Medical texts from ancient Mesopotamia stand in a wider tradition of scribal scholarship, including texts that deal with astronomy and astrology, mathematics, and law. The main characteristics of scholarly texts and, in particular, those that deal with the sciences, provide a context for the study of form and content of medical texts. For example, medical texts employ the casuistic formula and, rather than setting down general theories, present concrete descriptions of medical problems, whether these were once observed or merely theorised. The ways in which symptoms and diseases are described and arranged in the medical texts reflect the methods of Mesopotamian scholarship more generally, and these works seem to reflect an attempt by scholars to make sense of the world around them and to organize it into a comprehensible framework. The Kassite, or Middle Babylonian, period was especially important in the long-term process of standardisation and canonisation of such texts. Although the process by which works of the scientific disciplines reached their final form is not explained or even mentioned in the sources, it is thought to be the work of Kassite period transcribers and editors, since many representative texts of the scholarly tradition emerged from the library of Tiglath-Pileser I (who ruled from 1115-1107 BC) – so they emerged in essentially the same form in which they are attested in the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian copies. The oldest known complete medical text is from about 2000 BC and is in Sumerian ([LINK]; see also Civil). A therapeutic text that deals with many types of misfortunate, among them medical problems like headaches, it is also the only known medical text in Sumerian to date. The rest of the known sources for the study of Mesopotamian medicine are in Akkadian.
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