Parte I

Parlare la medicina
nell’Egitto greco-romano
 Aigyptia grammata:
linguistic and medical training
in Graeco-Roman Egypt
Rachel Mairs

Introduction
πυνθανομένη μανθάνειν ϲε Αἰγύπτια γράμματα ϲυνεχάρην ϲοι καὶ ἐμαυτῆι, ὅτι νῦν γε
παραγενόμενοϲ εἰϲ τὴν πόλιν διδάξειϲ παρα Φαλου[..]ῆτι ἰατροκλύϲτηι τὰ παιδάρια
καὶ ἕξειϲ ἐφόδιον εἰϲ τὸ γῆραϲ. (UPZ I 148)

Discovering that you are learning Egyptian letters (Aigyptia grammata), I was
delighted for you and for myself, because now when you come to the city you
will teach the slave boys in the establishment of Phalou[…]es the enema doctor,
and you will have a means of support for old age 1.

UPZ I 148, a Greek letter from the second century BC, packs a lot of infor-
mation into a short text. The provenance is unknown, as are the locations of send-
er and recipient. No other text is preserved on the papyrus, not even the standard
epistolary formulae: large margins are preserved at head and foot, and the back of
the sheet bears only some washed out writings. The Greek is of a good standard.
From the gender of the grammatical endings, we know that the author of the letter
is female, and that the addressee is male. Their relationship is unclear. The concern
for the man’s education and advancement might suggest a solicitous mother writing
to her son, but this is by no means certain. Their relationship, at any rate, is a close
one: she is pleased for him and for herself (soi kai emautēi), feeling personal pride,
but also anticipating financial security from his decision to learn Aigyptia grammata.
And of course, every mother likes the idea of her son becoming a doctor.
This text, although brief, and in some respects cryptic, opens a window onto
the linguistic aspect of medical education and practice in Graeco-Roman Egypt.
Other papers in this volume focus on the language and contents of medical papyri,
Greek and Egyptian. My concern is with the sociolinguistic context of medical prac-
tice: language acquisition for the purposes of medical training and praxis, and lan-

1 Trans. after Bagnall – Cribiore 2006.

4 Parlare la medicina nell’Egitto greco-romano

guage mediation (written translation or oral interpreting) for these same ends. For
now, let me restate the basic relevant information in UPZ I 148, which I shall pro-
ceed to dissect further: in written Greek, an unnamed female authorial voice address-
es an unnamed male, stating that his learning of Egyptian letters will let him teach
in the establishment of an enema doctor whose name is Egyptian 2.

Iatroklystes
Let me start by addressing how learning Aigyptia grammata might help some-
one get a job teaching in the establishment of an enema doctor. (I will spare readers
a full-scale history of the enema.) Although its meaning is clear, the term iatroklystes
is a hapax. The only other possible occurrence is in P.Hib. II 268 descr. (c. 260 BC),
an account, where the editors restore it without comment in two places:

βαϲιλ ( ) (γίνεται) (ἡμιωβέλιον) (ὀβολοῦ τέταρτον) ἠ[θήταιϲ(?) ἰατρο-]

15 κλύστηι (πεντώβολον) Ἁρμάι [
τῶι Ἡρακλεῖ Χώνϲι (δραχμαὶ) β [

Fr
00 κάτεργον ἀλέταιϲ [ -ca.?- ] ἠθήταιϲ ταμίαι ὑδροφ[ύλακι ἰατροκλύ]ϲτη[ι]
(πεντώβολον)

In each case it is the ‘doctor’ component that is supplied by the editors to fill
lacunae. The text otherwise has no medical content at all. In fact, the presence of a
hydrophylax (guard or inspector of irrigation works) speaks against the ‘enema doc-
tor’ interpretation, and suggests instead that we have someone used to managing a
different kind of waterworks altogether.
What did our actual enema doctor of UPZ I 148 treat? Graeco-Roman
Egypt was rich in things to die from. Diseases caused by pathogens included, but
were not limited to, diarrhoea, typhus, malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, plague,
cholera, bilharzia, and diphtheria 3. On the principle that misery likes company,
more than one of these were often combined in single patient, and chronic condi-
tions might weaken a patient sufficiently for an acute attack of another disease to
be life-threatening. A high population density, by pre-modern standards, allowed
disease to spread 4. In Graeco-Roman Egypt, illness was “frequent, dangerous and
highly unpleasant” 5.

