Medicine In Ancient Egypt

It is not necessary to emphasize the antiquity of Egyptian medicine; in every culture medicine develops very early, for the need of it is too universal and too pressing ever to be overlooked. We may be sure that some kind of medicine was already practiced in Egypt in the earliest prehistoric days, many millennia before Christ.


To quote an example, the use of malachite as an eye paint and an eye salve goes back to the Badarian age; the use of galena for similar purposes was introduced later, though still in predynastic times. Circumcision is a rite of immemorial age; bodies exhumed from prehistoric graves (as early as, say, 4000 B.c.) show traces of it. A very clear representation of the operation was sculptured on the wall of a tomb of the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2625-2475).