Early Greek physicians and scientists had a great curiosity about human anatomy and the inner workings of the human body. But Greek religious and cultural traditions did not permit them to systematically dissect corpses. So they traveled to Egypt in order to observe mummifications.
Egyptian physician-priests had been mummifying human bodies for thousands of years. But because they looked at corpses through religious, not scientific, eyes, they still had very little knowledge about human anatomy. Their goal was to preserve the body, not to understand it. In a short time, visiting Greek physi
Cians learned more about the structure and workings of the human body than Egyptian physician-priests had learned in millennia.
At the same time, the visiting Greeks took careful note of the more practical and effective treatments offered by Egyptian physicians: setting broken bones, the use of bandages, compresses and splints for injuries, simple surgeries, and potions and prescriptions that actually worked. These Greek observations of Egyptian medical knowledge—and their ability to separate the merely magical from the reliable and scientific—helped form the basis of Western scientific medicine.
Octavian ran Egypt as his personal estate, selling Egyptian grain to feed the Romans’ endless appetite for “bread and circuses”-free food and entertainment supplied by the government. Roman Egypt was extremely prosperous and productive, and the population grew rapidly. Several Roman emperors appear in Egyptian trappings on monuments within Egypt, but it was just a political fiction.
Major changes lay ahead. The spread of Christianity wiped out most traces of the old Egyptian religion. The Coptic language evolved from earlier Egyptian. Hieroglyphics, hieratic, and demotic writing disappeared, replaced by the Greek alphabet with a few additional letters. The last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved on a temple at Philae in 394.
Egypt remained a territory of the Roman Empire, and then the Byzantine Empire, until Arab general Amr ibn el-As conquered the area in 641. The Arabs introduced the Islamic faith to Egypt. Although a small, strong Christian community survived (they became known as Coptic Christians), Egypt became, and remains, an Islamic nation, firmly a part of the Arab cultural tradition.
World History
