Page 20 - My FlipBook

20 FIRST PERIOD—ANTIQUITY

beginning of the year 1873, from an inhabitant of Luxor, in Upper Egypt.
He published a beautiful edition of it two years later in Leipzig; and
in 1890 Dr. Heinrich Joachim published a German translation of the
whole papyrus, with an introduction and explanatory notes.
The Ebers papyrus is written in hieratic characters. We here repro-
duce some passages of it, so as to give our readers an idea of tlie style of
writing.^
Lepsius and with him the greater part of Egyptologists are of opinion
that the Ebers papyrus is not an original work at all, but simply a copy
of medical writings of still earlier date, belonging to different epochs,
and which were collected and reunited to form a kind of manual on
medicine.
Fig. I

Part of Ebers' papyrus in Egyptian hieratic characters containing three dental prescriptions.

From some indications existing in the papyrus itself, Ebers has been
able to argue, with quasi certainty, that the papyrus was Written toward
the year 1550 B.C. But some parts of it have their origin in a far more
remote epoch; they go back, that is, to thirty-seven centuries or more
before the Christian era. In fact, at page ciii of the Ebers papyrus"
one reads:
"Beginning of the book about the treatment of the iixedii in all the
members of a person, such as was found in a writing under the feet of
the God Anubis, in the city of Letopolis; it was brought to His Majesty
Usaphais, King of Upper and Lower Egypt." Now, as Joachim remarks,
the Usaphais herein named was the fifth king of the first Egyptian

' The Egyptians had three different kinds of writing: tlie liieroglyphic, the hieratic, and
the demotic. The hieroglyphic style, which is the most ancient and is chiefly to be found
on monuments and in religious texts, consists of figures representing every kind of object;
the hieratic or sacerdotal style is an abbreviation of the hieroglyphic writing; the demotic or
popular style, the least ancient, resulted from further abbreviations of the hieratic.
^ See page 185 of the German translation of Dr. Joachim.