chapter one

EGYPTIAN MEDICINE AND GREEK MEDICINE

Champollion never had the opportunity to decipher a medical papyrus. In

his days, Egyptian medicine was known indirectly, notably through infor-
mation from the Greeks, in particular Herodotus. The situation changed
completely during the second half of the nineteenth century following the
discovery and publication of Egyptian medical papyri. The first was the
Berlin papyrus, published by Heinrich Brugsch in 1863; some ten years later,
in 1875, the most important medical text from ancient Egypt, the Ebers
papyrus (named after its owner and editor) cast light on general pathology.
A particular aspect of Egyptian medicine, gynaecology, was subsequently
revealed by the Kahun papyrus, published by F.L. Griffith in 1898. The start
of the twentieth century continued to enrich the collection, notably with
the Hearst papyrus, published in 1905 by G.A. Reisner. This resulted in
attempts to produce overviews of Egyptian medicine, such as W. Wreszin-
ski’s three volumes Die Medizin der alten Aegypter, published in Leipzig
between 1909 and 1913. His study also had the merit of publishing a new
document, the London papyrus (Brit. Mus. 10059). The publication of med-
ical papyri continued, rendering this first overview partially obsolete. The
most important was that of the Smith papyrus by Breasted in 1930, whose
significance stemmed from the fact that it opened up surgery, a new area
of Egyptian medicine, whose rational aspect sharply contrasted with the
magico-religious medicine that had been known up until then. The first
half of the twentieth century ended with the publication of the Carlsberg
papyrus no. 8 by the Danish scholar E. Iversen in 1939 and of the Chester
Beatty papyrus no. 6 by the Belgian scholar F. Jonckheere in 1947. The sec-
ond half of the century witnessed a second wave of studies. The work on
Egyptian medicine in the Pharaonic era by Gustave Lefebvre, published
in French in 1953, remained unsurpassed for half a century. However, the
work that remains fundamental for our knowledge of Egyptian medicine
is the Grundriss der Medizin der Alten Ägypter, published in eight volumes
under the direction of H. Grapow from 1954 to 1963, with a supplementary
volume in 1973. Of course, further papyri have since come to enrich our
knowledge of Egyptian medicine; for example, the Brooklyn papyrus, dedi-
cated to snake bites, which was published by Serge Sauneron in 1989. Finally,

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4 chapter one

there is a very useful recent study in French by Thierry Bardinet, Les papyrus
médicaux de l’Égypte pharonique, published in Paris in 1995, which has the
great merit of discussing not only important aspects of Egyptian physiology,
pathology and therapeutics (without masking the numerous difficulties of
interpretation with which Egyptologists are confronted), but also of provid-
ing a French translation of the medical papyri, a very valuable tool for those
who are not Egyptologists.1
As and when these medical texts from Pharaonic Egypt were published,
scholars began to raise the question about the relationship that might have
existed between this Egyptian medicine (whose most prestigious exam-
ples date from about 1550bc) and Hippocrates, the first representative of
Greek medicine, which manifested itself more than ten centuries later.2 The
considerable chronological gap is not in itself a major obstacle to a com-
parison, since the Egyptian medicine as reflected in the surviving papyri
extends over a long period from the 1800s bc until the Ptolemaic age, a post-
Hippocratic era, without undergoing any noticeable major evolution. This
attempt at comparison appears all the more justified because the pharma-
copeia of Hippocratic medicine expressly mentions products from Egypt,
such as nitrate, alum and oil,3 all of which are testimony at least to commer-
cial exchanges, if not to an influence of one medicine on the other. Studies
on the Egyptian presence in the pharmacopeia of Greek or Latin authors,
such as Dioscorides, Celsus or Pliny the Elder, observe the same trend.4

1 Complete references to the publications of Egyptian medical papyri mentioned here

in the brief historiography of their discovery can be found in its bibliography. The bibliogra-
phy should also be consulted more generally for numerous works on Egyptian medicine or
the comparison between Egyptian and Greek medicine. To these we should add G. Majno,
The Healing Hand. Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass, 1975), pp. 69–140
(bibliography, pp. 434–441) and L. Green, “Beyond the Humors: Some Thoughts on Compari-
son between Pharaonic and Greco-Roman Medicine,” in Zahi Hawass (ed.), Egyptology at the
Dawn of the Twenty-First Century. Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Egyptol-
ogists, Cairo, 2000, 2 (Cairo, 2003), pp. 269–275. It is supplemented by the CEPODAL on-line
bibliography (University of Liège).
2 See at the end of the nineteenth century Heinrich. L. Emil Lüring, Die über die medicinis-

chen Kenntnisse der alten Ägypter berichtenden Papyri verglichen mit den medicinischen
Schriften griechischer und römischer Autoren. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der phi-
losophischen Doctorwürde an der Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität Strassburg (Leipzig, 1888).
3 For these references, see the Index Hippocraticus (Hamburg, 1986), s.v. Αἰγύπτιος.
4 In particular, M.H. Marganne on Dioscorides (“Les références à l’Égypte dans la Matière

médicale de Dioscoride,” in Université de Liége, Department des Sciences de l’Antiquité

(ed.), Serta Leodiensia Secunda. Mélanges publiés par les Classiques de Liège à l’occasion du
175e anniversaire de l’ Université (Liège, 1992), pp. 309–322); Celsus (“Thérapies et médecins
d’ origine ‘égyptienne’ dans le De medicina de Celse,” in C. Deroux (ed.), Maladie et maladies