Medical Treatise over 5000 years old

This remarkable papyrus, bought in 1862 by the American Egyptologist Edwin Smith in Luxor, Egypt, is an ancient Egyptian surgical treatise.

It is the oldest known medical document; written in the Middle Egyptian hieratic script,

it contains 377 lines of text on the recto (front) and 92 on the verso (back).

It is a textbook of surgery, containing systematic and highly detailed descriptions, diagnoses, treatments and prognoses of 48 neurosurgical and orthopaedic cases.

The papyrus, which is named after Edwin Smith, is now housed in the New York Academy of Sciences.

27 of the cases documented in the Edwin Smith papyrus are head injuries,

and 6 are spinal injuries.

Each of them is investigated rationally and deductively,

with only one of the 48 cases being treated with magic.

Although ancient civilizations are generally regarded as primitive, the Smith papyrus demonstrates that the ancient Egyptians had highly advanced knowledge of medicine. Many of the surgical procedures and concepts described in the document are still in use today, and it seems that the ancient Egyptians had knowledge of neuroanatomy that was as detailed and advanced as that of modern medicine.

The papyrus even contains a prescription for a wrinkle remover containing urea, an ingredient of modern anti-wrinkle creams.

The cases documented in the Smith papyrus are presented in a format that is very similar to that used by modern physicians.

Each case begins with a medical history and physical investigation of the patient, whose wound is categorized as “an ailment I can treat”,

“an ailment I shall contend with”,

or “an ailment which not to be treated”.

Patients with untreatable ailments were given palliative care by the surgeon. Case 25 describes the treatment for a dislocated jaw, in exactly the same way that medical students today are taught to treat the injury:

If thou examinest a man having a dislocation in his mandible, shouldst thou find this mouth open and his mouth cannot close for him, thou shouldst put thy thumbs upon the ends of the two rami of the mandible in the inside of his mouth and thy two claws [meaning two groups of fingers] under his chin, and thou shouldst cause them to fall back so they rest in their places.

Analysis of the writing style reveals that the papyrus is a copy made by a scribe around 1,600 BCE (17th Dynasty).

The original document was written circa 3,000 BC (3rd Dynasty),

and has been credited to Imhotep, the real father of medicine, who lived some 2,000 years before Hippocrates. (In fact, it is believed that the ancient Greeks knew of the contents of the Edwin Smith papyrus, and used them as a basis for their writings on science and medicine.)

The Smith papyrus was translated into English in the 1920s by James Henry Breasted, who noted that it contained the earliest known use of the word ‘brain’.

Hieroglyph meaning ‘brain’

A reading of the Smith papyrus reveals the similarity between ancient Egyptian and modern diagnostic procedures. During an examination, the patient was asked questions by the surgeon, who then counted the patient’s pulse and inspected wounds for inflammation. This was followed by careful observation of the patient’s general appearance, during which the surgeon noted the colour of the eyes and face, the condition of the skin, the quality of nasal secretions and the stiffness of the limbs and abdomen.

The papyrus also contains the first descriptions of the cerebrospinal fluid, meninges and the surface of the brain, including the gyri and sulci, as well as a description of sciatica. Breasted writes about how the author of the papyrus described his observations:

Like the modern scientist, he clarifies his terms by comparison of the things they designate with more familiar objects: the convolutions of the brain he likens to the corrugations on metallic slag, and the fork at the head of the ramus in the human mandible he describes as like the claw of a two-toed bird; a puncture of the cranium is like a hole broken in the side of a pottery jar, and a segment of the skull is given the name of a turtle’s shell.

He also notes that the author was well aware that damage to certain parts of the brain could affect the function of the body:

The observation of effects on the lower limbs of injuries to the skull and brain, noted by the ancient surgeon with constant reference to that side of the head which has been injured, shows an astonishingly early discernment of localization of function in the brain.

Thus, the author associated aphasia with fractures of the temporal lobe, and recognized that quadriplegia, priapism and urinary incontinence could occur as a consequence of cervical spinal cord injury.

Head injuries were characterized in much the same way as they are today:

In discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon’s effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms ‘fracture,’ ‘compound fracture,’ and ‘compound comminuted fracture,’ all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.

Case 48 desribes Lasegue’s sign, a neurological test for lumbar root or sciatic nerve irritation:

Thou shouldst say to [the patient]: ‘Extend now thy two legs and contract both again.’ When he extends them he contracts them both immediately because of the pain he causes in the vertebra of his spinal column in which he suffers.

From the Smith papyrus we can see that ancient Egyptian doctors also had knowledge of antiseptic technique and antibiotics. Wounds were bound in fresh meat, which has haemostatic properties. Honey, which has antibiotic properties, was applied to wounds, and opiates were administered as analgesics.

“Thou shouldst bind [the wound] with fresh meat the first day [and] treat afterwards with grease, honey [and] lint every day until he recovers.”

More than four millennia before William Harvey ‘discovered’ circulation, the ancient Egyptians were aware that the blood circulated around the body in vessels. They had names for all the major blood vessels and knew of their distribution throughout the limbs. They also knew that the heart was at the centre of the cardiovascular system.

The full extent of the medical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians will never be known. They probably wrote tens or hundreds of thousands of medical texts; only about 10 remain, providing us with a mere glimpse of the medical knowledge of this civilization.

