The First Toothache and Tooth Worms December 13, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient , trackback
Try and decode this Babylonian text from the seventh century B.C.
After Anu [a god] had created the heaven
Heaven had created the earth
The earth had created the rivers,
The rivers had created the marsh
And the marsh had created the worm.
The worm went weeping before Shamash [god of Justice]
His tears flowing before Ea (god of hell)
‘What will thou give me for my food?
What wilt though give me for my sucking?’
‘I shall give thee the ripe fig
And the apricot’
‘Of what use are they to me, the ripe fig
And apricot?’
Lift me up and among the teeth
And the gums cause me to dwell!
The blood of the tooth I will suck,
And of the gum I will gnaw its roots!’
This blood chilling verse in cuneiform describes the mythological beginning of one of the most tragic afflictions known to man: toothache. The worm, produced spontaneously from out of the mud of the marshland, puts forward his claim to gnaw on humanity’s enamel: a plague of more than Biblical proportions is born. (For anyone who reads this with one hand to a swollen jaw, there may be some consolation that Shamash asks Ea to crush the worm with his fist, though, as we all know, this either didn’t happen or the worm did not care.) Beach noted previously on this blog that there seems to have been a widespread, perhaps universal human belief that pain in teeth was caused by small worms: Beach previously looked at this belief in relation to Chinese ‘dentists’ and their ‘worm combing’ equipment. The worm-like holes in decaying teeth may have been the origin of this curious belief.
Interestingly this mythological text is not the first mention of teeth worms. The earliest written record of teeth worms beats this by a thousand years. The cure in question is also Babylonian and dates to about 1800 BC. ‘If a person’s tooth has a worm…’ It is advice to a doctor and includes reference to an x-tree [?] and a weed that can be rubbed on the tooth. Let’s hope that these objects had very good natural pain-killing properties, because Beach suspects that placebo only takes you so far with tooth-ache.
Any other early tooth worm records: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
