Texts and documents. Translation and analysis of a cuneiform text forming part of a Babylonian treatise on epilepsy.

INTRODUCTION The text which forms the basis of this study is represented by duplicate tablets deriving from two widely separated archaeological sites and belonging to different modem collections. The first of these documents, SU51/92+, was found at Sultantepe, near Urfa, in southern Turkey during the 1951-52 excavations of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara and the Turkish Department of Antiquities. It is written in the Neo-Assyrian script, and formed part of a collection of literary tablets whose colophons bear dates ranging from 718 to 612 BC. The second tablet, BM 47753, belongs to The British Museum's "Babylonian Collection". It does not originate from a controlled excavation, but there is nevertheless every likelihood that its provenance is Babylon. Beautifully written in the Neo-Babylonian script, it may be dated approximately to the middle of the first millennium BC. Together these sources provide the nearly complete text of the Twenty-fifth or Twenty-sixth Tablet' of a medical diagnostic series known as Sakikku, or 'All diseases',2 one of several Tablets hitherto missing from the reconstruction of the series published in 1951 by Rene Labat.3 The series was complete in forty Tablets,