Egyptian Aspirin
There's nothing like assuming in advance what it is that you are wanting to prove: people do it all the time and it is one of the more common logical fallacies. Yet at the same time it can be a most useful tool and sometimes an inevitable one.
Jackie Campbell of the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at the University of Manchester found herself forced to adopt this method in her recent study of Egyptian pharmacology.
Despite the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphics have been readable for over two hundred years, only the most common words are understood and there are many more which are still completely unknown - which is why you will sometimes find statements like "Pharaoh wore his pgt crown" (that is a purely imaginary example, by the way) because the poor translator does not have a clue what "pgt" means. It might be a colour, a precious material, a political term, or it might even have some esoteric ritual significance.
The fact is that our knowledge of ancient Egyptian is based first on comparison with modern Coptic which, while useful, has its limitations. If you think of someone trying to understand Anglo-Saxon by comparing it with modern English, I think you will get the idea.
Where that fails we have recourse to guess-work based on the context. If, for example, a text states that "Pharaoh took up his bow and shot the wretched enemy full of pgt" it is a safe guess that "pgt" means "arrows". Frequently, however, the context is less immediate and less definite. If we are told that "Pharaoh waved his pgt" it could be anything. The context may be a battle, which narrows the possibilities down somewhat - a pillowcase or a fly whisk are less likely on the battlefield - but still leaves a wide choice, from "sword" to "whip" to "mace", "sceptre", "banner", or "shield".
One of the places where these unknown words crop up particularly frequently is in the medical texts, of which we have a grand total of twelve. When a papyrus tells you that to treat a headache you take two ounces of "pgt" and mix it with an ounce of "tpg" you really have very little on which to base your translation!
Ms Campbell decided on a bold step: she decided to assume that the Egyptian prescriptions were sensible, science-based ones rather than superstitious rubbish, and on that basis to try to re-create the ancient recipes.
The first step, therefore, was to catalogue what plants were available to the ancient Egyptians - no good suggesting that "pgt" for headaches was willow-bark (known as the source of aspirin) if willows didn't grow in Egypt.
Fortunately we know a good deal about the flora of ancient Egypt: not only are there pictures of the trees and plants that grew there on the walls of tombs and temples, but we have specimens of many of them found in tombs or preserved in archaeological sites. In addition there is the evidence more recently available from analysis of pollen grains found all sorts of unlikely places, from the bandages wrapped round mummies to the mud bricks that were the most common building material.
However as well as determining the plants that were native to Egypt, Campbell also looked at those which might have entered the country by way of trade. After all, when someone is searching for a cure, no expense is too great and no distance too vast.
Having established what plants were available, Campbell then turned to the scientific literature to determine which ones had active ingredients that might be useful as medicines. She then drew up a series of lists of which plants might be helpful for which ailments. Only then did she turn to the ancient papyrii.
Rather than battle her way through all twelve, Jackie Campbell decided to concentrate on the four main medical papyrii which, between them, contain approximately a thousand prescriptions. The oldest papyrus dates to around 1850 BC and the youngest to 1200 BC, so the spread was a mere six centuries. In addition, 1850 BC meant that there was a sufficiently long period of development before it, so that the prescriptions were - she hoped - based on observation plus trial and error rather then magic and wishful thinking.
"I looked at the source of the drug and the formulation - was it a cream or an enema or a draught - and so on. Then I looked at the preparation: would the active drug have been extracted appropriately? And then, could it have worked? Was the drug given the right way and in a suitable dose?" Campbell says.
Her caution was justified; for example, previous translators had identified some of the unknown words as "cinnamon" and "aniseed", but according to Campbell's evidence, neither was available in ancient Egypt and the methods described for preparing the substances would not have succeeded in extracting any active ingredients.
The work took her five years, during which time she identified (or re-identified) 284 ingredients - various parts of 134 plants, 24 animals and 28 minerals. As a result she could confidently recreate 550 of the 1,000 recipes and had a pretty good idea of whether they would work or not. Another 156 recipes were complete apart from one or two minor ingredients, which was enough to give her a pretty good idea of whether the medicine would have been effective or not. There were 234 recipes whose major ingredients she could not identify, but the most frustrating were 27 for which the medical details were so garbled (or untranslatable) that she couldn't even tell what ailment they were supposed to treat.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
