REINTERPRETING ANCIENT EGYPTIAN WALL ART AS EVIDENCE OF EARLY MEDICAL AND CHEMICAL KNOWLEDGE: A VISUAL AND SYMBOLIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

The traditional interpretation of ancient Egyptian wall art has mostly been in terms of religious and funerary contexts, though increasing interdisciplinary studies indicate that these works of the visual narrative can also contain the representation of organized empirical information. This paper revises the analysis of chosen wall paintings in the temple and tomb complexes of the Old Kingdom to the Late Period as symbolic depictions of the medical, anatomical and chemical practices of the time. The study involves a systematic analysis of the images of gods like Anubis and Hathor, priest-healers, canopic jars, ritual fire and water, diagnostic gestures of touch and gestures of tactile diagnostics, and objects of an instrument character through the use of a qualitative interdisciplinary approach, which incorporates visual semiotics, symbolic decoding, and comparative analysis of ancient medical texts: the Ebers Papyrus and the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.

It is shown in the analysis that there are strong visual similarities between artistic iconography and documented Egyptian practices, pertaining to organ preservation, trauma assessment, herbal pharmacology, fumigation, sterilization and early chemical processing. The argument about Egyptian temples acting as a place of healing, experimentation, and knowledge transfer is further supported by the presence of some of the same surgical instruments carved in the Temple of Kom Ombo to prove that they also served as a religious facility.

This research fills a major gap in Egyptian logical and medical-archaeological research by placing wall art within the framework of an encoded visual archive of proto-scientific knowledge, not of mythological representation. The results suggest a new interpretive paradigm that includes visual archaeology, ancient medical history and semiotics and it adds to world-wide discourses on the origins, transmission and symbolic preservation of early medical and chemical systems of knowledge.