Opium or Cucumber? Debunking a Myth About Sumerian Drugs | Hacker News Reader

Opium or Cucumber? Debunking a Myth About Sumerian Drugs

resobscura.blogspot.com

63 pointsbenbreen11 comments

I'm working on editing my PhD dissertation into a book right now and I'm dealing with this exact problem. I work on Babylonian astrology and the text I studied for my PhD was a complex table of astrological material including "medical" ingredients. Right now I'm finishing off correcting and translating all of the medical ingredients in the text.

I've chosen to rather than try to convert the Sumerian/Babylonian names of ingredients into assumed parallels leave them all in their native language. Identifying ancient ingredients is really hard (for many of the reasons given in the blog post). Most all, how can we sure than any of the descriptive adjectives (especially sensory observations) have modern equivalents that we can relate to. We know for instance that color words can differ quite a bit between languages, and that's thanks to living speakers who can show us what they mean by a certain word. How do we do that for long dead languages? For instance try explaining the scent of cedar wood without using the word cedar... and imagine all the culturally specific adjectives you'd have to use to approximate the smell.

To be sure, it's not a hopeless task. Some ancient names can be identify with modern parallels, but on the whole it's a very fraught task.

That sounds really fascinating. Where could an interested layman read more about your (and related) work?

I find it very hard to find material in that space, between the pop-culture "Check out These 10 Things The Ancient Sumerians Did!" (too vacuous) and expert journal articles (too deep, not enough context). In some areas Wikipedia rabbit-hole-trips serve well, but not always.

Totally agree, there are publications out there that are starting to bridge the gap. But really now more and more academics are taking to twitter and sharing their research in a more public way often with much of the field specific jargon tempered because of the platform.

I just published an article in an open-access book on digital methods in my field which is available here: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/b97890...

Author of the original post here. That sounds super interesting. Out of curiosity, have you come across the phrase in question ("hul gil") in any of the documents you look at? I, too, would love to read about your work if it's public anywhere.

I haven't seen it in my texts, and actually perusing the dictionaries and sign-lists right now, I think I'm getting a sense for how the derivation came about.

I modern reading of the signs that make up the word they're talking about "irrû" in Akkadian, are: ḪUL₂.GIL₂, but the context of its use suggests a bitter cucumber like plant (also a tangled plant, because "irrū" means intestines).

As to the name "joy plant" if you were to read the signs as ḪUL₁!.GIL₁! (notice the 1's) then that would be correct, but instead they are the second versions of each sign, and cannot be read as "joy" or "plant".

That's very helpful and interesting, thank you!

It kind of reminds me of the use of Navajo as a code by the Americans in WWII. If you don't know the language and no one in your country does, you have no hope of decoding it because words just mean different things and you can't translate a cultural experience and understanding.

Surely the modern curcurbit is the product of years of breeding to remove hairs, seeds, gain length and sweetness.

Do we even know what primitive Sumerian cucumber sandwiches looked like?

Poppy heads didn't need breeder changes beyond potency and size! Seeds there for the grabbing in a handy pocket size container and sap a-plenty.

>Thompson himself was aware of the confusion later in his career, but explained it by saying that the Sumerians used the term UKUS-RIM for both plants "because of the similarity of the poppy capsule to the small cucumber."

>Honestly, I'm not seeing it.

I hate to see this stuff in a debunking article since it indicates that the author is not doing a very good job at trying to understand the claims. The "small cucumber" could easily refer to the cucumber around the time of polination, when it does look at least vaguely similar even today (and as ggm mentioned, it might have looked different then). See the second image on this page (and remember that the flowers will dry at some point):

http://blog.explosiveblooms.com/2013/07/lemon-cucumbers-are-...

Some of the arguments sound reasonable but I wouldn't put too much trust in this author.

Author here - fair enough, that sentence was maybe too flippant. I do mention in the caption that bitter cucumber looks more similar. But if the criterion for making the assumption is that some types of cucumber are sometimes round like poppy pods, then I think it's still not at all convincing.

Thanks for sharing this, I love reading about how different societies interact with and approach psychoactives. Historical works liek this and anthropological works like Jeremy Narby's Cosmic Serpent are so intriguing.

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