A groundbreaking discovery has revealed the first known diagnosis of infertility, dating back over 4,000 years, inscribed on an ancient Assyrian clay tablet found in central Turkey’s Kayseri province. The discovery was made by a team from Harran University, in collaboration with several other institutions, who uncovered this Assyrian artifact that sheds light on early attempts to address infertility.
The clay tablet, which was written in cuneiform script, detailed a prenuptial agreement and included a diagnosis of infertility along with a solution for couples struggling to conceive. The artifact, published in Gynecological Endocrinology, suggests that if a married couple was unable to conceive within two years, the wife was permitted to allow her husband to take a female slave as a surrogate to bear a child. The slave would be freed after delivering a male child, ensuring the family was not left without offspring.
This important find was made in the Kültepe district, once part of the Old Assyrian Empire’s settlement and trade colony between 2,100 BC and 1,800 BC. Professor Ahmet Berkız Turp from Harran University’s Gynecology and Obstetrics Department commented that the female slave’s primary role was to produce a male heir for the family.
The Assyrian Empire, one of the world’s earliest civilizations, is known for its vast collection of ancient records. In 1925, over 1,000 Old Assyrian tablets were uncovered in the region, referred to as the Cappadocian tablets, offering invaluable insights into the social and legal structures of the time. The prenuptial agreement and its provisions for infertility are part of a larger collection that was initially discovered by F. Hrozny, though many of these records were later destroyed in a fire, which engulfed the settlement where they were found.
The ancient cuneiform tablets, which served as a form of written communication among Assyrian merchants, have provided historians with a unique perspective on the pre-Hittite Assyrian colonies in Bronze Age Anatolia. The discovery of the infertility diagnosis and the contingency plan for reproduction highlights the early recognition of fertility challenges and the lengths to which ancient societies went to address them.
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