A short history of plant medicine in Anatolia: from the Hittites to the Ottomans
Anyone who buys linden or sage from a herbalist in Turkey today stands at the end of a chain of knowledge that goes back thousands of years in Anatolia. The history chapter of Turhan Baytop’s Türkiye’de Bitkiler ile Tedavi (Plant Healing in Turkey) follows that chain from Neanderthal graves to Ottoman hospitals. This article is a short summary of that chapter.
Prehistory: the flowers of Shanidar
According to Baytop, people in Anatolia have used plants for healing since the Palaeolithic. As the earliest evidence he points to the plant remains found in Neanderthal graves in Shanidar Cave, just south of Hakkari [1]. Whether those remains were left in a ritual or carried into the cave by animals is still debated.
Mesopotamia: 250 plant drugs
Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian tablets show that healing was carried out by priest-physicians using both magic and medicine. Most remedies were made from plants; beer, wine and butter served as carriers. Care was taken to gather plants at particular times, at night or before sunrise or after sunset, and to dry them in the shade [1].
About 250 plant drugs are known from this period. Plants we still recognise today, such as mandrake, henbane, opium poppy, saffron, thyme, mint and fennel, appear often in the prescriptions [1].
The Hittites: “And so the patient will be well”
We know Hittite medicine from the tablets found in the archive of their capital Hattusa (Boğazköy). The Hittites saw illness as a punishment from the gods and used magic and medicine together. Most of their remedies were plant-based; the Hittite word for a plant drug was “waššī” [1].
Alongside Anatolian plants such as hawthorn, almond, bay laurel, licorice, myrtle, garlic and olive, the prescriptions also mention imported drugs such as myrrh and asafoetida. The Hittites cultivated some plants and sold others, such as saffron and opium poppy, abroad [1].
Amounts are rarely given; the tablets say only “a little” or “much”. Whether the remedy is to be taken by night or by day, however, is stated. Every prescription ends with the sentence “And so the patient will be well”; the next one begins “If he does not get well” [1].
The Seljuks: a hospital in every city
In the two centuries from 1071 to 1308, the Anatolian Seljuks founded hospitals called bimaristan, darülafiye or darüşşifa in almost every large city. As Baytop reports, these were fully equipped institutions with their own physicians and pharmacists [1].
According to Seljuk endowment deeds, shops selling medicines in the cities stocked plants brought even from India, and caravanserai hospitals had pharmacies of their own. The first of these hospitals is the Gevher Nesibe Sultan Hospital, founded in Kayseri in 1206. The two snake reliefs on its gate can still be seen; the building is now a museum [1].
The Ottomans: herb gatherer, syrup maker and pharmacist
Ottoman medicine largely continued Seljuk and Islamic medicine; the main difference is that it was written in Turkish rather than Arabic or Persian. The endowment deed of the hospital that Sultan Bayezid I built in Bursa in 1399 names three people who worked with medicines: the şerbetçi, who made syrups and sherbets; the aşşab, who knew the medicinal plants and gathered or bought them; and the saydelan, the pharmacist who prepared pastes, pills and the main medicines [1].
The oldest known drug book written in Turkish is the Edviye-i Müfrede of İshak bin Murad of Gerede, dated 1389–90. In plain Turkish it lists remedies in alphabetical order, with where each is found, what it is good for and what harm it can do. Baytop notes that most of the plants in this book are still known among the people by the same names and used for the same purposes [1].
In the fifteenth century Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin, chief physician of the Amasya hospital, ran an experiment to see whether his antidotes worked against snake venom: he had a viper bite a rooster, then gave it the antidote and recorded the result [1]. In the same century the physician Şirvânî, who came to Anatolia from Shirvan, was writing about how to detect counterfeit drugs, including how he told real turmeric from fake.
A note
This article is a short summary of the history chapter of Baytop’s book; see the book for details and primary sources. It is not always certain which modern species the plant names in old prescriptions refer to.
Plants in this article
Sources
- Turhan Baytop, Türkiye’de Bitkiler ile Tedavi: Geçmişte ve Bugün, 3. baskı (yay. haz. Feza Baytop Günergun), Nobel Tıp Kitabevleri, 2021, “Tarih ve gelişim” bölümü