They came out of the north—hordes from the plains of the Black Sea and of northwest Asia Minor. For almost a millennium, between 2800 and 2000 BC, the human tide [of Indo-European invaders] swept around the Aegean Sea and poured into the nearby peninsula....They first conquered, and then over the centuries settled among, the original inhabitants of the Greek peninsula.

And just as the Middle Eastern conquerors borrowed and adapted the cultures of such civilized peoples as the Babylonians and the Egyptians, so too the lords of Mycenae turned to the oldest, best-established civilization close at hand—that of the Minoans, on the island of Crete.
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The Minoan culture dazzled the newcomers, and they adapted much of it for their own. From the Minoans, the Greeks learned to combine copper and tin to make the alloy called bronze. Skilled Minoan workers and their Mycenaean pupils shaped gold, silver, ivory, rock crystal, and other materials into handsome luxuries for the lords of their palaces and citadels. Mycenaean pottery makers closely mimicked the works produced by Minoan masters. Becuase the Mycenaeans had no written language of their own, they adapted the linear scrpt that Minoan scribes had been using to keep accounts.

Beginning about 1000 BC, the Phoenicians boldly ventured forth from their cities...to explore and then establish trading posts and colonies in the farthest reaches of the known world....In about 700 BC they were joined in their maritime ventures by another trading folk, the Etruscans....For more than 100 years, the Phoenicians and Etruscans between them outclassed the understandably envious Greeks as naval and mercantile powers in the waters beyond Sicily. And it was they who largely shaped events and set cultural patterns around the rim of the western Mediterranean for centuries to come.

The worship of Osiris, one of the great cults of ancient Egypt, gradually spread throughout the Mediterranean world and, with that of Isis and Horus, was especially vital during the Roman Empire.

By the time that the Hebrews and Greeks were writing, Egypt had become a vast and impressive legend, a colossus slumbering in a feeble old age, but still wearing a mysterious air of majesty. It was impossible to visit Egypt without a respectful awe before the mighty pyramids and vast temples.

...[T]he Greeks had closer contacts with the ancient Middle Eastern civilizations than did the Indians [of India]. Traces of these contacts are available in archaeological remains and literary sources and provide clues to early Greek history and culture.

The successful use of mass in stone architecture, in pyramids, tombs, and temples, was so distinctly Egyptian that we may call it an invention of theirs....Structural elements of the buildings, such as the pylon towers, the torus moulding at the corners, and the several different orders of columns, derived from native materials and forms....At the top of such a bundle-column appeared the tufted heads or flowers of the reeds. This was the origin of the stone column with floral capital and of the three orders, Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian. This was a form which Egypt "invented," and which subsequent cultures in Palestine, Asia Minor, the Aegean, and Greece took over. The artistic expression of ancient Egypt was a native development, with its distinctive cubism, its two-dimensional representation, its idealized portrait, and its bland ignoring of precise location in space and time in order to capture eternity....To a very marked degree Canaanite-Phoenician art and archaic Greek art borrowed the Egyptian form of expression. We may trace from Egypt to Greece the orders of columns, certain floral and geometric designs, the sphinx, or the statue which stands frozen with legs apart and with fixed smile in clear imitation of Egyptian style.
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Egyptian science gave a good working basis for its culture....Egypt worked out the 365-day calendar long centuries before it was in use elsewhere in the world. Her mathematicians and architects could lay out huge structures with an amazingly small margin of error. With a cumbersome system of notation, without any zero or complex fractions, they could make precise calculations of such volumes as that of a cylinder or that of a truncated pyramid. In the practical fields of anatomy and surgery, her physicians commanded wide respect in the ancient world. They recognized the focal importance of the heart within the human body, as a feeder of life-sustaining fluid to the entire system.
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The Greeks were generous enough to say that they took their science from the Babylonians and the Egyptians, and this is true in the same sense as applies to art and architecture.
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The same observations may be made about the treatment of man's position in space and time, that is, about the writing of history. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians had annals and chronicles, detached records of what happened in a certain reign or a certain year....
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In the field of religion and ethics, it has been argued that the fountain sources of our moral heritage lie in ancient Egypt, because the Egyptians discovered the worth of the common man and insisted upon his sacred right to justice....The conflict between the rights of the group and the rights of the individual—a conflict which is still under debate—had been a question at issue from the Old Kingdom to the Empire. In reaction against the absolute centralization of the early Old Kingdom, there had come an emphasis upon the rights of the individual citizen. For a time rule ceased to be sheer right and became social responsibility, with pharaoh the good shepherd, who tended his flock patiently and conscientiously.
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The Egyptians had colonies at such places as the Fourth Cataract, Byblos in Phoenicia, and Beth-Shan in Palestine, as early as 1400 B.C. Thousands of foreign captives were brought into the Nile Valley. By 600 B.C. there were colonies of Greeks and Hebrews in Egypt. Peoples living side-by-side learn from each other. There is a tradition that Egyptian physicians were in great demand in other countries, traveling to Asia Minor and Persia to practice their superior medical lore. There is no doubt that such contacts were a means of taking Egyptian forms to foreign countries and of bringing foreign forms to Egypt.

September 10, 2005

Secrets of the Mummy's Medicine Chest

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

The ancient Egyptians left proof of their scientific prowess for people to marvel at for millennia. Their engineering skills can still be seen at Giza, their star charts in Luxor, their care for head wounds on Fifth Avenue.

