The Cotsen Collection at UCLA: 6 (2024-07-31)

Created by: Wolfe, Jared N.

A lexical list recording the parts of the human body with their variations and medical afflictions ordered from head to toe. This large tablet is housed in UCLA Library Special Collections

The lexical series titled “ugu-mu” (“O, hy head!”) presents in descending order from head to toe the parts of the body, including bodily afflictions and associations, in Sumerian. The entries themselves are cast from the perspective of the speaker, thus the first few lines read, “my skull …my skull-cap, my head, my forehead,” etc. In this way a scribe would learn the parts of the body, sometimes also in conjunction with the medical maladies that afflicted them. This particular exemplar is from the Old Babylonian period, and represents a major undertaking on the part of the scribe, evidenced by the size of the tablet (8 columns total). A tablet this size would probably have been kept among instructional materials of the school masters and assigned to less-advanced students to make copies of text subsections. CDLI entry: P462192

credit: Wolfe, Jared N.