have been caused by Ištar. According to lines 13-14 of the commentary, “belly” in the protasis is related to “Ištar” in the apodosis, since they both appear together, mutatis mutandis, in a line from Enūma eliš IV.
Several of the explanations contained in this commentary are closely paralleled by the badly damaged obverse of BM 40837 (CCP 4.1.4.C), a tablet identified by E. Schmidtchen as a commentary on Sagig 4. The present edition has been collated and several new readings have been obtained: they are marked with an asterisk in the text below.
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