Herbs in Greek and Egyptian Myths and Folklore

Utnapishtim said to him, to Gilgamesh:
Gilgamesh, you came here;
you strained, you toiled.
What can I give you as you return to your land?
Let me uncover for you, Gilgamesh, a secret thing.
A secret of the gods let me tell you.
There is a plant. Its roots go deep, like the boxthorn;
Its spike will prick your hand like a bramble.
If you get your hands on that plant,
you'll have everlasting life.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, 1600 B.C.E.
(Gardner-Maier Translation)

The herb-doctors and physicians of Summer, Babylon, Assyria and Egypt believed in no uncertain terms that their craft was a gift from the gods, and the gods themselves were it's first practitioners. The knowledge of the curative properties of plants, water, and oils was considered a divine art whose secrets were jealously guarded, and passed down in oral traditions. When men first learned to write they committed these teachings to clay tablets and rolls of papyrus, and drew up the first lists of medicinal herbs.

From: a vase dedicated to the god by Gudea, King of Babylonia, 2350 B.C.

In these ancient herbals medicine and magic are almost inextricably mixed together; though it is clear they had a very real knowledge of primitive medicine. As herbalists they took with them their box of medicines and as magicians their magic rods, which were the symbols of their profession. The serpent encircled rod of the Summerian god Ningishzida, may have evolved into the rod of Asclepius, which is still used today as a symbol of healing. The modern caduceus, a symbol used by many medical organizations, has two entwined serpents and is also associated with Hermes (Mercury). ¹¹

The Edwin Smith Papyrus affords evidence that in Egypt as early as 2000 B.C. herb-doctors were already seeking the truth that sickness was not caused by devils and demons, but by natural causes that could be affected and understood by man. Many Greek writers describe the remarkable skill of the Egyptian physicians,and refer to the great antiquity of the study of medicine in Egypt, indeed it was thought that the dwellers on the Nile were the inventors of the art of healing. Athothis, the son of Menes, the second king of the 1rst Dynasty, was a physician, and left behind him books on anatomy. (3600 B.C.)

Water - A Divine Element

As in Egypt, so it was in Babylonia, water was used largely in medical, magical and religous ceremonies of all kinds. The Egyptians attached great importance to bathing in the water of the famous Sun-well at Heliopolis , believing that when Ra, the Sun-god, rose on the world for the firs time he bathed his face in the water of the well. According to Christian tradition, Mary washed our Lord in the water drawn from the well, and when the water was thrown out, wherever any drops of it fell, balsam trees sprang up. From these shrubs a holy oil called Meron (meh-RON)was expressed which was used in important sacred rites and ceremonies.

The connection between the gods and certain plants and trees was very close. Myrrhtrees sprung from the tears of Horus¹², cedar trees from the blood of Gebban, and honey bees were born when the tears of Ra reach the ground. The gum and sap of these trees, and honey were believed to be very powerful medicines.

The early Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian herbalist knew the value of vegetable oils and medicated for soothing and healing the body and protecting its tissues. They believed these oils were effluxes from the body of Ra, which had taken form of certain trees, e.g., the olive13, the acadia, and the palm, etc.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN HERBALS AND BOOKS OF MEDICINE

Though it is good reason to believe that official Schools of Herbalists existed in Egypt as early as 3000 B.C., not one of the theoretical works on which the physicians of that day based their practice as come down to us. All the copies of medical papyri now know were written after 1800 B.C., and their contents are series of prescriptions witch were probably in general use among the various schools of herbalists in the country. The most famous of these is the Ebers Papyrus, published in facsimile with a glossary by Stern at Leipzin, in 1875. The prescriptions in included a description of the disease to be treated, which medicines is intended to cure, and in some cases a magical formula which is to be recited by the physician and sometimes the patient is added. Men thought that every illness was caused by the operation of a devil, or devils that had destroyed the protecting influence of the god or good spirit that usually dwelt in it. The devil must be expelled before the herbal healing can begin. Just as every living man was protected by a God, The Book of the Dead (Chap. XLII) shows us that the members of a dead man were believed to be protected the same way.

HOLY OILS AND MEDICATED UNGUENTS

The Ebers Papyrus contains more than a dozen prescriptions for salves and ointments, several kinds of oil are mentioned including olive oil. These early herbalists knew that oil was a first-class vehicle in which to administer medicines to the sick; in some of the prescriptions we are told to boil all the ingredients in hone and oil, or in oil alone.

The preparation of scented as well as medicated oils and unguents was an important branch of the herbalists business,and is considered to be the ancient roots of modern day aromatherapy practices. The perfuming of the body became at a very early period to be a part of ceremonial rituals, both of the living and the dead. Coloring of the lips and nails of the fingers and toes with the reddish-yellow juice of the henna plant was prevalent in Egypt.

