Ebers Papyrus

The Ebers Papyrus, also known as Papyrus Ebers, is an Egyptian medical papyrus of herbal knowledge dating to 1550 BCE (the late Second Intermediate Period or early New Kingdom). Among the oldest and most important medical papyri of Ancient Egypt, it was purchased at Luxor in the winter of 1873–1874 by the German Egyptologist Georg Ebers. It is currently kept at the Leipzig University Library in Germany. The papyrus was written in Ancient Egypt in 1550 BCE, during the late Second Intermediate Period or early New Kingdom, but it is believed to have been copied from earlier Egyptian texts. The Ebers Papyrus is a 110-page scroll, which is about 20 meters long. Along with the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus (1800 BCE), the Edwin Smith Papyrus (1600 BCE), the Hearst papyrus (1600 BCE), the Brugsch Papyrus (1300 BCE), and the London Medical Papyrus (1300 BCE), the Ebers Papyrus is among the oldest preserved medical documents. The Brugsch and the London Medical papyri share some of the same information as the Ebers Papyrus. Another document, the Carlsberg papyrus, is identical to the Ebers Papyrus, though the provenance of the former is unknown. The Ebers Papyrus is written in hieratic Egyptian writing and represents the most extensive and best-preserved record of ancient Egyptian medicine known. The scroll contains some 700 magical formulas and folk remedies. It contains many incantations meant to turn away disease-causing demons and there is also evidence of a long tradition of empiricism. The papyrus contains a "treatise on the heart". It notes that the heart is the centre of the blood supply, with vessels attached for every member of the body. The ancient Egyptians seem to have known little about the kidneys and made the heart the meeting point of a number of vessels which carried all the fluids of the body—blood, tears, urine and semen. Mental disorders are detailed in a chapter of the papyrus called the Book of Hearts. Disorders such as depression and dementia are covered.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (12)

Egyptian medical papyri

Egyptian medical papyri are ancient Egyptian texts written on papyrus which permit a glimpse at medical procedures and practices in ancient Egypt. These papyri give details on disease, diagnosis, and remedies of disease, which include herbal remedies, surgery, and magical incantations. Many of these papyri have been lost due to grave robbery. The largest study of the medical papyri to date has been undertaken by Humboldt University of Berlin and was titled Medizin der alten Ägypter ("Medicine of ancient Egypt").

Ebers Papyrus

Humorism

Humorism, the humoral theory, or humoralism, was a system of medicine detailing a supposed makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers. Humorism began to fall out of favor in the 17th century and it was definitively disproved in the 1850s with the advent of germ theory, which was able to show that many diseases previously thought to be humoral were in fact caused by microbes.