Talk:Tooth worm
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Dating of the Mesopotamian "Legend of the Worm"[edit]
This article states that the idea of the tooth worm is first mentioned in a text "from Sumer, Mesopotamia, some 4000 BC". The claim here is sourced to the 1990 article Historical Perspectives of Oral Biology: A Series in the journal "Critical Reviews in Oral Biology and Medicine" and this source in fact has an even earlier date:
Perhaps the earliest reference to tooth decay and its pain comes from the ancient Sumerian text, discovered on a clay tablet, known as the "Legend of the Worm".12 The clay tablet was excavated from an ancient city in the lower Mesopotamian area of the Euphrates Valley, which dates from about 5000 B.C. The cuneiform text refers to the creation of the heavens, the Earth, and the marshes; the latter created the worm (Figure 5).
This article again sources for its claim the 1945 book Dental Chronology: A Record of the More Important Historic Events in the Evolution of Dentistry. This book contains a short translation of this "Legend of the Worm" and dates it to "About 5000 B.C."
But these dates obviously cannot be correct, seeing as we have no writing that early. The earliest Sumerian proto-writing dates to about 3.500 BC and we do not see coherent texts until around 2.800 BC. So clearly the dating here claimed is impossible. The text cited can be found in standard works of Near-Eastern mythology, but it is a text from the Neo-Babylonian period, i.e. from around 600 BC. I've edited the article accordingly, but I wanted to set out the reasoning here. —Pinnerup (talk) 19:36, 25 April 2018 (UTC)
2009 study[edit]
The structures from the 2009 study are truly microscopic. How do they propose they could have led to the Babylonian myth? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.61.180.106 (talk) 00:41, 20 February 2022 (UTC)