Museum Tusculanum Press Two Medical Manuscripts: The Hieratic P. Carlsberg 8 and the Coptic Codex P. Carlsberg 500 (Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications)

This book presents text editions of three medical texts from ancient and late antique Egypt. Two of the texts, written on the recto and verso of the same papyrus, date to the 14th or 13th century BCE and comprise treatises on ophthalmology and gynecology respectively; the third is a Coptic medical treatise from the 5th or 6th century CE that outlines treatments against a wide variety of ailments. The texts are published in full for the first time, which substantially increases the limited corpus of ancient and late antique medical texts from Egypt. They significantly aid our understanding of the practice of medicine and the conceptualization of disease and treatment in the pre-modern world. The specialized terminology of the treatises also makes them lexicographically valuable, as they present a number of otherwise unattested words.