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| A stone relief carving of soldiers made in Assyria and now in the British Museum. (Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis) |
A new study finds evidence of trauma experienced by soldiers returning home from combat over 3,000 years ago
In
his account of battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the Greek historian
Herodotus recorded the story of a man that went inexplicably blind after
witnessing the death of one of his comrades. Until recently, this was
believed to be earliest-known record of what modern medicine calls
post-traumatic stress disorder.
But now, as BBC News
reports, a team of researchers says they’ve found references to
PTSD-related symptoms in much earlier writings, dating from the Assyrian
Dynasty in Mesopotamia, between 1300 B.C. and 609 B.C. They published
their findings in the journal Early Science and Medicine with an article poetically titled “Nothing New Under the Sun.”
Soldiers in ancient Assyria (located in present-day Iraq) were tied to a grueling three-year cycle, the BBC notes.
They typically spent one year being “toughened up by building roads,
bridges and other projects, before spending a year at war and then
returning to their families for a year before starting the cycle again.”
By studying translations of known texts, the historians were able
to see just how familiar symptoms of PTSD might have been to Assyrian
soldiers. Co-author of the study and director of the Anglia Ruskin
University’s Veterans and Families Institute, Professor Jamie Hacker Hughs told BBC News:
"The sorts of symptoms after battle were very clearly what we would call now post-traumatic stress symptoms.
"They described hearing and seeing ghosts talking to them, who would be the ghosts of people they'd killed in battle - and that's exactly the experience of modern-day soldiers who've been involved in close hand-to-hand combat."
As the study’s abstract states, the researchers also found instances of soldiers reporting “flashbacks, sleep disturbance and low mood."
PTSD wasn’t clinically recognized in the U.S. until 1980,
following a surge in classifiable cases from soldiers returning home
from the Vietnam War. Before that, terms like “shell shock” were used to
describe post-combat psychological struggles, and many soldiers, either
because of external pressures or their own feelings of shame, kept
quiet about emotional injuries first sustained in war.
This new research helps to demonstrate that, despite only
recently receiving wide recognition, the correlation between war and
post-traumatic stress is likely as old as human civilization.
By
Laura Clark
smithsonian.com
