Medicine and healing practices in ancient Egypt

Medicine was practised from early times in Egypt and Mesopotamia, two great contemporary centres of civilisation. The first extant textual evidence of healing treatments is recorded in cuneiform script on clay tablets towards the end of the third millennium BC, but there may have been an equally early Egyptian tradition which has not survived because it was recorded on papyrus, a far less robust writing material. A craftsman receiving treatment to his eye in a scene from the tomb of the master builder Ipwy at Thebes. Image: Drawing and facsimile painting by Norman de Garis Davies (1927, Two Ramesside Tombs at Thebes). Previous studies on ancient Egyptian medicine have generally categor