“Its Leaves Are Like the Daughter of the Willow”: The Herbal Genre in Ancient Egypt

Abstract

Summary The ancient Egyptian herbal genre remains poorly documented, with only two fragmentary herbal treatises and a few handfuls of isolated herbal entries preserved. Recently, however, an herbal treatise has come to light, which is so far only published in part, and which provides important new information on this branch of ancient Egyptian medical practice. The treatise is recorded in pLouvre E 32847 + pCarlsberg 917 and differs significantly from the rest of the extant herbal corpus in that it concerns a single plant and its seed exclusively. As such, the treatise represents a subtype of the herbal genre, which we might term the specialized herbal. It presents a more nuanced image of the herbal genre and the reasons for recording botanical knowledge. At the same time, certain passages in the treatise mirror the structure, vocabulary, and grammatical constructions found in the rest of the corpus, confirming that herbals existed in a standardized format already at the beginning of the New Kingdom, if not earlier. In this paper I present an overview of the extant herbal corpus and discuss what the addition of the specialized treatise in pLouvre-Carlsberg means for our understanding of the herbal genre in ancient Egypt<fnote> This paper is derived from a chapter of my unpublished PhD dissertation, Medical Science in Ancient Egypt: A Translation and Interpretation of Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg (pLouvre E 32847 + pCarlsberg 917) (Copenhagen, 2020).</fnote>.