THE SUMERIAN AND ASSYRIAN HERBALS

Whether the Sumerians were the discoverers of the arts of healing which they employed cannot be said. Their arts have much in common with those employed by the Egyptians, if we may judge by the contents of the Ebers Papyrus, and it seems as if the art of medicine had already become nationalized in the third millennium B.C. At all events it cannot be said with certainty that the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians, or that the Sumerians borrowed from the Egyptians; the probability is that both nations borrowed from a common source, and the present writer thinks that source was far more likely to have been Asiatic than African. Of the folk-medicine of the aboriginal inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and that of the aboriginal inhabitants of Egypt, nothing whatever is known.

The Assyrian Herbal was compiled in the seventh century B.C. and contained the names of between 900 and 1000 plants, but the fragments show many of these may have been synonyms. The names by which we know many of the plants are derived from Summerians through the Greek and Arabic languages, and among such may be mentioned apricot, asafoetida, saffron, liquidambar, galbanum, colocynth, carob, cardamon, cumin, opoponax, turmeric, cherry, flax,nard, silphium, phaseolus, myrrh, mulberry, mandrake,poppy, styrax, sesame, cypress, lupin, etc.

The Greeks, like the Summerians and Egyptians, believed that the gods were the first herbalists andpysicians, and that the art of healing was taught to man by them. Their first great god of medicine was Asklepios or Æsculapius,⁷ the son of Apollo and the virgin Coronis. He was born in Epidaurs, and is said to have flourished about 1250 B.C. He learned his art from Cheiron, most righteous of the Centaurs ⁵, and is mentioned by Homer (Ilian, ii.731). He carried a staff, with a serpent, the symbol of renewed life, coiled around it. Hygieia, the goddess of health was his daughter.

Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.) of Cos, considered to be the founder of a system of scientific medicine, and derived a great deal of his learning fromt he Eygptians. Thought to be a direct dececendant of Æsculapius, he was the first to banish magic and supersition from medicine. The drugs which he used were mostly vegetable in charater, but he employed copper, alum and lead in his medicines. There is no evidence that he compiled a herbal, and therefore he most probably used the lists of plants which were known to Thales and Pythagoras (580-489 B.C.).

Theophrastus⁸ (372-285 B.C.) wrote two books of botany, and describes in his Historia plantaurm over 500 plants. He may be regarded as the first scientific botanist, and his work contains parts of the oldest Greek herbal known.

Crateuas was a great herbalist and collector of plants, and physician to Mithridates VI. Eupator (120-63 B.C.) of Pontus who was also a great herbalist, and famous for his skill with posions.² Crateus was the first to include drawings of the plants in his herbal.

All the Greek Herbals and medical works written between about B.C. 300 and B.C. 30 by the great botanists and herbalists of the School of Medicine of Alexandria were based upon the lists of plants and medical works of the Egyptians. The Sumerians and Egyptians made provision for receiving patients in their temples, and quarters for sick folk existed in the famous Museum at Alexandria. During the Ptolemaic period a considerable amount of knowledge of Sumerian and Babylonian medicine must have found its way into Egypt, as a result of the campaigns of 'Alexander the Great in Western Asia in the fourth century B.C.

We have now to consider the work of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the ancient herbalists, viz. PEDANIUS DIOSCORIDES (or Dioscurides), who was a native of Anazarba in Cilicia Campestris, and flourished in the early part of the second half of the first century of our era. He was one of the physicians attached to the Roman Army in Asia, and he collected a great deal of general information about plants at first hand. He owes his fame chiefly to his work commonly known as De Materia Medica. Dioscorides travelled extensively in Greece, Italy, Germany, Gaul, Spain, etc., and as a result was able to discuss and describe about 400 plants. In his Herbal—that is to say, that portion of it which deals with plants—he gives the name of the plant and its Greek synonym, a description of it, its habitat and direction for its preparation as a medicine, and its medicinal effects. His Herbal is, in fact, a laborious compilation made from the works of Hippocrates*, Theophrastus of Eresus, Erasistratus, Andreas, Niger, Crateuas, Nikander and many other scientific botanists and herbalists. Among the drugs mentioned in his Pharmacopoeia which are still to be found in the modern Pharmacopoeias of Europe(in 1926) are :almonds, aloes⁴, ammoniacum, aniseed, belladonna, camomile, cardamom, catechu, cinnamon, colchicum, colocynth, coriander, crocus, dill, galbanum, galls, gentian, ginger, hyoscyamus, juniper, lavender, linseed, liquorice, male fern, mallow, marjoram, mustard, myrrh, olive oil¹⁰, pepper⁹, peppermint, poppy, rhubarb, sesame, squill, starch, stavesacre, storax, stramonium, sugar, terebinth, thyme³, tragacanth, wormwood. Two centuries later a number of synonyms were added to the Herbal Dioscorides, and many figures of plants derived from illustrated Herbals, one being that of Crateuas. From this Recension of the Herbal of Dioscorides all the remaining manuscripts of the work have been copied, more or less completely from another Recension of the Herbal in which the synonyms were arranged alphabetically. ORIBASIUS of Pergamus (A.D. 325-403) based many portions of his works on it. This is not the place to trace the history of the transmission of the Herbal of Dioscorides from the fourth to the sixteenth century, which has been so admirably done by Mr. Singer in Journal Hellenic Studies, Vol. XLVII. p. 24 ff. It is sufficient to say that for more than thirteen centuries it was one of the principal text-books of herbalists and physicians throughout the civilized world.

