A Brief Introduction to the Horse Medical Manuscript from the Tianhui Laoguanshan Han Tomb

Abstract

One of the most important archaeological finds excavated from the Tianhui Laoguanshan Han tombs in 2012–13 was a manuscript on horse medicine, dated around the third century BCE. Prior to the discovery of this highly specialized veterinary text, only a handful of horse recipes from the Qin and Han periods had been found, and a sixth-century CE agricultural treatise, Essential Techniques for the Common People, was generally regarded as the earliest surviving source of extensive veterinary material, including various medical treatments for horses. Although the Laoguanshan manuscript – given the modern title Book of Treating Horses by the Team for Collating the Medical Bamboo Slips Excavated from the Han Tombs in Tianhui Town, Chengdu – has suffered significant damage, it nevertheless gives us an insight into the knowledge and treatments for horses during the Qin and early Han periods. A variety of ways of treating horses are recorded in Treating Horses, including herbal remedies, piercing, cauterization, hot packs, bandages, massage, and bathing. The use of gold needles is also mentioned in this text, echoing the gold and silver sewing needles excavated from Liu Sheng’s (d. 113 BCE) tomb in Mancheng, Hebei Province. This paper offers a short introduction to this valuable text on horse medicine by examining the content of its fragments, including names of ailments, symptoms of certain diseases, etiologies, and treatment methods. The discovery of Treating Horses challenges the established view that horse treatment methods in ancient China were predominantly herbal and that techniques of bleeding and cauterization recorded in Essential Techniques were brought to China from elsewhere, together with the introduction of Buddhism. The paper argues that the “foreign influence” had already occurred at a much earlier date, in the form of interactions with nomadic tribes such as the Scythians, the horsemen par excellence of classical antiquity.