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CHAPTER I.

DENTAL ART AMONG THE EGYPTIANS.

Among the people of ancient times, the Egyptian nation was, without
doubt, the one in which civilization first took its rise and had its earliest
development. From the time of Menes, first King of Egvpt (3892 B.C.),
the inhabitants of the vallev of the Nile were well advanced on the path
of civilization, and under the fourth dynasty, dating from 3427 vears
before the Christian era, thev had already attained a high degree of
progress.
Medical art and science in every country have always progressed in
proportion to the general civilization, for the treatment of disease is
one of the first and most important manifestations of civilized life. It
is therefore natural that the healing art should have flourished earlier in
Egvpt than elsewhere, that is, in the midst of the oldest civilized people.
There, as in other countries, medicine was practised for some time
only by the sacerdotal caste; but not all the members of this caste were
doctors and priests at one and the same time; there was a special class
among them, called "pastophori," whose mission it was to cure the sick.
Our knowledge of medicine as practised among the Egyptians of old
is now no longer limited to the scanty notices handed down to us by Greek
and Roman writers. The researches made by students of Egyptian lorc^
have placed original medical writings in our hands, now already partly
interpreted, that permit us to form a sufficiently exact idea of the science
of ]Medicine in ancient Egypt.
These valuable documents, denominated papyri, from the material
on which they are written, now exist in great numbers in the Berlin
Museum, in the British Museum, and in those of Leyden, Turin, Paris,
and other cities; but the most important of the papyri treating of medical
subjects is certainly the papyrus of Ebers, in the library of the Leipzig
University.^ This verv valuable papyrus—the most ancient of all known
works on Medicine—is the best written of all the Egyptian medical
papyri, and is also the best preserved and most voluminous. In size
it is 30 centimeters high, 20 meters long, and the whole text is divided
into 108 sections or pages, each one of about 20 to 22 lines. The cele-
brated Egyptian scholar. Prof. George Ebers, procured it, toward the

' See Introduction to the German translation of the Ebers papyrus, by Heinrich Joachim,
Bedin, 1890.