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 book is the first complete catalogue of cuneiform tablets and inscriptions at the National Museum of Denmark and includes the publication of more than one hundred previously unpublished manuscripts. The cuneiform tablet collection, which the museum acquired over more than a century, reflects the long-standing Danish interest in the cultural heritage of ancient Iraq, Syria and Iran. Also included are a number of cuneiform tablets that were excavated during the Danish archaeological campaigns in Hama (Syria).The catalogue itself is the result of a four-year project called Hidden Treasures: Cuneiform Texts at the National Museum of Denmark, co-funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, the Edubba Foundation and the University of Copenhagen. The project was a collaboration between the National Museum and the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies of the University of Copenhagen, with the goal to fully catalogue and digitize for the first time the entire collection of written artefacts inscribed with the cuneiform writing system, one of the earliest scripts to ever be devised. The digital catalogue and images are now made available on the website of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI).The manuscripts and inscriptions catalogued and published here range in date from the middle of the third millennium up until the late first millennium BCE, covering almost the entire timespan of cuneiform cultures. It includes newly identified historical, legal, administrative, literary and religious texts from three millennia of cuneiform cultures and thus reflects a wide array of time periods, languages and genres.