Bullutsa-rabi

Circa Second Half of The Second Millenniumb.c.e.

Exorcist-poet

Sources

Revered Author. Bullutsa-rabi was the author of a great hymn to Gula, the goddess of healing. The frame narrative of the poem, in which Bullutsa-rabi introduces Gula, is written in the third person, while Gula sings her own praise in the first person. In the third-person frame Bullutsa-rabi beseeched the goddess on his own behalf, and he even wrote his name in the last lines of the poem. The passage in which Gula enumerates her skills provides valuable information about how Mesopotamian physicians treated patients:

I am the physician, I can save life,
I carry every herb, I banish illness.
I gird on the sack with life-giving incantations,
I carry the texts which make (one) well.
I give health to mankind.
(My) clean dressing salves the wound,
(My) soft bandage relieves the pain.
At my examination, the moribund revives,
At a word from me, the feeble one arises. (Foster)

Bullutsa-rabi’s name appeared again, much later, among the authors listed in a catalogue of texts and authors found in the ruins of the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668–627 B.C.E.) at Nineveh, destroyed by the Babylonians and Medes in 612 B.C.E.

Sources

Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature, 2 volumes (Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 1993), pp. 491–499.

W. G. Lambert, “The Gula Hymn of Bullutsa-rabi,” Orientalia, new series 36 (1967): 105–132.