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Welcome to Voices of Ancient Egypt, the podcast for people who don't just want to learn about ancient Egypt, but want to understand it on a deeper, more meaningful level. I'm Melinda Nelsonhurst, an Egyptologist with a PhD in the field and years of experience teaching at the university level, working in Egypt, and training students around the world to read real ancient Egyptian texts. I've spent decades studying this civilization in a traditional academic setting, so you don't have to. And so you can access knowledge that's usually locked behind academic walls. This podcast brings ancient Egyptian history, beliefs, and language to life and shows you that learning hieroglyphs is possible no matter your age, background, or schedule. So whether you want to read hieroglyphs in museums, on social media, or on your next trip to Egypt, you'll find the tools, stories, and encouragement to make it real right here. Let's hear the voices of the ancient world together. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Voices of Ancient Egypt podcast. Super excited to be here with you today and share a topic I have not talked about on the podcast yet. Seems like how is that possible? Talked about so many things so far, but there's so much to learn about ancient Egypt, so much more to talk about. And what you're gonna hear today is a great example of the work that we do in my next level hieroglyphs program, Master Scribes, where we get into reading higher-level texts like historical accounts, stories, the book of the dead, heart scarabs, letters, statues, and even medical texts like the one I'm gonna talk about today. Master Scribes is my six-month group program for learning to read next level hieroglyphic text, and it's gonna be opening really soon. As of recording, just a few days from now, it'll be opening to the wait list. And so you'll want to grab your spot on the wait list to be first to hear. You can go to masterscribes.com for that, and I'll link it in the show notes too. So, what I wanted to talk about today is ancient Egyptian medicine and some specific aspects of it, because there's a lot you could say about this. I'm gonna focus on sort of one area, and we'll talk a bit about a papyrus that has medical text written on it, instructions for prescriptions and such, which today we call papyrus evers. So, when it comes to ancient Egyptian medicine in general, there are some sort of general things we could say about it. Interestingly, they do have a lot of interesting treatments, and a lot of things that you'll read about ancient medicine, especially with ancient Egyptian medicine, really focuses on, you know, what were the remedies like? Did they really work? How are they similar to ones we have today? So a lot of times we tend to look at this through the lens of our modern critical, like, well, does it really work kind of lens, right? So there are a lot of books written often from that sort of medical perspective, too, of like ancient Egyptian medicine and how does this compare to what we do today? Does is any of it relevant medically speaking for today and so forth? But I want to talk about it in a little bit of a different way and reframe this a bit to talk about it more in terms of the ancient Egyptians' understanding. We will talk a bit about, of course, how the ancient Egyptians understood things and how that might not be exactly the same as how we do today, but think about it from the ancient perspective, in terms of what was important to them, what they thought was effective and worthwhile doing. So, one of the things that we find in ancient Egyptian medicine is that they had this concept of sort of channels through the body. You could think of this as like the circulatory system. It sort of was their type of understanding of a circulatory system, but it's pretty different from ours. And this is partially because the ancient Egyptians were not really big on exploring the body if it caused harm to the body. So their understanding was definitely different than ours. Ours has been informed by hundreds, really, you could say thousands of years of kind of experimentation that included sometimes some really horribly gruesome things, actually, and um, sometimes some really morally reprehensible things as well. I was just reading something about this earlier today. But for the ancient Egyptians, they really didn't want to interfere with the integrity of the body. So during mummification, you may have heard before that sometimes they took out internal organs to help dry out the body, or they removed the brain through the nose. These are the major exceptions when it comes to sort of violating the integrity of the body, and they did so in the least invasive way possible. So, for example, when they removed organs, they made only a small slit in the abdomen and then just sort of felt their way around in there to take out what they needed to, rather than, you know, they could have just made a really big cut, right? And then been able to see what they were doing better, but they didn't. And that was really intentional. And when you think of the ancient Egyptian viewpoint and approach and mindset, this is really so important to understand about their view, because not only did this affect how much they understood the internal workings of the body, it did limit their understanding because of that, because they weren't doing exploratory things, you know, just to check out, like, oh, what does a kidney look like? Or, you know, where is this or where is that? But it also informed their treatments. So, in a lot of the treatments you'll find, they don't involve the things that we might think of today that we might do for certain types of injuries, for example, like surgery. Generally speaking, the ancient Egyptians avoided doing that because, again, their aim was to try to heal without causing any additional damage to the body. So, because of this, their treatments tended to revolve more around either topical treatments, if we're dealing with a wound, for example, like maybe a head wound or getting hit on the head. So it might involve bandaging, of course, which is not that different from what we do today, of course, but they might also apply certain things to it to help with the healing or to help bring down swelling. So, for example, meat, just like you might have seen in older media about putting like a steak on a black eye, for example, or they might put honey on a wound. And these are practices that you see a lot in the ancient medical texts from Egypt. You also see a lot of concoctions made up that were meant to be ingested. So you might have various things mixed together, for example, to make a drink or a bread or something that the person would eat or drink. And these often had the effect of an emetic or diuretic. So again, they had this idea of they don't want to harm the flesh of the body, but they did want to try to flush out any bad things. And this goes back to their understanding of the circulatory system. So I mentioned the circulatory