Edwin Smith Papyrus
Sign in to saveoldest Egyptian medical text
Key facts
- Size
- length: 4.68 meters
- Created
- c. 1600 BC
- Discovered
- Egypt
- Present location
- New York City , New York , United States
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- manuscript
- Named after
- Edwin Smith
- Country
- Ancient Egypt
- Country of origin
- Ancient Egypt
- Material used
- papyrus
- Image
- Edwin Smith Papyrus v2.jpg
Show 4 more facts
- inception
- 1580-00-00
- Commons category
- Edwin Smith Papyrus
- time period
- Seventeenth Dynasty of Egypt
- language of work or name
- Egyptian
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~9 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Edwin Smith Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical text, named after Edwin Smith who bought it in 1862, and the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma. This document, which may have been a manual of military surgery, describes 48 cases of injuries, fractures, wounds, dislocations and tumors.
It is unique among the surviving Egyptian medical papyri because it presents a rational and scientific approach to medicine in ancient Egypt and avoids prescribing magic. This copy dates to Dynasties 16–17 of the Second Intermediate Period in ancient Egypt, c. 1600 BCE but the original may date from the Old Kingdom.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Edwin Smith Papyrus” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.