Imhotep was an Egyptian chancellor to the Pharaoh Djoser, possible architect of Djoser's step pyramid, and high priest of the sun god Ra at Heliopolis. Very little is known of Imhotep as a historical figure, but in the 3,000 years following his death, he was gradually glorified and deified.
The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian is an extinct Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century. Egyptian is one of the earliest written languages, first being recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC. It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4,000 years. Its classical form is known as Middle Egyptian, the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt which remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period. By the time of classical antiquity the spoken language had evolved into Demotic, and by the Roman era it had diversified into the Coptic dialects. These were eventually supplanted by Arabic after the Muslim conquest of Egypt, although Bohairic Coptic remains in use as the liturgical language of the Coptic Church.
The phoenix is an immortal bird that cyclically regenerates or is otherwise born again. While it's part of Greek mythology, it has analogs in many cultures such as Egyptian and Persian. Associated with the sun, a phoenix obtains new life by rising from the ashes of its predecessor. Some legends say it dies in a show of flames and combustion, others that it simply dies and decomposes before being born again. In the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, a tool used by folklorists, the phoenix is classified as motif B32.
Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems, the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts and the Arabic script, and possibly the Brahmic family of scripts.
Thoth is an ancient Egyptian deity. In art, he was often depicted as a man with the head of an ibis or a baboon, animals sacred to him. His feminine counterpart was Seshat, and his wife was Ma'at. He was the god of the Moon, wisdom, knowledge, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magic, art and judgment.
Nut, also known by various other transcriptions, is the goddess of the sky, stars, cosmos, mothers, astronomy, and the universe in the ancient Egyptian religion. She was seen as a star-covered nude woman arching over the Earth, or as a cow. She was depicted wearing the water-pot sign (nw) that identifies her.
In Egyptian mythology, Sekhmet, is a warrior goddess as well as goddess of medicine.
Ptolemy XIV Philopator was a Pharaoh of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, who reigned from 47 until his death in 44 BC.
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.
Hesy-Ra was an ancient Egyptian high official during the early Third Dynasty of Egypt. His most notable title was Wer-ibeḥsenjw, meaning either "Great one of the ivory cutters" or "Great one of the dentists", which makes him the earliest named dentist. His tomb is noted for its paintings and cedar wood panels.
Johann Peter Adolf Erman was a German Egyptologist and lexicographer.
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.
James Peter Allen is an American Egyptologist, specializing in language and religion. He was curator of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1990 to 2006. In 2007, he became the Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University. In 2008, he was elected president of the International Association of Egyptologists. A graduate of Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology, he received his PhD from the University of Chicago.
The "Tale of Two Brothers" is an ancient Egyptian story that dates from the reign of Seti II, who ruled from 1200 to 1194 BC during the 19th Dynasty of the New Kingdom. The story is preserved on the Papyrus D'Orbiney, which is currently held in the British Museum.
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 BCE and is today kept at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
Karl Richard Lepsius was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist, linguist and modern archaeologist.
Paul Ghalioungui or Ghalioungi (1908–1987), MD (Cairo), MRCP (Lond), Professor of Medicine and former Chairman of Internal Medicine department, Ain Shams University Faculty of Medicine. An Egyptian endocrinologist, historian of Egyptian medicine, Egyptologist and an authority on Pharaonic medicine, he wrote a vivid history of Egyptian medicine in English, French, Arabic, German, and Spanish.
The Brugsch Papyrus, also known as the Greater Berlin Papyrus or simply Berlin Papyrus, is an important ancient Egyptian medical papyrus. It was discovered by Giuseppe Passalacqua in Saqqara, Egypt. Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia acquired it in 1827 for the Berlin Museum, where it is still housed. The style of writing is that of the 19th Dynasty, and it is dated between 1350 and 1200 BC.
Sebiumeker was a major supreme god of procreation and fertility in Nubian mythology who was primarily worshipped in Meroe, Kush, in present-day Sudan. He is sometimes thought of as a guardian of gateways as his statues are sometimes found near doorways. He has many similarities with Atum, but has Nubian characteristics, and is also considered the god of agriculture.
