We know the title held by the ancient owner of any other healing papyri in only one case, and it has nothing to do with healing: Accountant of the Project, on the project for cutting and decorating the tomb of the king (Pestman 1982). Perhaps that accountant was a cultured reader, in a society where writings for health might have formed part of the core figure of a knowledgeable person. Although he might have been consulted either for his reading knowledge or for his real experience, the written records for his life at the village do not portray him as a healer. The earliest surviving group of health papyri is from a reused tomb under the Ramesseum: the box of papyri was found in 1896 at the bottom of the tomb shaft, with a range of items, but the body and any coffin had long since gone. The items include figurines associated with birthing rituals, and the combination of imagery and manuscript content has led Egyptologists to identify the original owner of the tomb as a healer (Quack 2006). However, there are three obstacles to this interpretation: (1) the combination of later literary and healing manuscripts recalls the mixed contents of papyri known to belong to the accountant; (2) there may have been more than one person buried in the tomb, and the original association of the objects with the papyri is uncertain; and (3) the presence of birthing objects is typical for burials of the time of these papyri. More serious still, rich burial equipment of the third to first millennia BC tends to mark not profession, but status and gender: therefore, it would be extraordinary to find a healer buried with healing equipment. Here, the later burial of Madja could be cited as a possible counterexample of healing material with a possible healer; perhaps, then, exceptions were occasionally made with burials of women, supporting the idea that the owner of the papyri was a midwife (Gnirs 2009). However, this remains speculation: there is no body and no secure parallel for special midwife burial equipment, and all other female burials of the period lack such items. In general, the lack of parallel may support a different interpretation for Madja after all, as someone given special healing protection for eternity rather than an owner of medicines.
Among the earliest manuscripts (1800 bc) are two papyri with shesau treatments, from the townsite at Lahun. One covers the treatments for women, perhaps specifically once pregnancy is visible but stopping before the birth. Possibly the medic handed over to the midwife at this point. However, on one of the papyri found under the Ramesseum, an incantation series extend beyond birth to (immediate?) postnatal care, as does a later papyrus of incantations for mother and child (Yamazaki 2003). The concerns in these birth papyri include forecasting the sex of the child to be born (on forecasting, see section III). The second Lahun healing manuscript preserves the only second-millennium BC example of veterinary care, perhaps mainly for hygiene of cattle herds used in offerings. A treatise in a Roman Period hieratic papyrus, possibly composed earlier, includes among the tasks of the pure of Sekhmet monitoring outbreaks of contagious diseases and checking cattle meat (Osing and Rosati 1998).
World History