The Greek Herbal assumed its final form in the hands of Claudius Galen, who was born at Pergamus in Moysia, about 130 A.D. He traveled extensively in Palestine and Asia Minor, and studied plants, and then set out to find the gagates stone, the use of which was believed to cure gout, epilepsy and hysteria. He wrote many works, of the aprx. 277 medical treatises attributed to him, 83 are genuine, 19 are doubtful, and 48 are lost. Galen enjoyed a great reputation as a philosopher and medical teacher, and that reputation continued undisputed throughout the whole Middle Ages. The herbal of Galen is contained in Books VI_VIII of his work, commonly known as De Simplicibus. Galen gives a description of the plant itself, and he usually ends the paragraph with a statement as to its use in medicine.

Galens work was so complete, and in a way so final that no Greek or Roman botanist attempted to supersede the De Simplicibus by a work of his own.

THE LATIN HERBALS

HERE must be mentioned two works which, though not Herbals in the true sense of the word, may be regarded as such, viz. the De Re Rustica, which in its earliest form was written by MARCIUS PORCIUS CATO CENSORINUS (B.C. 234-149), and the lengthy work on " Remedies derived from the Garden Plants " which fill Books XX-XXV of Pliny's (AD 23 – August 25, 79) ⁶Natural History. Cato's work contains a considerable number of native medical prescriptions of an old-fashioned character, and the magical spells or songs which were to be chanted whilst the medicines were being administered, e.g. " Huat, hanat, ista, pista, sista, damniato dam-naustra." The following extract will give an idea of the character of Pliny's Herbal. " CICHORIUM OR CHRESTON, OTHERWISE CALLED PANCRATION, OR AMBULA : 12 REMEDIES. Wild endive or cichorium has certain refreshing qualities used as an aliment. Applied by way of liniment, it disperses abscesses, and a decoction of it loosens the bowels. It is also very beneficial to the liver, kidneys and stomach. A decoction of it in vinegar has the effect of dispelling the pains of strangury; and, taken in honied wine, it is a cure for the jaundice, if unattended with fever. It is beneficial, also, to the bladder, and a decoction of it in water promotes the menstrual discharge to such an extent as to bring away the dead foetus even. In addition to these qualities, the magicians state that persons who rub themselves with the juice of the entire plant, mixed with oil, are sure to find more favour with others, and to obtain with greater facility anything they may desire."

Towards the end of the fourth century A.D. THEODORUS PRISCIANUS, physician in ordinary to the Emperor Gratian, wrote a Herbal, and Lucius APULEIUS produced his Herbarium a little later. The De Simplicibus of Galen and the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides were translated from Greek into Latin at the end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century, and during the succeeding centuries various Recensions of them came into being, and short medical works by other writers were incorporated in them.

THE HERBAL IN SYRIAC

FOR nearly four centuries the Alexandrian School of Medicine (founded about B.C. 260) sent out into the countries round the Mediterranean scientific herbalists and botanists, skilled anatomists and wise and learned physicians. Alexander the Great had made Alexandria the greatest trading centre in the world, and the Ptolemies, his successors, made its Medical School to excel all others in learning. The discoveries made in Alexandria by the physicians who dissected the dead and vivisected the living in pursuit of the knowledge of the secrets of Nature were quickly made known to the Jewish physicians in Jerusalem and Damascus, and other cities on the great caravan roads leading towards the East. Little by little the knowledge of Greek medicine and the Herbals of Dioscorides and Galen became known in the literary cities of Amid, or Diyarbakr, and Edessa, and before the close of the fifth century A.D. translations of Greek medical works began to be made into Syriac. This is proved by a statement of Bar Hebraeus in his Chronicle (ed. Bruns and Kirsch, Leipzig, 1789, p. 62), which reads: "And Sapor (I., A.D. 240-273) built for himself a city which was like unto Constantinople, and its name was Gundhi Sabhor (Beth Lapat), and he settled his Greek wife therein. And there came with her skilled men from among the Greek physicians, and they sowed the system of medicine of Hippocrates in the East.

