PhD defence

Towards a Historical Contextualisation of the Ancient Egyptian Perspectives of the Inner Body, Sickness, and Healing

• J.C. Russell

Date

Tuesday 30 April 2024

Time

15:00 - 15:45 hour

Address

Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden

Supervisor(s)

• Prof.dr. O. Kaper
• Prof.dr. T. Pommerening

Summary

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.

PhD dissertations

Approximately one week after the defence, PhD dissertations by Leiden PhD students are available digitally through the Leiden Repository, that offers free access to these PhD dissertations. Please note that in some cases a dissertation may be under embargo temporarily and access to its full-text version will only be granted later.

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