Papyrus is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge. Papyrus can also refer to a document written on sheets of such material, joined side by side and rolled up into a scroll, an early form of a book.
The Ebers Papyrus, also known as Papyrus Ebers, is an Egyptian medical papyrus of herbal knowledge dating to c. 1550 BCE. 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 Elephantine Papyri and Ostraca consist of thousands of documents from the Egyptian border fortresses of Elephantine and Aswan, which yielded hundreds of papyri and ostraca in hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Koine Greek, Latin and Coptic, spanning a period of 100 years in the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives, and are thus an invaluable source of knowledge for scholars of varied disciplines such as epistolography, law, society, religion, language and onomastics. The Elephantine documents include letters and legal contracts from family and other archives: divorce documents, the manumission of slaves, and other business. The dry soil of Upper Egypt preserved the documents.
Ancient Egyptian mathematics is the mathematics that was developed and used in Ancient Egypt c. 3000 to c. 300 BCE, from the Old Kingdom of Egypt until roughly the beginning of Hellenistic Egypt. The ancient Egyptians utilized a numeral system for counting and solving written mathematical problems, often involving multiplication and fractions. Evidence for Egyptian mathematics is limited to a scarce amount of surviving sources written on papyrus. From these texts it is known that ancient Egyptians understood concepts of geometry, such as determining the surface area and volume of three-dimensional shapes useful for architectural engineering, and algebra, such as the false position method and quadratic equations.
The Bancroft Library is the primary special-collections library of the University of California, Berkeley. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity. The collection at that time consisted of 50,000 volumes of materials on the history of California and western North America. It is now the largest such collection in the world. The library's current building, the Doe Annex, is in the center of the university's main campus, and was completed in 1950.
The Edwin Smith Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical text, named after Edwin Smith who bought it in 1862, and the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma. From a cited quotation in another text, it may have been known to ancient surgeons as the "Secret Book of the Physician".
The medicine of the ancient Egyptians is some of the oldest documented. From the beginnings of the civilization in the late fourth millennium BC until the Persian invasion of 525 BC, Egyptian medical practice went largely unchanged and included simple non-invasive surgery, setting of bones, dentistry, and an extensive set of pharmacopoeia. Egyptian medical thought influenced later traditions, including the Greeks.
Papyrus Hood is a hieratic papyrus from the time of 21st Dynasty Pharaoh Amenemope, 993–984 BC. The papyrus is at the British Museum,, and is a cursive hieratic manuscript which contains a copy of the Onomasticon of Amenope. This Third Intermediate Period work is known from eight other fragmentary copies, and relates back to the late New Kingdom era.
The Reisner Papyri date to the reign of Senusret I, who was king of ancient Egypt in the 19th century BCE. The documents were discovered by G.A. Reisner during excavations in 1901–04 in Naga ed-Deir in southern Egypt. A total of four papyrus rolls were found in a wooden coffin in a tomb.
The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus is the oldest known medical text in Egyptian history, dated to c. 1825 BCE, during the Twelfth Dynasty. The Papyrus addresses gynecological health concerns, pregnancy, fertility, and various treatments.
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.
The Brooklyn Papyrus is a medical papyrus dating from ancient Egypt and is one of the oldest preserved writings about medicine and ophiology. The manuscript is dated to around 450 BC and is today kept at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.
The Ramesseum medical papyri constitute a collection of ancient Egyptian medical documents dating back to the early 18th century BC, found in the temple of the Ramesseum. As with most ancient Egyptian medical papyri, these documents mainly dealt with ailments, diseases, the structure of the body, and proposed remedies used to heal these afflictions, namely ophthalmologic ailments, gynaecology, muscles, tendons, and diseases of children. It is the only well-known papyrus to describe these in great detail. Most of the text written in the known manuscripts of this collection are in parts III, IV, and V, and written in vertical columns.
The Medical Ostraca of Deir el-Medina are a collection of ostraca containing notes of medical importance. These ostraca were written in the New Kingdom Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina during the 18th and 19th Dynasties. Unlike other sources of medical literature from the period, these ostraca are notes written by and concerning the artisans of Deir el-Medina, rather than physicians or royalty. Thus, they offer a unique view of the common experience of medicine in Ancient Egypt.
The London Medical Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum, London. The writings of this papyrus are of 61 recipes, of which 25 are classified as medical while the remainder are of magic.
The Erman Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical papyrus. Fifteen columns of the papyrus are preserved, nine on the recto and six on the verso. The papyrus dates to around 1600 BC at the end of the Second Intermediate Period.
The Ritual of Embalming Papyrus or Papyrus of the Embalming Ritual is one of only two extant papyri which detail anything at all about the practices of mummification used within the burial practices of Ancient Egyptian culture.
The Hearst Expedition was an archaeological project led by the University of California to explore burial grounds at and around Qift, Egypt. The expedition spanned the years 1899–1905, and was named for Phoebe Hearst, mother of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who funded it. George A. Reisner directed the expedition, and is credited with some of its most important finds, including the stela of Prince Wepemnofret and the Hearst Medical Papyrus.
The Papyrus Carlsberg Collection is a collection of Egyptian papyri in the possession of the University of Copenhagen. It was founded in the early 1930s by Prof H. O. Lange with the help of funds from the Carlsberg Foundation. The majority of the documents were purchased between 1931 and 1938. Later on, in 1939, the foundation, with the consent of the Ministry of Education and the headmaster, presented its collection in the University of Copenhagen.
