thumb|Monumental stone relief (probably) of an Apkallu figure from the Temple of [[Ninurta in the Assyrian city of Kalhu, formerly believed by some experts to be a representation of an āšipu "exorcist-priest", who functioned as a healer and doctor ]]
thumb|Monumental stone relief (probably) of an Apkallu figure from the Temple of [[Ninurta in the Assyrian city of Kalhu, formerly believed by some experts to be a representation of an āšipu "exorcist-priest", who functioned as a healer and doctor ]]
In ancient Mesopotamia, the ašipu (also āšipu or mašmaššu) acted as priests. They were scholars and practitioners of diagnosis and treatment in the Tigris and Euphrates valley (now Iraq) around 3200 BC.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).