Book

An Ancient Egyptian Herbal

Lise Manniche, the Danish Egyptologist, assembles the surviving evidence for how the ancient Egyptians actually used plants, from the fields and gardens of the Nile to the apothecary and the embalmer's table. The introduction sets the tradition in its long life, from the earliest medical papyri four thousand years old through the Coptic herbalists to the Arab physicians who inherited the material, and admits honestly that no complete pharaonic herbal survives, only fragments. The early chapters survey the setting: the formal gardens of temples and town houses known from tomb paintings, the bouquets, garlands and collars worn at feast, the flowers and boughs about the home, the kitchen, the cosmetic jar and the perfume flask. The chapter on medicine draws directly on the remedies, showing how juniper, frankincense, cumin, cinnamon and honey entered suppositories, fumigations and dressings, and how the same spices anointed the mummy. The heart of the book is the herbal itself, an illustrated A-to-Z of the plants with their Egyptian names, habitats and uses, followed by the plant names Dioscorides quotes and a glossary. Scholarship written for the general reader, by a specialist with Kew checking her botany.

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