ISAW announces the publication of Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

By David Ratzan
08/03/2023

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and NYU Press are pleased to announce the publication of the latest volume from ISAW Monographs, Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East, edited by Sofie Schiødt, Amber Jacob, and Kim Ryholt. 

Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East collects the select proceedings of papers delivered at two conferences held in Copenhagen and New York in 2018 and 2019, respectively, both organized by an international collaboration called Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt (SciPap), established in 2017 on the initiative of Kim Ryholt, director of the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection.

The contributions presented in Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East engage  with topics in medicine, astronomy, astrology, and other forms of divination, as seen from a variety of textual sources in several languages and scripts from Egypt and the Near East spanning more than a millennium, including some texts that are edited and discussed here for the first time. These include new treatises on divination, including dream interpretation, personal astrology, and Sothis divination, as well as treatises on medicine, including dermatology, gynecology, and apotropaic incantations. The contributors, which include both established and early-career scholars, were tasked with approaching their texts not only as specialists, but also from a cross-cultural perspective, and the resulting body of work reveals new and exciting evidence for the transfer of scientific knowledge across cultural borders in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.

This book will be of interest to specialists in the history of medicine, science, divination, and magic, as well as to papyrologists, Egyptologists, and Assyriologists.

Please follow this link for the Table of Contents and contributors.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Sofie Schiødt is an Egyptologist specializing in pharaonic medicine, magic, and mummification. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and co-director of the international research project Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt in Cross-Cultural Perspective (SciPap) at the University of Copenhagen. She is currently preparing the text edition of the second-longest medical text preserved from ancient Egypt, P.Louvre-Carlsberg.

Amber Jacob is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and co-director of the SciPap project. Her work centers on Egyptian medical practice in Graeco-Roman Egypt and its cross-cultural implications. Her dissertation presents the editio princeps of an unpublished corpus of Demotic medical texts from Tebtunis.

Kim Ryholt is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Copenhagen, director of the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection, and founder and former director of the SciPap project. He specializes in ancient Egyptian history, literature, and historiography.

ABOUT ISAW MONOGRAPHS

Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East is the fifteenth volume to be published in the ISAW Monographs series, a joint publication project with NYU Press. ISAW Monographs publishes authoritative studies of new evidence and research into the texts, archaeology, art history, material culture, and history of the cultures and periods representing the core areas of study at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. The topics and approaches of the volumes in this series reflect the intellectual mission of ISAW as a center for advanced scholarly research and graduate education whose aim is to encourage the study of the economic, religious, political, and cultural connections between ancient civilizations, from the Western Mediterranean across the Near East and Central Asia, to China.

As with ISAW Papers, ISAW's born-digital journal, ISAW is committed to publishing all volumes of ISAW Monographs free and online for the interested public and scholarship community in a timely fashion. Currently, five volumes of ISAW Monographs are available free online via the ISAW Publications page. 

 Information about previous volumes, including how to order them in both print and online versions, is available via the ISAW Publications page and the NYU Press website. For information or questions about ISAW Monographs and ISAW's publishing projects, please email David M. Ratzan: david.ratzan@nyu.edu. To request review copies, please email Leah Baxter: leah.baxter@nyu.edu.

Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and the Near East:
Joint Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd
Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt International Conferences
May 2018, Copenhagen, and September 2019, New York

Edited by
Sofie Schiødt, Amber Jacob, and Kim Ryholt
458 Pages | 51 illustrations | 8.5 x 11 in.
$85.00 | 9781479823130
Publication date: August 29, 2023

isaw.nyu.edu | www.nyupress.org

Contact: david.ratzan@nyu.edu