system before, but I didn't get too much into it. So they had this understanding, again, of these sort of vessels or channels through the body. They didn't really understand veins and blood vessels and that sort of thing, but they did understand that things flowed through the body and made their way around in the body. And because they understood this, they also understood that they could become clogged. So in the Ibers propyrus, in one section, they talk particularly about the circulatory system or their understanding of it with these vessels. And this is a section we've actually read in my program Master Scribes before. We've actually read multiple other sections of the Ebers Propyrus as well, including prescriptions for um getting rid of wrinkles and things like that. But this particular section has to do with the vessels in a person. So it says, as for a man, meaning, you know, a human, twelve vessels are in him for his heart. They are the ones that give to his every member. So again, they have this idea that there are these channels or vessels that go from the heart into the different limbs of the body. And then they say about this, it continues by talking about what the physician can do. So any physician or priest of Sahmet, or what we might call in English a magician or a protective person, can put their hands or his fingers on the patient, and it specifies on the head, on the back of the head, on the hands, on the place of the heart, on both arms, on both legs. And this is how the measuring of the heart is performed. And it goes on to say it speaks forth in the vessels of every body part, it meaning the heart. So can you guess what it means when it says the heart speaks in the vessels of every body part? It's the pulse. So maybe you didn't know before, the ancient Egyptians did know how to take the pulse. And not only that, they understood that a weak pulse or not being able to get a pulse in a certain part of the body indicated a health problem. So it also says in the Ebers papyrus and another section right after this, that if the heart weakens, this is because the heart does not speak or the vessels of the heart are speechless. Now, because of this, because they understood a bit on a basic level that things circulated around the body, and they understood the pulse in terms of understanding that it was a diagnostic tool for your health, both overall and in certain parts of the body, they viewed it that if there was a weak pulse in a certain part of the body, this was because the channels or vessels were becoming clogged. So they had a concept of stuff that could sort of build up in the body and clog it. So one word they use sometimes for some of this material was wahido. And because of this clogging, this is why they were so interested in diuretics and emetics, because the idea was you could try to clean out this leftover stuff that got left behind in the vessels of the body and were clogging things and causing these health issues. So these remedies generally included both a recipe for making some kind of thing that the person would eat or drink in this particular case. There were also, of course, topical treatments. So, for example, there are a lot of topical treatments for eye problems because eye diseases and infections were extremely common in ancient Egypt, unfortunately. So there's lots and lots of things for that. But when it comes to trying to clear that wahidu out of the body, clear the stuff out of the body to help the vessels, they mostly have things that you ingest. So they usually have a recipe for putting together what it is that the patient's going to ingest, but they also had a part of this prescription that was to read a certain text allowed, to recite a speech that was based on the mythology of ancient Egypt. And these two parts were seen as very integral in Egyptian medicine. By modern Western viewpoints, oftentimes these are distinguished as two different things as magic and medicine. But the ancient Egyptian viewpoint was not this way at all. They did not distinguish between these. They were all of this together was the treatment. It was the prescription. You needed to do all of it together. It wasn't that one was better or more effective than the other. So these little stories that they would tell were basically a way of placing the patient in the role of a God who had been healed before. And through that association with the God who had been healed, this patient would be healed also. So they might say that you need to recite this, and they'll say, recite this, and then drink whatever this concoction is that they put together, for example. So one for digestive issues, for example, says when the when the belly is ill to mix cumin, goose fat, and milk. You boil them together, strain it, and then the patient drinks it. Another recipe involved mixing malachite ground really finely with bread dough and then put into three sort of pellets or pills, and then those are swallowed by the man and gulped down with sweet beer as well. The ancient Egyptians did drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of bread, so they do feature also in these recipes a lot. And another fluid that features in a lot of prescriptions actually is the milk from a woman who was born a male child. So this might sound a little bit weird at first, but this actually goes back to the mythological underpinnings for healing that we were talking about, right? I mentioned putting the patient in the role of a god. Oftentimes this was being in the role of the god Horus, who is the son of the goddess Isis. And Horus was healed many times. He was injured by his uncle Seth during their battles, and also even when Horus was an infant, and he was healed multiple times, often by his mother Isis. And this is the reason for this association of the milk from a woman who is born a male child being particularly potent, because this is reference to the milk of Isis to heal her son Horus. And all of these parts together, the understanding of the channels of the body that we read from the papyrus Ebers and that we read in Master Scribes, as well as the recipes, some of which we read there also, and also these kind of recitations of mythological references, which we read some of those in Master Scribes as well. All of these come together to put together the ancient Egyptian sort of approach to medicine, their overall philosophy of medicine and how they would treat these various ailments. And if you've enjoyed this episode, this is just a tiny taste of what we do in Master Scribes. There's so much waiting for you in the program. And just one of the things is learning to read original Egyptian medical texts like this one. And there's so much more as well. MasterScribes applications open to the wait list August 17th, and there'll be a limited number of bonus hieroglyphic day planners available for those who sign up early. Still want to get on the wait list to have first crack at those spots and the special bonus? You can go to masterscribes.com to grab your spot on the wait list. Until next time, stay curious.