The ancient Mesopotamian civilisation’s weirdest job? Meet the veterinary exorcist
In the cradle of civilisation, illness wasn’t just a medical problem — it was a supernatural one. That’s why Mesopotamians turned to exorcists not only to treat people, but animals too.
If your donkey fell ill in ancient Mesopotamia, the solution wasn’t to summon a vet: it was to call an exorcist. It was a lucrative career path that began with sick animals, but could culminate at a king’s bedside.
“People who started out as veterinary exorcists then moved on to treating humans,” says historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid – author of Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History – who was speaking on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast about Mesopotamian culture and society.
In this early Mesopotamian society, being an exorcist – an āšipu – didn’t mean you were someone who expunged the supernatural.
These exorcists were trained healers who treated everything from toothaches to cattle fevers, not only with the aid of scalpels or potions alone, but with rituals, incantations and appeals to the gods.
A world ruled by gods and omens
The Mesopotamians, who lived between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from around 3000 BC, believed they were surrounded by a cosmos teeming with powerful invisible forces.
Gods were believed to rule every part of life, from weather and agriculture to childbirth and healing. Meanwhile, malevolent spirits were thought to lurk in corners of the world unseen, capable of causing disease, misfortune or madness.
To survive in such a landscape, the Mesopotamians developed a range of specialists to navigate the divine and the demonic.
Chief among them were these exorcists, who addressed not only the physical symptoms of illness, but also the supernatural forces behind them – like good doctors today, they considered the underlying causes of disease as well as the external symptoms.
“There wasn’t this sharp divide between medicine and religion,” says Al-Rashid. “A doctor might also be an exorcist, or he might consult one.”
For the Mesopotamians, science and spirituality were two parts of the same system: both necessary to identify what was wrong, and how to put it right.
Treating spirits, not symptoms
This belief system – and the professions – extended far beyond human illness. The Mesopotamians relied on beasts of burden for labour, transport, trade, and warfare. When those animals got sick, it wasn’t just a logistical challenge; it was a sign that something in the spiritual balance had shifted.
“We have these tablets with lists of diagnoses and prognoses for animal illnesses,” Al-Rashid explains. “Particularly for horses and donkeys. And prayers and rituals to treat them.”
Such tablets were vital professional documents detailing what symptoms to look for, what spirits to suspect as the cause of the illness, and what ritual responses to offer: an infected wound might be seen as a sign of divine anger; a persistent cough in an ox could be blamed on a demon.
The veterinarian exorcist’s job was to identify the affliction’s supernatural cause and then drive it out.
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Part of what made this role so vital was the belief that spiritual contamination could spread.
“The idea that the same spirit that attacked your ox could go on to infect your household — that made it urgent,” explains Al-Rashid. So, if a demon had attacked a cow or horse, it might then move on to a servant, a child or even the house itself, representing a breach in the spiritual perimeter.
In this way, the veterinary exorcist wasn’t just treating the animal itself.
Their rituals, prayers and purifications formed part of a broader strategy to maintain balance between the human, natural and divine realms, which were the foundations of well-being in ancient Mesopotamian thinking.
A civilisation written in clay
One of the reasons we know so much about Mesopotamian healing practices is because they were meticulously recorded.
Their libraries, archives and schools produced thousands of tablets, covering law, commerce, astrology, and yes, medicine.
These texts reveal not only what the Mesopotamians did, but what they believed. They show a society where illness had moral and spiritual meaning, where every disease was both a symptom and a sign.
A headache might be caused by a cold — or a forgotten offering. A lame donkey might signal an impure household.
That’s why the exorcist was essential. He (and it almost certainly was a “he” explains Al-Rashid) was a kind of spiritual mediator between realms.
This, ultimately, was a very Mesopotamian job, rooted in the beliefs and context of the society in which the presence of gods was evident everywhere, illness was never random, and every part of life — from the king’s dreams to your donkey’s limp — was weighted with meaning.
Authors
Kev Lochun is Deputy Digital Editor of HistoryExtra.com and previously Deputy Editor of BBC History Revealed. As well as commissioning content from expert historians, he can also be found interviewing them on the award-winning HistoryExtra podcast.