Chester Beatty Medical Papyrus

The medical papyri Chester Beatty are a collection of ancient Egyptian magical texts with medical records and to belong to a larger group of nineteen papyri, which in 1930 gave Alfred Chester Beatty the British Museum in London. They include the Chester Beatty Papyri V to VIII, XV and XVIII.

Origin

The papyri were found in 1928 in Deir el -Medina and named after its first owner Alfred Chester Beatty, which they donated to the British Museum. They were part of a larger discovery, which is now scattered. The legal texts are now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the letters in the Institut français d' archéologie orientale and the greatest literary manuscript in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The manuscripts in the British Museum include literary texts, rituals, incantations, and medical texts.

These papyri seem to have belonged to a family archive, which were created by the writer Kenherchepeschef from Deir el -Medina in the 19th dynasty and passed on by his wife Naunakhte to the children of her second marriage. The collection remained for over a century in the hands of the family and has been continually enlarged. Most recently, she was deposited in a grave chapel, where it remained until its discovery in 1928.

Although the collection also contains a purely medical text, no the title of doctor ( sunu ) appears in the family born to have.

List of Papyri

The texts consist largely of magical spells, only Papyrus Chester Beatty VI seems to be purely medical.

• Papyrus Chester Beatty V ( BM 10685 ):

• Papyrus Chester Beatty VI (BM 10686 ):

• Papyrus Chester Beatty VII (BM 10687 ):

• Papyrus Chester Beatty VIII ( BM 10688 ):

• Papyrus Chester Beatty XV (BM 10695 ):

• Papyrus Chester Beatty XVIII Rs (BM 10698 ):