Head wounds? Yes, and the ancients treated broken arms, cuts, even facial wrinkles -- vanity is not a modern invention -- and they used methods as advanced as rudimentary surgery and a sort of proto-antibiotics.

As for Fifth Avenue, it, like the Valley of the Kings, is a place of hidden treasures. What researchers call the world's oldest known medical treatise, an Egyptian papyrus offering 4,000-year-old wisdom, has long dwelled in the rare books vault at the New York Academy of Medicine.

It is an extraordinary remnant of a culture that was already ancient when Rome was new and Athens was a backwater -- Egypt's stone monuments endure, but the scrolls made of pulped reeds have mostly been lost. One expert, James H. Breasted, who translated the papyrus in the 1920's, called it "the oldest nucleus of really scientific knowledge in the world." Yet relatively few people know of it, and fewer have seen it.

It is about to become much better known. After a short trip down Fifth (insert down-the-Nile metaphor here) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the papyrus will go on public display, probably for the first time, on Tuesday, as part of the Met's exhibition "The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt." The show will also include items like a CAT scan of a mummy, surgical needles and other medical artifacts.

"What they knew about the body is quite striking, though they did not always understand it," said James Allen, curator of Egyptian art at the Met, whose new translation of the papyrus appears in the exhibition catalog.

The papyrus shows that ancient medics had a pretty good idea that blood, pumped by the heart, flows around the body -- a notion that was not firmly established until the 17th century -- and knew how to stitch cuts closed. It includes the oldest known descriptions of the effects of brain injuries, and the meninges, the membrane that covers the brain.

It also advises using honey -- a natural bacteria killer -- on open wounds, and giving patients a concoction of willow bark, which contains a natural painkiller that is chemically similar to aspirin. Mr. Allen said another ancient Egyptian text recommends putting moldy bread on wounds, suggesting that doctors had stumbled onto the principle behind penicillin. "They didn't know what bacteria was, but they were already fighting infections," Mr. Allen said. Though Egypt had metal tools, its doctors used stone knives, because "They could make flint knives much sharper, and a freshly sharpened flint knife is sterile."

Preparing bodies for mummification gave the Egyptians detailed knowledge of anatomy and bandaging. They understood that a wound to one side of the head could cause paralysis on the opposite side of the body. The papyrus advises doctors to insert fingers into head wounds to feel what kinds of skull fractures and brain penetration are involved, and it differentiates between bones that are fractures, splintered or snapped in two.

Ever since an American, Edwin Smith, bought and translated the papyrus in the 19th century, it has struck readers as surprisingly modern. It includes magical incantations, but most of the text takes a methodical, empirical approach to diagnosis and treatment. Perhaps most striking is its restraint -- the author's approach is cautious, and in some cases, the text counsels doing nothing but waiting to see if the body will heal itself.

"When you think about some of the aggressive treatments recommended by later authorities, the things done in the Middle Ages that would make your skin crawl and were sometimes harmful, the papyrus is often much more in line with our current thinking," said Miriam Mandelbaum, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the academy of medicine.

The papyrus dates to the 17th century B.C. -- about nine centuries after the great pyramids were built, but about a century before the time Moses is believed to have lived. While there are fragments of medical writing that are somewhat older, experts say, none are nearly as extensive.

The papyrus uses words that were already archaic then, and the writer explains them, evidence that it is a copy of a document that was a few hundred years older.

The Greeks acknowledged rather simply that they had learned a great deal from Egypt and Mesopotamia, and that this had been formative in their own lives. The Hebrews were both resentful of and allured by the sophistication of the Egypt from which they had escaped. While they wrote about the "fleshpots," they also wrote about "all the wise men" and how Moses had learned "all the wisdom of the Egyptians."

...[T]hanks to the work of the Egyptian-born Greek priest Manetho in the 3rd century and others, Egypt remained in the cultural awareness of many later civilizations. Assmann points to the compelling impressions left by pyramids and other monuments, to biblical and classical texts that described Egypt as a living culture.

>> But in the intellectual sphere, their contributions were unique and stunning... <<

Unique and stunning, perhaps, but not brand-new or original.

At first the Greeks and Macedonians went to the East as conquerors and rulers, and imposed a pattern of Hellenization. But in the process they themselves were changed, so that the resulting Hellenistic civilization was an amalgam rather than a transplantation. And in the long run the religions of the East made their way West and contributed substantially to the transformations of the Roman Empire and Medieval Europe.

...[T]he truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation-states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love had first been established in medieval times. These stock brokers owed the very notion of a market economy to the Middle Ages.

Both astronomical and mathematical calculations and medical diagnoses and prescriptions undoubtedly exist[ed]: is there much point in asking whether the men who worked them out and drew them up were or were not aware that they were doing scientific work? They did it in fact, even if they had no theoretical conception of it as such.
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...[T]he myth-making character [of the ancient Orient] is not to be understood as eliminating rational thought, but as including it in a higher unity. The Oriental is not unable to think rationally, but he feels no need to isolate reason as an independent faculty and theorize it as such.

"The Mesopotamians were true innovators," notes [Oriental Institute] Museum director Karen Wilson, who oversaw the gallery's reinstallation, "and our heritage from them includes many of the things we now take for granted," including writing, mathematics, time, urban civilization, the wheel, the sail, and astronomy.

When Greece and Rome have been assigned their proper place in the historical process...we shall see how extensive, varies, and at times decisive was the influence which the ancient Orient which preceded them exercised in those civilizations.