2 The name is most probably a variant of Phalous (dative: Phalouti), from the Demotic Pa-lw3.
There is no compelling identification among the many Phaloutes in the papyrological record.
3 Scheidel 2001, 51-117.
4 Scheidel 2001, 115.
5 Lang 2013, 20.
 Aigyptia grammata: linguistic and medical training in Graeco-Roman Egypt 5

Why treatment by enema? This is where an ethnic aspect begins to creep in.
A Greek might have answered that it was because the Egyptians were obsessed with
purging 6. Herodotos (Histories, II 77) claimed that the Egyptians spent three days
a month purging themselves with emetics and enemas, because they thought that
disease was caused by what people ate. Diodoros (1.82) repeats a similar view: that
Egyptians regularly fasted and purged, because most food taken into the body was
superfluous, and caused disease. The stereotype was naturally also used for com-
ic effect. In Aristophanes’ Peace, a helmet-maker laments that he has surplus stock
which he cannot shift; another character suggests he sell them to the Egyptians for
measuring laxatives (Peace, 1250-4). A double entendre in the Thesmophoriazusae
(857), makes fun of the Egyptians as “a people much given to laxatives.” There is a
certain logic behind the use of what one might more delicately call ‘cathartic drugs’:
ridding the body of disease-causing toxins. Drugs could also be administered by ene-
ma or suppository. Despite the stereotype, these treatments were used, not just in
Egyptian medicine, but also in Greek 7.
How far does this ethnic stereotype reflect actual practice in Egyptian and
Greek medicine in Graeco-Roman Egypt? Illness, as Philippa Lang has argued, “is
a sociocultural concept. The meanings imputed to sickness and healing have always
varied within and between different societal groups, including different ethnici-
ties” 8. Although medicine can be understood as part of ethnocultural identity, “It
is not uncommon for people in ethnoculturally pluralist societies like the modern
United States to believe at one and the same time in ideas from two or more medi-
cal systems” 9. The two traditions, Egyptian and Greek, were both much more closely
integrated than previously thought, and displayed their own, considerable, internal
variations in practice and theory 10. UPZ I 148 is in itself evidence of this complex
relationship: Egyptian letters are a professional qualification for working in the estab-
lishment of an enema doctor, but the profession of the enema doctor is not valued
solely by Egyptians.

Aigyptia grammata
This brings us back to the Aigyptia grammata of the letter, and the linguistic
aspect to learning and practising medicine. Contemporary social attitudes to the
languages of medicine – as distinct from the wider ethnic aspects of medical prac-
tice – are difficult to discern. One possible perspective is attested in the Corpus
Hermeticum, a body of texts from the first-third centuries AD. A teaching written in

6 Lang 2013, 41, 158-63.

7 Lang 2013, 157-8.
8 Lang 2013, 1.
9 Lang 2013, 43.
10 Lang 2013, xi.
6 Parlare la medicina nell’Egitto greco-romano

the voice of Asklepios, the Greek god of medicine, regards the translation of medical
texts as their distortion, and the Egyptian language as better suited to magico-med-
ical practice than Greek:

[These teachings] will be entirely unclear (Hermes said) when the Greeks even-
tually desire to translate our language to their own and thus produce the great-
est distortion and unclarity in what was written. But this discourse, expressed in
our paternal language, keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of
the sound and the (intonation?) of the Egyptian words contain in themselves the
energy of the objects they speak of. Therefore, in so far as you have the power,
king – for sure, you are capable of all things –, keep the discourse untranslated,
lest mysteries of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid
and, as it were, dandified Greek idiom extinguish something stately and concise,
the energetic idiom of the (Egyptian) words. For the Greeks, O king, have empty
speeches capable only of logical demonstration, and this is just what the philos-
ophy of the Greeks is: noise of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches but
sounds that are full of action 11.

