Ancient Egyptian Medicinal Practices Part 1
The knowledge that life is precious and that our hold on life is tenuous has haunted humans for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians had a strong belief surrounding life, death and the afterlife. For many, what define the ancient Egyptians are not their lives, but their deaths and the funerary practices surrounding their death cults. As fascinating as the life after death aspect of the ancient Egyptian culture is, what often eludes common knowledge is how these people strove to preserve the lives of the living as much as they endeavored to preserve the lives of the dead. The following research will focus on the remedies of the ancient Egyptians with an emphasis on the Oasis dwellers. The difficulty of this paper will be the fact that Egyptologists have yet to find any ancient literature from the Oases dealing with medicinal practices. This being the case, this paper will focus on comparisons. The Oases, as will be shown, have a similar ecosystem to the Nile Valley, so it is safe to assume that the diseases suffered were the same in both regions of ancient Egypt. The differences will be in the magical and religious practices of the ancient Egyptians, both the Oases dwellers and the people of the Nile Valley.
The knowledge of the ancient physicians, the treatments those physicians dealt to their patients and their understandings of the diseases they were treating will be discussed in this paper. A number of diseases will be mentioned, their modern definitions given and their ancient treatments discussed. These remedies will be found to treat mostly the symptoms of the diseases and not the cause. Both the herbal remedies and the magical remedies will be analyzed.
© 2009 – 2010, Page Strong. All rights reserved.
That's a Wrap!
Questions? E-mail the Scribe!
About The Author
Comments