Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications – serie

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.

This second volume of the Fragmentary Osirian Papyri comprises copies of several rituals which were performed in the cult of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. With one exception, the material originated in the Roman Period Temple of Tebtunis in the Fayum.Some of the rituals, like the Great Decree or the Great Ceremonies of Geb, are known from earlier copies, while others, like the Procession Text or the Osiris Figurine Ritual, were only discovered in the course of research for the Fragmentary Osirian Papyri series.The volume concludes with the Mysteries Texts, a group of papyri detailing the rites and recitations assigned to specific dates in the Osirian festival calendar.