Dissertation
Towards a historical contextualisation of Ancient Egyptian perspectives of the inner body, sickness, and healing
On Tuesday 30 April 2024 Jonny Russell successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.
- Author
- Russell, J.C.
- Date
- 30 April 2024
- Links
- Leiden Repository
This thesis explores ancient Egyptian descriptions of sicknesses of the inner body, the concepts used to understand them, and the trends in associated therapeutic applications for healing. It concludes that the ancient Egyptian system of understanding recorded in writings—while somewhat obscured as the surviving texts were never intended to be descriptive of ideas—can be compared to other ways of thinking and categorising sickness experiences as found in other written cultures. Especially in terms of how such ideas are constructed and how therapies are associated with such concepts. Similarities can be observed in terms of core concepts and associated therapeutic applications recorded in cuneiform compendia of comparable age from Mesopotamia. Rather than using these observations as evidence of an influence of one culture over another, it is argued that these writings include practices and ideas which can instead be considered common to this region of the world, rather than as exclusive and invariably peculiar either the Egyptian and/or Mesopotamian cultures.
Supervisor: Prof.dr. O.E. Kaper
Co-supervisor: Prof.dr. T. Pommerening