Alternative body worlds in ancient Egyptian healing texts

Abstract

The ancient Egyptians usually placed great care in differentiating between men, women, and others, and the corpus of healing texts is no different from other textual and visual sources in this regard. Among the numerous prescriptions concerned with fertility and pregnancy we even find some few examples that seek to determine the quintessential question: is the child male or female? But ambiguity remains and, because our own expectations are heavily coloured with multiple associations from other sources as well as more recent medical traditions, there is reason for caution. This article takes the concept of ‘body worlds’ as a lens in an attempt to not only see through but also mediate between multi-layered positions, perspectives (past and present), and records to explore and complicate how bodies were conceptualised and demarcated by the ancient Egyptians. Instead of simply confirming the present in the past, or judging the level of truth compared to modern western notions, this article seeks to elicit alternative (historically and relationally contingent) perspectives of the sexed body, to contextualise sexual difference within the ontological logics of ancient Egyptian healing texts from the Middle and New Kingdoms.