Ancient Egypt Remedies for helping women in childbirth

Ancient Egypt Remedies for helping women in childbirth

In real life, Egyptian midwives seem to have used both medical and magical methods to speed up labour. Medical remedies included swallowing a mixture of honey and fenugreek, or a vaginal suppository whose ingredients included incense, beer and fly dung. Spells of the second millennium BC for helping women in childbirth involve a variety of magical techniques, most of them similar to those used for treating diseases and minor accidents.

Identification with deities is often at the centre of these spells. The person helping the mother sometimes takes the role of Horus.

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Love, sex and birth in Ancient Egypt Papyrus

Love, sex and birth in Ancient Egypt Papyrus

Two curious fertility figurines from tombs at Beni Hassan are made of knotted string.

They were probably the physical component of spells involving the tying of magical knots. One seventeenth century BC pottery fertility figurine has an iron ring fitted tightly around its thighs.

Iron was a rare material at this date and the ring is almost certainly a magical binding device. The purpose of this charm may have been to prevent miscarriage by keeping the womb closed until the baby was due.

Alternatively, this figurine could be the relic of a malicious act of magic.

The iron ring might be there to prevent someone from giving birth easily. Without knowing what words were spoken to activate the figurine, its purpose must remain ambiguous.

As the time for the birth approached, the expectant mother was isolated from the rest of the household, or at least from its adult males.

One spell for 'hastening birth' summons Hathor to bring the sweet north wind to the pavilion in which the birth is taking place. Painted ostraca show women suckling children in an airy pavilion whose columns are wreathed with columbine or bryony

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Ancient Egypt Magic therapy techniques to enjoying sex and orgasm

Ancient Egypt Magic therapy techniques to enjoying sex and orgasm

One case is described in detail on a funerary stela of the first century BC

The Lady Taimhotep was married at the age of fourteen to the High Priest of Ptah at Memphis. She bore him three daughters but the couple wanted a son. They prayed together to the deified Imhotep

The god appeared to the High Priest in a dream and promised that he should have a son if he refurbished the sanctuary of Imhotep's temple. The High Priest carried out the work and made offerings. Imhotep caused Taimhotep to conceive a male child, who was named after the god. She died four years later at the age of thirty.

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Ancient Egypt Magic therapy techniques to sexual turmoil

Ancient Egypt Magic therapy techniques to sexual turmoil

The arrival of the beloved acts like an amulet (wedja) and restores the young man to health. In another poem from the same papyrus (ChesterBeatty /), the young man complains that the girl has lassoed him with her hair, caught him with her eye, restrained him with her necklace and branded him with her seal. These metaphors are all equivalent to magical techniques.

Many cultures have thought the ability of a woman to throw a man into sexual turmoil to be akin to sorcery. This may partly explain the aggressive tone of some love charms directed at women. A rare second millennium BC example has already been mentioned

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The most important ancient Egypt books4/10

The most important ancient Egypt books4/10

After many hard days of search and research for most important and unique information included in ancient Egypt available books we found only 10 books we can tell you that we trust this will be helpful and trustable to reading in

The Tutankhamun Affair

At the beginning of the 20th century, a young unknown pharoah remained, beneath his golden mask, in the darkness of a tomb deep in the Valley of the Kings. His name was Tutankhamun.

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The most important ancient Egypt books3/10

The most important ancient Egypt books3/10

After many hard days of search and research for most important and unique information included in ancient Egypt available books we found only 10 books we can tell you that we trust this will be helpful and trustable to reading in

Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt

This book is not intented as a general public introduction to the religion of ancient Egypt and that's why many newcomers in Egyptology became dissapointed or were at a lost. The speech of the author is not easy to follow if one is not well embebed into the ancient system of thought. None the less, there are plentiful of original research in this book that I should recommend it to anyone who wants to get deeper into Egyptian mythology.

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The most important ancient Egypt books2/10

The most important ancient Egypt books2/10

After many hard days of search and research for most important and unique information included in ancient Egypt available books we found only 10 books we can tell you that we trust this will be helpful and trustable to reading in

The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife

Ancient Egyptians held a rich and complex vision of the afterlife and codified their beliefs in books that were to be discovered more than two millennia later in royal tombs. Erik Hornung, the world's leading authority on these religious texts, surveys what is known about them today.

