Think Like an Egyptian (28 page)

For religious practices, speech was a vehicle of power. The Egyptians believed in “magic,”
k3 (heka),
that could be summoned through “utterances” or “spells,” the common word for which,
r
(ro), was derived from that for “mouth.” A god would be praised for “his spells of magic”; a lector priest who read the temple liturgy boasted that he “knows his spell”; the temple library of Edfu described its holdings as books, instructions, laws, and “Spells for averting the Evil Eye.” In all these cases it is likely that, to be most effective, the spells were spoken aloud. The recitation of the sacred liturgy accompanied by the uttering of spells at particular moments would have been another sound of ancient Egypt.

 

 

 

 

The hieroglyph depicts the udder, with teats, and the tail of a female mammal, perhaps a cow. It writes the word for “belly” or “body” especially that of humans, even though the part is based on that of an animal, as is the case with the hieroglyph for “ear.” The teats make for a more distinctive sign, and this presumably explains the choice of a female animal, although Egyptians tended to celebrate the male physique.

Statues of men (especially kings) were mostly intended to stand in temples or tomb chapels, where they received offerings on behalf of the spirit of the statue’s owner. They were seen, therefore, only by priests and those privileged to enter the temple. The male body, often with minimal cladding, was normally youthful, its musculature taut and fit. Instead of commemorating events, statues displayed the characteristics for eternal repose. Violent activity was unseemly, and episodes from myth or the battlefield were not suitable subject matter. The faces were mostly benign and confident. From time to time, sculptors introduced signs of age and experience, a corpulent body, a lined face. But these are sufficiently uncommon to cause comment today. Women’s statues were more passive, slender, and modestly clad.

Hunting in the marshlands or deserts was the favored active pastime for the male elite, but not athletics. In the marshlands, to judge from tomb scenes, men took their whole family along, and they waited patiently while he attempted to spear a fish. Other tomb pictures show sports and games being played by the commoners, as at Beni Hasan, where the tombs of local governors contain filmlike sequences of wrestling men included as entertainment for the tomb owner to observe.

Egyptians were exposed to the complexity of their anatomy when they witnessed injuries from warfare or building sites and the butchery of mammals. Moreover, the practice of embalming gave them an opportunity to observe human anatomy regularly. Only a very few papyri remain that deal with aspects of medicine. In keeping with other areas of the Egyptians” technical knowledge, they are not descriptive general treatises but manuals of practical application. One learned by example. Even so, they reveal an impressively detailed knowledge of the body’s interior, with an extensive vocabulary to name the parts.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus (named after its first modern owner) is a scribe’s copy of a manual on injuries, which instructs on injuries from the head downward (the papyrus is incomplete and stops in the middle of the 48th case, which deals with the spine). Each case begins with a description of the injury, some examples of which involve exposure of and damage to the brain. The manual would thus have been particularly useful to army doctors prior to the New Kingdom when clubs and axes were common weapons. The majority of cases were said to be treatable, and sensible instructions are provided, but almost a third were judged simply to be beyond treatment. Other papyri, arranged in a less orderly fashion, try to recognize and name the soft linear systems embedded in human flesh, including arteries (which were thought to conduct air rather than blood), ducts for urine and semen, and tendons and muscles. These are united under a separate word,
mtw (metu),
and required strengthening and softening through remedies. For a case involving the
metu
of the anus (probably hemorrhoids), for example, the bandaging on of a mixture of ox fat and acacia leaves is recommended.

Generally the medical papyri are written as if the patient were male. One very fragmentary papyrus, however, addresses itself to women’s medical conditions, including those connected with pregnancy (see no. 76, “To be born”).

 

 

 

 

Many conditions that require medical treatment display outward signs: swellings and ulcers, hernias, worms present in feces, blood in the urine. Swellings seem to be the origin of this curious hieroglyph, which is often used in medical papyri as a determinative sign for morbid conditions. Other conditions, arising from disease and from poor functioning of the body’s organs, produce internal pain and fever, and the true cause was virtually impossible to detect by ancient Egyptians with the knowledge of the day.

Similar perhaps to the four humors that dominated medieval European science, the Egyptians used a word,
whdw
(
wekhedu
), to denote a morbid essence which originated in the bowels (and caused putrefaction in corpses) and could spread through the body by means of the “channels” (
metu
). But the belief in spiritual forces meant that the Egyptians had a source of illness that must often have seemed as valid as a physical explanation : “The breath of life enters into the right ear and the breath of death enters into the left ear,” states a medical papyrus. A god or the spirit of a dead person could infect the living with a toxic substance called
(
a’ aa),
or simply have an influence on the course of a sickness.

The prudent course was to adopt a dual approach: to use the remedies from the written sources that had proved effective in the past, while uttering spells to appeal to gods and demons. As an example, the mainly rational Edwin Smith Papyrus, after describing a remedy, continues with a threatening spell: “What is to be said as a charm over this remedy: Repelled is the enemy that is in the wound! Cast out is the [evil] that is in the blood, the adversary of Horus [i.e., Seth]!”