It has been noted with some regret, although with little surprise, that most of the tablets belonging to the Neo-Babylonian library discovered within the temple of Šamaš at Sippar duplicate texts already known to us. The medical tablet presented here, apart from being a welcome addition to the scarce number — compared to the Assyrian medical tablets — of medical texts from Babylonia, is therefore especially interesting as it contains an excerpt text for which no duplicate has been hitherto identified.
The tablet IM 132670 (Sippar 8/352, which measures 215 × 133 mm) contains four columns of text and is almost completely preserved; only the upper right and the lower left corner are broken and a crack and some rubbing impede the understanding of column iii. The text is a collection of thirty-eight prescriptions that treat diseases affecting the head, temples, ears, eyes, nose, teeth and lungs. Their arrangement follows the scheme known in Akkadian as ištu muḫḫi adi šēpē “from head to foot” (literally: “from the cranium to the feet”). All major text collections that treat parts of the body are thus arranged, like the therapeutic, diagnostic and physiognomic series and the lexical list Ugu-mu. Numerous prescriptions of the new text have parallels in other medical texts. In most cases these parallels encompass only one or two entries. In two Assyrian texts, however, several consecutive prescriptions are paralleled. The text AO 11447 parallels §§3–12 while in BAM 44 §§ 33–8 are noted. BAM 44 lists the prescriptions in the same order, only inserting two additional prescriptions at one point. AO 11447, on the contrary, not only adds several other prescriptions but lists them in a different order to the effect that the same prescriptions are used for different symptoms.