Egyptian is a language of authority and fixed knowledge, Greek of criticism

and controversy 12. The former is here valued over the latter. The irony, of course, as
Dieleman points out, is that this text survives only in Greek, and we have no reason
to suppose that an Egyptian version ever existed, of which this is the translation 13.
The line between medicine and magic is here a fine one. Words in themselves have
power. Secrecy is paramount, and priests work to protect their ‘unique selling point’
as bearers of secret knowledge, who alone can use it effectively 14. We might make a
similar point about physicians, as professionals whose specialised knowledge is also
linguistic knowledge.
We do not have to look far to find more recent and familiar examples of
people learning languages in order to train as doctors. In Medieval and Early
Modern Europe, Latin and Greek were the principal languages concerned. Latin,
as an international scientific language, was a crucial first step in any good educa-
tion, medical or otherwise, and an essential tool to gain and contribute to medical
knowledge. By the late nineteenth century, doctors in Britain no longer studied in
Latin or Greek, but were still required to study Classical languages to be admit-
ted to medical school. In 1905, the British Medical Journal published an editorial
calling for reform:

Even at Eton, the chief among the stately homes of classical studies in this coun-
try, the number of boys who go on to the universities is said to be steadily declin-

11 Corpus Hermeticum, Treatise XVI, 1-2, trans. Dieleman, after Copenhaver.

12 Cf. Lang 2013, 132-4.
13 Dieleman 2005, 2-4.
14 Dieleman 2005, passim.
 Aigyptia grammata: linguistic and medical training in Graeco-Roman Egypt 7

ing, and this is attributed by those who ought to know to the fact that compul-
sory Greek stands like a lion in the path. It is particularly in the case of intending
students of science and medicine that it acts as a deterrent 15.

Greek and Latin were by this point barriers to medical education, not tools.
In studying Greek in order to study medicine, nineteenth-century medical stu-
dents were engaged only in a box-ticking exercise. Other languages were more use-
ful in their training and practice. For British and American physicians, French and
German were the languages of medical training and science. The medical schools of
France and Germany attracted large numbers of students from Anglophone coun-
tries 16, whose medical education was also inevitably a linguistic one. In other peri-
ods and parts of the world, we could make the case for languages such as Arabic,
Chinese or even English. So the recipient of UPZ I 148 is part of a long history of
people who, to become doctors, must first study a language other than their own.
His mother is also doubtless part of a long tradition of parents who see education in
the humanities only as a stepping stone to their offspring joining a respectable pro-
fession such as doctor or engineer.
The surprising thing for many Classicists is to see the Egyptian language in this
position. UPZ I 148 is a useful corrective to the view that Greek literacy was the sole
road to professional advancement in Hellenistic Egypt 17. Previous studies have been
quick to realise the potential of this fragment as evidence for bilingualism and lan-
guage acquisition 18. They have generally, however, worked on the assumption that
this man comes from a Greek-speaking family and is now acquiring a good com-
mand of Egyptian for the first time 19. It is this newly-acquired skill which he will
pass on to, or will help him teach, the slaves in the establishment of the Egyptian
enema-doctor. There is no problem with the functional separation of Greek and
Egyptian in this instance. As we have seen, certain medical fields were known as
native Egyptian specialities, including, apparently, the administering of enemas 20.
But it is as well to unpick precisely which skills were involved in this. Quite apart
from the question of professional qualification (why would an Egyptian doctor hire
a Greek to teach his slaves Egyptian, particularly one who has just learnt the lan-
guage?), the problem is one of orality versus literacy. More recent medical doctors
have studied languages for different reasons: to study medical texts, and to commu-
nicate orally. Why is our student learning Egyptian?

15 “British Medical Journal”, 28 January 1905, 199.

