Читать книгу EPIDEMICS in Ancient Egypt - Victoria Goldwyn - Страница 5

INTRODUCTION

A Concise Overview on

Ancient Survival Strategies

in Uncertain Times

T

his short reading is about magic and medicine in Ancient Egypt. It is addressed to all those who have never heard anything on this subject. It is intended to reach those looking for a concise but precise introduction to the topic and aims to answer questions about what the Ancient Egyptians did to counter diseases.

Magic and medicine: Why are these two fields connected here? After all, medicine is science, and magic is opposed to it, right? Well, for the Ancient Egyptians, both belonged together. Magic and medicine were not mutually exclusive. The physician could be a magician and a priest at the same time, and both professions were educated in the same place, in the so-called House of Life. In the Ancient Egyptian language, it was called per ankh. This was a school where astronomers, astrologers, and other scientists also received their education. At that time, the magical creation of things belonged equally to the necessary knowledge of a healer as the treatment of injuries with herbal tinctures. So, there was not always a sharp separation of disciplines.

When treating the sick, the Ancient Egyptians also displayed practical creativity. An impressive example is this oldest prosthesis for a toe found in Egypt. Experienced specialists in antiquity created simple replacements of body parts made of cedarwood and leather as early as 600 B.C.

People who had lost a body part due to an accident, illness, or battle were thus able to lead a halfway everyday life again. The archaeological artifact, shown in the picture below, of a prosthetic toe belonged to the daughter of a priest. She probably suffered from diabetes and had to have her toe amputated. Experts found that this new prosthetic toe was so well adapted to the human physiognomy that the patient could probably walk very well with it.

Fig. 1.: Prosthetic toe from Ancient Egypt made from leather, linen and cedarwood.

In the following, I will now first provide you with basic knowledge about both fields, magic and medicine. These overviews are essential for understanding why magic and medicine are so closely related. Next, I will address what illness meant to the Ancient Egyptians in the first place. And you will learn why magic was not quackery to them. We will look at selected archaeological objects, which give us valuable clues about healing treatments and magical acts for the restoration of health or the manifestation of a pleasant existence in the afterlife.

In the central section about epidemics in Ancient Egypt, we will look at historical text sources about treatments and magical acts for restoring health and how they tried to prevent diseases.

This is a pretty current topic: In Ancient Egypt, too, people struggled with outbreaks, which they had difficulty controlling over a long period. What we today call an epidemic or – on a global scale, a pandemic – was also known to the Egyptians. This section is about the behavior of the Ancient Egyptians during plaguess. How did they perceive the epidemic in the first place? And what did they do to prevent it from spreading?