According to CTN 4, 71 [/cams/gkab/P363486/], a catalogue from Kalhu, Sakikkû "concerns all diseases and all forms of distress". The logogram SA.GIG, translated by the Akkadian word sakikkû, means "symptoms", and indeed the series describes, from head to foot, a wide range of diseases that may affect the human body.
If the topic of the series is medical, it shares much of its format and content with other divinatory series, because all kinds of illness and diseases were seen as a sign from the gods. It is thus structured like other divinatory series: the symptom is described in a protasis and the prognosis and/or diagnoses is given in the apodosis, which typically names the disease and the chances of the patient to survive. Many illness were named after a god or a demon ("hand of X"). Once the demon was identified, a specialist, mostly the āšipu, could proceed with the appropriate therapy.
Sakikkû indeed belongs to āšipūtu (or the art of the āšipû, as stated in the first-millennium catalogues of the series. According to the colophon of CTN 4, 71 [/cams/gkab/P363486/] from Kalhu, as well as manuscripts found in Babylonia, a certain Esagil-kin-apli was responsible for the organisation and general structure of the series at the very end of the second millennium, during the reign of the Kassite king Adad-apla-iddina (1067-1046):
Concerning that which from old times had not received a new edition, and according to "twisted threads" for which no (written) copies were available, in the reign of Adad-apla-iddina, king of Babylon, to work it anew..., Esagil-kin-apli, son of Asalluhi-mansum, the sage of king Hammurabi, (...) deliberated with himself, and produced the new editions for Sakikkû, from head to foot, and established them for knowledge.
According to this colophon, Esagil-kin-apli undertook substantial editorial work, gathering and organising together different former (oral) traditions of the diagnosis series. However, there is little independent evidence for this Esagil-kin-apli's historicity: he may have been a purely symbolic figure. Some surviving manuscripts actually date from the early second millennium. The Kalhu colophon seems to indicate that the version of Sakikkû associated with Esagil-kin-apli became a reference standard, even if the numbering of the Tablets suggested in his catalogue does not completely match the numbering known in Nineveh or Assur.
In the first millennium, the series was arranged into 40 Tablets (the number of the god Ea who gave this knowledge to mankind) with more than 3,000 individual entries. The series is further subdivided into six main chapters of unequal length. The ordering of the omens follows two main principles: the course of the āšipu's examination of the patient, and the ordering of the symptoms, from the general to the specific.
In all, there are 5 manuscripts each from Kalhu and Huzirina, and a further 5 from Achaemenid and Early Hellenistic Uruk—few compared to the other divinatory series. By contrast, there are 12 commentaries [/cams/gkab/P348448,P348449,P348450,P348451,P348452,P348453,P348454,P348457,P348459,P348460,P348461,P348462,P348463,P348843/] on the series dating from the Achaemenid period, witnessing the Uruk scholars' strong interest in the serie. Unusually, there is also 1 commentary in Huzirina, STT 2, 403 [/cams/gkab/P338717/].
Marie-Françoise Besnier
Marie-Françoise Besnier, 'Signs of the body: Sakikkû', The Geography of Knowledge, The GKAB Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/cams/gkab/theworldoftheipu/divinatoryseries/signsofthebody/]