16 Bynum, et al. 2006, 48-51, 141-3.
17 For another possible example of a Greek learning written Egyptian for professional purposes, see
Sosin – Manning 2003.
18 Rémondon 1964b; Bagnall 1995, 33.
19 Bagnall – Cribiore 2006, 113.
20 Rémondon 1964a, 134; Ritner 1992; Ritner 2000, 115; on Demotic medical texts, see
Depauw 1997, 111-2.
8 Parlare la medicina nell’Egitto greco-romano

The information we are given is that the recipient of the letter is learning
Aigyptia grammata, ‘Egyptian letters’ 21. The place of learning is not specified: per-
haps a temple or from a tutor. Literacy in a language and spoken command of it
are two very different matters. It would be perfectly possible, for example, for some-
one who had received a Greek education and also had a good spoken command of
Egyptian to be illiterate in the latter language 22, and thus unable to study Egyptian
medical texts, although he could learn and teach orally in the language. This is
much the situation suggested by Goudriaan for the famous mid-second century BC
Serapeum recluse Ptolemaios and his brother Apollonios, who despite their exten-
sive interaction with Egyptian speakers and interest in Egyptian dream literature,
were apparently unable to read and write Demotic and had to resort to Greek trans-
lations 23. Indeed, only a minority of monolingual Egyptian speakers will ever have
been able to read or write Demotic 24. The recipient of UPZ I 148’s new command
of Aigyptia grammata enables him to extend his bilingual repertoire into a new func-
tional sphere – in linguistic terms, a new ‘domain’. But it is quite possible that this
is due to the mastery of a new written medium, rather than entirely new linguistic
skills. In other words, nothing in the letter tells us for certain that the recipient did
not already speak Egyptian. It is even possible that Egyptian was his first language.
The scenario of a mother and son from an Egyptian-speaking home writing
to one another in Greek does seem, at first sight, perverse. But many factors might
influence the choice of Greek as the language of written communication (especially
by a woman), whatever the author’s oral linguistic skills or preferences: availability of
scribes, preferred language of the recipient, or, especially later, in the period between
the decline of Demotic and the rise of Coptic, lack of an alternative, Egyptian, writ-
ten medium. One of several possibilities is that we have here a mother and son from
a Greek family long resident in Egypt, which educated its children in Greek but had
come to use Egyptian as the language of the home. It would still be unusual, we
might suggest, for the son of such a family to learn to read and write Demotic in
childhood, perhaps because Egyptian literacy was not valued by a family which con-
sidered itself ethnically Greek, unless it could be shown to serve professional ends.
This much is hypothetical – and I do not mean to suggest that this scenario is more

21 A fact recognised by Rémondon 1964a. The objection might be raised that slaves would hardly
need to be able to read and write Demotic in order to administer an enema. We know nothing
of Phalou..es’ teaching methods, but we might suggest that a student’s ‘hands-on’ training would
have been greatly enhanced by the ability to read Egyptian medical texts or teaching-notes for
himself. (The native language of the slaves, we have no means of knowing, nor of whether they
had earlier training in reading or writing any other language.) cf. Adams 2003, 356-68 on ‘doc-
tors’ Greek’ in the Latin-speaking world.
22 Cf. Adams 2003, 40-1 on Latin and Greek.
23 Goudriaan 1988, 46.
24 Ray 1994, 64-5. On Demotic school-exercises, and the difficulty of identifying texts as such, see
Tassier 1992; Tait 1996, 177-8; and Depauw 1997, 115-6.
 Aigyptia grammata: linguistic and medical training in Graeco-Roman Egypt 9

or less likely than any other – but the point remains that UPZ I 148, in itself, tells
us nothing for certain about the oral competence of either party in either Greek or
Egyptian 25. What it does tell us is that someone is acquiring literacy in Egyptian, i.e.
the ability to read and write Demotic medical texts, so that he can either pass on this
skill, or the medical knowledge he gains from it, to trainees.