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The most important ancient Egypt books1/10

The most important ancient Egypt books1/10

After many hard days of search and research for most important and unique information included in ancient Egypt available books we found only 10 books we can tell you that we trust this will be helpful and trustable to reading in

Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt

John Anthony West's revolutionary reinterpretation of the civilization of Egypt challenges all that has been accepted as dogma concerning Ancient Egypt. In this pioneering study West documents that: Hieroglyphs carry hermetic messages that convey the subtler realities of the Sacred Science of the Pharaohs. 

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Ancient Egypt Fertility Magic guide

Ancient Egypt Fertility Magic guide

Block from a tomb at Giza, c. 2300 BC. In the middle of a procession of female dancers and young boys stands a figure masked like Bes who holds a scourge and a hand-shaped wand. This unusual scene has variously been interpreted as a puberty ritual, a harvest festival, or a protective rite.

In Egyptian religion, the fertility of animals and crops was chiefly associated with male deities, such as Osiris, Amun-Min and the earth god Geb, but human fertility was more the domain of goddesses, such as Hathor, Isis, and Heqet. A snake goddess called Renenutet was linked to both human and crop fertility'.

Renenutet is often shown suckling a divine or royal child and was revered as 'the nourisher of children'. She was also the 'Lady of Granaries'. Renenutet was honoured in shrines set up in granaries and in the fields at harvest time.

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NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS George Andrew Reisner (1867–1942)

NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS George Andrew Reisner (1867–1942)

A leading twentieth-century archaeologist, Reisner, an American, excavated at Giza where he uncovered the Old Kingdom nobles’ tombs, the Valley Temple in Mycerinus’s pyramid complex, and the intact tomb of Queen Hetepheres. He also led the Archaeological Survey of Nubia (1907–1908), established a basis for Nubian prehistory, and explored the pyramids and sites in the Sudan, thus expanding knowledge of the Kushite rulers who conquered Egypt in Dynasty

He worked at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, and later held the professorship of Egyptology at Harvard University (1914–1942). He was also curator of Egyptian antiquities at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston.

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NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942)

NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942)

Petrie, who received no formal education, was taught surveying and geometry by his father.

He first visited Egypt in 1880 to survey the Great Pyramid at Giza and then excavated for the Egypt Exploration Fund from 1884 to 1886. His considerable talent and ability were recognized by the novelist Amelia B. Edwards, one of the founders of the Egypt Exploration Fund (now known as the Egypt Exploration Society).

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NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS Giuseppe Passalacqua (1797–1865)

NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS Giuseppe Passalacqua (1797–1865)

Born in Italy, Passalacqua became an excavator and a collector after an unsuccessful stint as a horse dealer, the business that had originally taken him to Egypt. His excavations at Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank of Thebes (Luxor), from

1822 to 1825, revealed the tombs of priests and priestesses of Amun.

When he offered to sell his collection, drawn from Thebes and other sites, to the French government, it was rejected, but most of it was then acquired by Frederick William IV, ruler of Prussia, for Berlin’s Egyptian Museum. Passalacqua became conservator of the Egyptian collections at the Berlin museum in 1828 and spent the rest of his life there, organizing the material he had excavated.

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NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS Gaston-Camille-Charles Maspero (1846–1916)

NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS Gaston-Camille-Charles Maspero (1846–1916)

A French Egyptologist of Italian parentage, Maspero first led an archaeological expedition to Egypt in 1880. The next year, he succeeded Auguste Mariette as director of both the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the National Antiqui-ties Service. He further developed Mariette’s work, expanding the excavation and temple restoration programs and continuing the organization and cataloging of the collections in the Cairo museum.

He is particularly noted for publishing the first edition of funerary spells known as the Pyramid Texts.

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NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS François-Auguste-Ferdinand Mariette (1821–1881)

NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS François-Auguste-Ferdinand Mariette (1821–1881)

Mariette became professor of Egyptology in Boulogne, France, in 1843 and first went to Egypt in 1850 in order to obtain manuscripts for the Louvre in Paris. On this visit, he became interested in archaeology and made the spectacular discoveries at Saqqara that launched his career as an excavator. In total, he uncovered some 7,000 principal monuments.

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NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS Walter Bryan Emery (1903–1971)

NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS Walter Bryan Emery (1903–1971)

Inspired as a youngster by public lectures given in Liverpool, England, by the Egyptologist John Garstang (1876–1956), Emery first went to Egypt in 1923. He became the director of excavation at North Saqqara in 1935 and there under- took one of his major projects, the almost complete excavation of the site’s Dynasty 1 cemetery.

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