The Ebers Papyrus

For a wound, frankincense, ochre and goat's gall were mixed in equal parts, smeared on a bandage and bound on. For white spots in the eye, the gall bladder of a tortoise was ground with honey and applied to the eyelids, after a spell about the crew of Ra's solar boat had been recited over it. Both remedies come from the Ebers Papyrus, the largest scroll on ancient Egyptian medicine and the only one to survive complete.

The scroll, 18.63 meters long, holds 879 texts in 108 columns, numbered up to 110: nearly 900 prescriptions and teaching texts, mostly on general and internal medicine, for about 80 conditions, among them heart disease, gynecological complaints, intestinal problems, parasites and eye diseases. The remedies take the form of ointments, pills, suppositories, enemas and bandages, mixing minerals, plant and animal products and even human and animal excrement; 70 to 80 percent of the ingredients have still not been identified. Spells stand beside the prescriptions, because Egyptian healers were physicians, priests and magicians at once. One passage describes the heart as the center of the blood supply, with vessels running to every part of the body.

The text is written in hieratic, in black ink with the quantities picked out in red, and probably by a single scribe. A calendar on the back and radiocarbon dating carried out in 2014 both place it at the end of the 16th century BCE. A 2018 review in Heart Views notes that it was compiled by scribes from extracts of earlier sources.

The Leipzig Egyptologist Georg Ebers bought the scroll in Luxor on his second trip to Egypt, in 1872 and 1873, and carried it 600 kilometers down the Nile to Cairo by boat. He published a facsimile in 1875. Leipzig University Library, which acquired the papyrus in 1873, has put the whole text online with German and English translations since 2017, and in 2021 it put a full-length replica on display.