Interpreting
Training and practising as a doctor in Graeco-Roman Egypt could involve
linguistic training, more specifically literate training, in order to access knowledge
recorded in writing in a particular language. What of the sociolinguistic context
more broadly: how was medicine practised in a multilingual society?
In modern multilingual societies – which most are, to some degree – medical
interpreting, between patient and physician, both takes place on an informal lev-
el (family members helping each other communicate with a doctor) and is an area
of specialised training and qualifications, even within specialist interpreter training
itself. Unfortunately, interpreters and interpreting activities are poorly attested in the
Egyptian documentary record 26. Given the extensive evidence for language contact
in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, this absence is indeed curious. The main reasons
for the silence of the sources are, as again many have already argued, solidly practical
ones 27. Many people in Egypt will have been bilingual to some degree, and capable
of interacting with speakers of other languages without an interpreter. Those who
did not have sufficient command of a language for a particular situation will have
been able to draw, informally, on the language skills of others who were bilingual.
In such a scenario, bilingualism and interpreting were so unremarkable and unprob-
lematic that they required little comment. Where language mediation is mentioned,
it is generally because it is either exceptional, or presented some special difficulty.
There is also the problem that the circumstances in which oral linguistic behaviour
finds reflection in the written record are very restricted.
Although we have no attested interpreters from Graeco-Roman Egypt in a spe-
cifically medical context, the legal profession offers a comparative example of a sit-
uation in which ordinary inhabitants of Egypt had recourse to specialists to try to

25 The exstent to which lack of names limits us in our analysis is probably debatable. In many
respects, the appearance of Egyptian names would be more significant than Greek – which could
be argued to be a product of the choice of written medium. See below on the archive of Dryton
and Apollonia-Senmonthis.
26 See Mairs 2012; P.Col.Zen. II 63, note to l. 7; Peremans 1983, 11; Hanson 1991, 176;
Bagnall 1993, 233, “a good example of the reticence of the documents”; Rowlandson
2004, 166; Bagnal, et al. 2005, 27; contra: Rochette 1995, 62, on the supposed ‘frequen-
cy’ of δι’ ἑρμενέωϲ in the papyri.
27 See e.g. Rowlandson 2004, 159.
10 Parlare la medicina nell’Egitto greco-romano

overcome problems, the linguistic complications which insued, and how these were
overcome.
First, practising law in a multilingual society required different linguistic strat-
egies – much like medicine. Written legal documents might need to be translated so
that they could be understood by courts operating in a different language, or even
the parties themselves. 28 In law courts, witnesses giving testimony might need to
be questioned through an interpreter, if they did not know the language of proceed-
ings. In the few examples we have where interpretation of this kind is mentioned, it
is significant that either the interpreter is not named, but only mentioned in pass-
ing, or we are told that it is one of the court officials who himself acted as interpret-
er. In other words, interpreting was done ad hoc by whatever competent bilingual
happened to be present, not by a dedicated professional. This is the kind of scenar-
io we have to mention for medical interpreting: if there was a communication gap
between practitioner and patient, there will have been someone on hand to interpret.

Conclusions
UPZ I 148 is a unique and valuable piece of testimony in a number of ways.
Mentions of specialist doctors in the papyrological record from Graeco-Roman
Egypt, never mind clyster-doctors, are uncommon. Historians of the enema would
doubtless find it fascinating. Picking the document apart enables us to move beyond
certain assumptions that we might have: that, following Herodotos and others,
Egyptians were fixated with enemas – they were, but so were Greeks -; and that
the addressee was a monolingual ethnic Greek – which we cannot assume from the
evidence. Language choice is not just dictated by ethnic or linguistic origin, but by
context and purpose, and the medical profession, like others, could and can require
new linguistic skills, oral and written. Graeco-Roman Egypt was a profoundly mul-
tilingual society, the oral linguistic element of which is often hidden from us in the
sources. Different ways of overcoming linguistic gaps, where these existed, included
written translation, language acquisition, and the informal services of bilinguals. The
Graeco-Roman example makes us think about medicine in a multilingual society in
ways that have implications beyond this specific historical context.

28 Mairs 2016.
 Aigyptia grammata: linguistic and medical training in Graeco-Roman Egypt 11

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