Crocus, Root of mountain rose, Ammoniac, Swallowwort, Pyrethrum, Peppercorns (long and .*. round), Liquorice root, Purple balaustion, Rose (yellow) leaves, Glaucium, Phceniceum, Wood lettuce, Incense plant berries, Crocus root, Green gall nuts, Green myrobalanus chebula, Lycium, Glaucium, Persian sathre, Pomegranate rind, Ferns, Aloes, Acacia, Indian salt, Daucus gingi-dum, Nard, Amomum, Ginger, Aniseed, Seed of rock parsley, Samterin, Salsola, Cardamoms, Reed of incense plant, Lithargyrum, Arsenic, Kroko-maghma, Costus, Myrrh, Dog-excrement, Verdigris (?), Tamarix, Caryophyllus aromaticus, Vine mould, Seed of roses, Balsam bark and Cassia.

Pound all these well together, reduce them to a powder, and apply sometimes in the form of a powder, and sometimes mixed with honey in the form of a gargle.

THE HERBAL IN ARABIC

The greatest botanist produced by the Arabs in the Middle Ages was ABD-ALLAH IBN AL-BAITAR, who was born at Malaga, and died at Damascus A.H. 646 (A.D. 1248). He travelled extensively in Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor, and collected a vast amount of botanical knowledge at first hand. He was director of the Medical School of Cairo under Malik al-Kamil (died 1237), and whilst there he compiled the great ARABIC HERBAL. He based his work on the Herbals of Theophrastus, Dioscorides and Galen, and his great knowledge enabled him to correct several mistakes in their works. His Herbal contains the names of nearly 800 plants, and he included in it the names of many Persian and Indian drugs (see the translation of J. von Sontheimer, 2 vols., Stuttgart, 1870-72).

• 1. About 130 of the plants known to Hippocrates are mentioned by Dioscorides.
• 2. The botanical name of agrimony, Eupatoria is derived from Mithridates VI. Eupator
• 3.The ancient Greeks burned thyme in their temples for consecration and purification, but also as an offering to the gods. It was especially sacred to Adephaghia, the Greek goddess of food and good eating.
• 4. Aloes was employed by the ancients and was known to the Greeks as a production of the island of Socotra as early as the fourth century B.C. It is said one of the reasons Alexander the Great invaded the Scocotra Islands was to provide Cleopatra with Aloe.
• 5. According to the Ancients, Wormwood counteracted the effects of poisoning by hemlock, toadstools and the biting of the sea dragon. The genus Artemisia (Wormwood) comesfrom Artemis, the Greek name for Diana. The name of the genus Erythraea,(Centurary) is derived from the Greek erythros (red), from the colour of the flowers. The genus was formerly called Chironia, from the Centaur Chiron, who is supposed to have cured himself with it from a wound he had accidentally received from an arrow poisoned with the blood of the hydra.
• 6. Garlic was placed by the Greeks on the piles of stones at cross-roads as a supper for Hecate, and according to Pliny, garlic and onion were invocated as deities by the Egyptians at the taking of oaths.
• 7. The milkweeds (Asclepias)were named for Aesculapius. The ancient Greek physicians held mustard in such esteem that they attributed its discovery to Aesculapius.
• 8. Peppermint's generic name, Mentha, is derived from the mythological origin ascribed to it, and was originally applied to the mint by Theophrastus.
• 9. Pepper was used as a currency during the siege of Rome in AD 408 and "peppercorn rents", now meaning very low rents, were commonly paid to landlords. It is said that Attila demanded 3,000 pounds of pepper in ransom for the city of Rome.
• 10. The oil, in addition to its wide use in diet, was burnt in the sacred lamps of temples, while the victor in the Olympic games was crowned with its leaves.
• 11. The Caduceus vs the Staff of Asclepius (Asklepian 03) ret (2009)pub 2005
• 12.The Egyptian priests called horehound the "Seed of Horus", or the "Bulls Blood", and "The eye of the Star".
• 13. The high position held by the Olive tree in ancient as in modern days may be realized when it is remembered that Moses exempted from military service men who would work at its cultivation, and that in Scriptural and classical writings the oil is mentioned as a symbol of goodness and purity.