In my novel Hand of
Fire, set in what is now Turkey during the Trojan War, I made a lot of
people sick. That was the easy part. But when I wanted to cure them, well, that
proved more problematic. What were the Bronze Age equivalents of aspirin and Robitussin in about 1300 BCE?
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| Cuneiform Tablet, David Hawkins Wikimedia |
My main character, Briseis, the woman Achilles and Agamemnon
fought over in the Iliad, is a hasawa, which I translate as “healing
priestess.” Accordingly I had to show the specific cures she used. I had some
excellent resources to draw from. Large libraries of clay tablets written in
cuneiform have been uncovered, dating to this period. They describe in detail
the rites—many of which we would categorize as magical—that could bring a sick
person back into harmony with the gods and hence to health. They also list the
herbs and roots she would have used as medicines. But scholars usually can’t
identify/translate the names of the specific plants mentioned on the tablets.
Hmmm. What’s a responsible historical novelist to do? Early
on in my research I discovered a Greek Herbal by Dioscorides Pedanius of
Anazarbos. This isn’t an ideal source—he’s a millennium or so after my period,
but it’s the earliest listing of medicinal herbs I could locate and such
knowledge is traditional and not likely to change dramatically, and this guy
did live in Turkey not too far from where my novel is set—near Troy. I combined
Dioscorides with some modern information about herbal medicines and did my best
uniting that understanding with the cuneiform tablets.
One tablet mentions a plant we can translate—the onion—but
this rite demonstrates how differently a Trojan or Hittite healer might
approach healing a sick person.
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| Onion layers, Wikimedia |
“Like this onion he peels and throws into the fire—and fire
consumes it entirely—whose roots will not take hold in the soil, whose shoot
will not sprout, so may the pain of my sin and transgression, the sickness that
is in my body, my flesh, my veins be peeled off like this onion.”
This rite uses analogical magic—as with this onion, so with
my body. The Bronze Age peoples in the region we now call Turkey and into
Mesopotamia believed that illness came as punishment from the gods for
offenses by the sick person. So it made sense (to them) that disease could be
lifted by the gods if the correct procedure was followed—hence the creative use
of onion layers. (Wouldn’t you love to peel away your problems and burn them in
a fire? The symbolism is quite compelling.)
In the case of this onion, the actual plant is consumed by
fire not ingested by the patient. Another example of this kind of analogical
use of plants occurs when a person’s soul or inner state can be “sweetened” by
making it like the inside of a grape or fig. The Hittites did not distinguish
between mental and physical ailments—they were on to something there. Other
times, as we hear from the tablets, plants were used in ways that we more
readily identify as medicinal.
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| Astragalos, Magnus Manske Wikimedia |
My character, Briseis, needed something to staunch blood in
a wound. Dioscorides tells his reader of astragalos,
the root of which can be ground and when sprinkled on a wound, controls blood
flow. He mentions helpfully that it is hard to grind, so if Briseis is
particularly upset she can be seen to smack that pestle hard and this is all to
the good. Later, on Google, I discovered astragalus
(Latin spelling) turns out also to be used in traditional Chinese medicine as
an energizing tonic not a blood stauncher, but I’m sticking with Dioscorides
and hoping that’s what Briseis used. It happens to grow in both Turkey and
China, so it makes sense that two separate traditions discovered this handy
little shrub.
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| Henbane, Wikimedia |
Historians suspect that hallucinogenic plants might have
been used in some ancient religious processes, such as having a priestess
“speak” in the voice of a god. I hunted about for a possible plant to include
in my book since no such secret information gets reported from the ancient
world. I read about henbane, an herb that has curative qualities as well as
hallucinogenic ones. Henbane induces sleep and soothes coughs, among other
things. But then I found an article describing the experiences of a few
unfortunate overdose victims of henbane. They had terrifying visions of wolves
attacking them. I immediately did my due diligence as an author. Did henbane
grow in ancient Turkey? Is it mentioned in the written record? Yes on both
accounts. (Dioscorides includes it in his herbal, although he’s not very
helpful about this particular plant.) A plausible case can be made for it. Into
my novel went henbane—who could resist wolves? And conveniently I had a
character with a chronic cough.
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| Mullein, Wikimedia |
At one point Briseis marvels at the multiple qualities a
single plant can offer. She is walking at night with torches made from the
mullein plant and she used mullein-leaf infusion earlier that day to sooth the
queen’s cough. Mullein is another traditional plant that I had to cull from
modern sources and then backtrack to see if it could plausibly have been
something Briseis used. But when the queen’s chest hurt from that cough,
Briseis took a piece of green wool and tied it on a mouse, spoke the necessary
words (words were considered to have intrinsic power of their own), and then
sent the mouse away. Off goes the chest pain. Or so the theory goes. This
scapegoat method is another common thread in the Hittite and Near Eastern
medical/magical traditions, rather similar to the onion rite. My heroine Briseis would
have used a combination of herbal and magical processes to bring health and
well-being.
So we may not know all the specifics of herbal lore in the
Bronze Age, but we can make some educated guesses and combine those with the
more solid ground of ritual procedure and end up with a pretty accurate
portrayal of what a hasawa, a healing
priestess living near Troy, would have done to help those struck by any sort of
illness, physical or mental.
For more about Bronze Age Troy and the Hittite Empire or to hear the announcement of the release date of Hand of Fire, go to judithstarkston.com
