Greco-Egyptian Uterine Amulets

Current location: Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman Medical Library

Small, roughly cut and covered in strange symbols, these little stones have made their way through museum collections, passed from Classical departments to Egyptology ones, Medieval to European Prehistory. They’ve represented exotic religious doctrines and containers carried by devotees of Isis. Their central motif has depicted a “vase of sins” of the Gnostic Christian sect, a vase to collect water from the Nile, a pneumatically driven musical instrument, a cooking pot and no doubt many more entertaining conjectures which never made it to paper.

Prescription No. XI: Treatment for a woman who loves bed

These prescriptions are all taken from the Kahun Gynaecological papyrus, edited and translated by F.L.Griffith in 1989. The Papyrus was found at El-Lahun in Northern Egypt and is currently housed in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, part of University College London. The papyrus is dated to circa 1800BC, the late Middle kingdom, making it the oldest known medical text in Egypt.