Mummies, Magic and Medicine in Ancient Egypt: Multidisciplinary Essays for Rosalie David by Campbell Price, et al. (review)

This volume is in honor of a worldly renowned British Egyptologist, Rosalie David, who produced a series of studies appreciated not only by the scholarly Egyptological community, but also by a wider audience. She is known within the Egyptological community for her interdisciplinary approach to the study of ancient Egypt and for the application of scientific analytical techniques through what is called the “Manchester method,” which was first developed in the 1970s within the “Manchester Mummy Project” in order to obtain a comprehensive examination of mummies. This book collects a number of articles produced mostly by British Egyptologists and scholars of bioarchaeology, biomedical Egyptology, and the like on a variety of topics related to Rosalie David’s main interest, namely mummies, magic, and medicine in ancient Egypt, as announced in the book’s title. The editors of the volume have brilliantly managed to assemble and organize articles on rather different topics in four main sections.

The first section, “Pharaonic sacred landscapes,” includes contributions on recent archaeological finds and interpretation of sacred areas. The first two articles are devoted to the necropolis of Saqqara: Aidan Dodson provides an overview on the layout and chronology of the site’s tombs and monumental buildings while Paul T. Nicholson focuses on a landscape “archaeological narrative” for North Saqqara in the Late and Ptolemaic Period when the animal necropolis was functioning. Steven Snape reports on the archaeological work done in the Middle Kingdom necropolis of Rifeh in Upper Egypt while Angela P. Thomas provides an assessment of the Ramesside monuments of Unnefer at Abydos. Two articles are devoted to the study of individual artefacts: Peter Robinson presents a peculiar ostracon with a sketch of a burial scene recalling a similar scene found in a papyrus of the Book of the Dead and depicting the funeral and a tomb substructure; Penelope Wilson provides new interesting evidence for the Ptolemaic Royal Tombs at Sa el-Hagar (Sais), in particular a red granite block depicting the Four Sons of Horus, very probably belonging to a large funerary object such as a sarcophagus, and an ushabti with a royal cartouche of Psamtek. The contribution of Philip Turner on Seth as a “con-man,” which closes the first section of the book, would have been better included in the following section, which is devoted to magico-medical practices.

This second section presents the publication of two artefacts and a few more general overviews on topics related to magic and medicine in ancient Egypt, some of which are written by experts in the field of medicine and biomedical Egyptology. Carol Andrews presents a peculiar amulet of a wedjat eye with an uncommon animal iconography for this kind of object (including a recumbent lion, a lion head, and a crocodile); John Taylor describes and discusses a wooden funerary figurine with magical/ritual function, which seems to be a miniature copy of an early New Kingdom Theban anthropoid coffin. The rest of the articles present reassessments, according to the most recent research, of topics such as the magico-medical remedies and treatments for the scorpion sting according to Ramesside sources from Deir el Medina (Mark Collier), and as occurring in passages of the “Contendings of Horus and Seth” (Essam el-Saeed); surgery and trauma care on the basis of a new translation of the Edwin Smith Papyrus (Roger Forshaw); the ancient veterinary practice in relation to human healing and care (Conni Lord); the function of the healing statues and their materiality in relation to their text (Campbell Price); the healing and magico-medical texts of the so-called “Ramesseum Papyri” (Stephen Quirke); and finally, a study on schistosomiasis in ancient Egypt (Patricia Rutherford...