Bron: http://neurophilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/07/10/pharaonic-neurosurgery-the-edwin-smith-surgical-papyrus/

World's Oldest Cheese Revealed On 3,500-Year-Old Chinese Mummies Buried In The Fearsome Taklamakan Desert

MessageToEagle.com - Scientists have analyzed the bodies of a group of Bronze Age people who were buried in the mysterious Taklamakan Desert and found evidence of cheese dating back to 1,615 BC.
No ever has such an old discovery of cheese been made.
USA Today reports that "the world's best-aged cheese seems to be a lactose-free variety that was quick and convenient to make and may have played a role in the spread of herding and dairying across Asia.
"We not only identified the product as the earliest known cheese, but we also have direct … evidence of ancient technology," says study author Andrej Shevchenko, an analytical chemist at Germany's Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. The method was "easy, cheap … It's a technology for the common people."
The cheese, like the mummies, owes its existence to the extraordinary conditions at Small River Cemetery Number 5, in northwestern China.
First documented by a Swedish archaeologist in the 1930s, it sits in the fearsome Taklamakan Desert, one of the world's largest.

Lumps of cheese, shown with arrowheads, were collected from the neck and chest of a female mummy known as the "Beauty of Xiaohe." Inset shows an enlarged view of a cheese lump. Credit:Yimin Yang and Yusheng Liu
A mysterious Bronze Age people buried dozens of their own atop a large sand dune near a now-dry river, interring their kin underneath what looks like large wooden boats. The boats were wrapped so snugly with cowhide that it's as if they'd been "vacuum-packed," Shevchenko says.
The combination of dry desert air and salty soil prevented decay to an extraordinary degree. The remains and grave goods were freeze-dried, preserving the light-brown hair and strangely non-Asian facial features of the dead along with their felt hats, wool capes and leather boots.
Analysis of the plant seeds and animal tissues in the tombs showed the burials date to 1450 to 1650 BC.

Some of the bodies had oddly shaped crumbs on their necks and chests.By analyzing the proteins and fats in these clumps, Shevchenko and his colleagues determined that they're definitely cheese, not butter or milk. It's not clear why people were buried with bits of cheese on their bodies, Shevchenko says, though perhaps it was food for the afterlife.The analysis also showed the mummies' cheese was made by combining milk with a "starter," a mix of bacteria and yeast.

This technique is still used today to make kefir, a sour, slightly effervescent dairy beverage, and kefir cheese, similar to cottage cheese.
If the people of the cemetery did indeed rely on a kefir starter to make cheese, they were contradicting the conventional wisdom.
Most cheese today is made not with a kefir starter but with rennet, a substance from the guts of a calf, lamb or kid that curdles milk. Cheese was supposedly invented by accident when humans began carrying milk in bags made of animal gut.

 Two hundred mummies were discovered in the 1930s by a Swedish archaeologist in the Taklimakan Desert north of Tibet.
Making cheese with rennet requires the killing of a young animal, Shevchenko points out, and the kefir method does not.


Click on image to enlarge He argues that the ease and low cost of the kefir method would have helped drive the spread of herding throughout Asia from its origins in the Middle East.
Even better, both kefir and kefir cheese are low in lactose, making them edible for the lactose-intolerant inhabitants of Asia. The new results are reported in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The people died around 3,600 years ago but their bodies were preserved because of the air-tight nature of their unusual graves and salty soil.
Scientists have found fragments of cheese-making strainers in Poland that date back more than 7,000 years, and there are Danish pots from 5,000 years ago that hold what may be butter or cheese, says bioarchaeologist Oliver Craig of the University of York in Britain. But he agrees that Shevchenko's team has good evidence that their cheese is the record-holder for age.
Craig is more cautious about the new study's suggestion that the cheese was made with kefir starter rather than rennet. That's harder to prove, he says, because the proteins could have decayed too much to provide a definitive answer. He thinks a study of animal bones or pottery is needed to confirm that the cheese at the cemetery was part of a technological spread across Asia.
Whether the cheese was common in its day, it's exceptional now. Usually if a dairy product is left to its own devices, "bacteria will get in and start to eat it away, liquefy it," Craig says. "It's just amazing it survived."

Some of the mummies (pictured) were found to have unusual crumbs on their necks and chest which are now known to ancient cheese. They were preserved - complete with their felt hats - die to the dry conditions of their desert burial Image credit: Wang da Gang
Criag says that fragments of cheese-making strainers in Poland, dating back more than 7,000 years, and 5,000-year-old cheese making tools have previously been discovered in Denmark, but no crumbs of ancient cheese as old as that found with the mummies have been recovered before.
It is an extraordinary discovery.
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Undeciphered Ancient Code Could Be Evidence Of The World's Oldest Data Storage System

Scientists are trying to decipher ancient lost code that could reveal our ancestors kept data records long before our modern society developed storage systems.

MessageToEagle.com - Were ancient people familiar with computers? Is it possible the world's oldest data storage system was invented more than 5000 yeas ago?

Mesopotamia is a name for the area of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, corresponding to modern-day Iraq, the northeastern section of Syria and to a much lesser extent southeastern Turkey, smaller parts of southwestern Iran and Kuwait.


Mesopotamia has been called the "cradle of civilization" and civilizations living in this region were a remarkable people.

They were long lasting civilizations of enormous accomplishment.
For example, early Sumerian writings reveal the civilization was an organized society with kings, laws, literature, schools, and libraries.

Some scholars have argued that the Egyptians preceded the Mesopotamians with the invention of writing and there are also some ancient lost civilizations that of which we know very little except for some underwater ruins we can barely examine. We cannot say with certainty the Sumerians invented writing, but we do know they were a sophisticated society. Artifacts and relics discovered in this area reveal a complex society and there are still many things we are uncertain of regarding these mysterious people. In the late 1960s, archaeologists excavated several stone balls in western Iran.Their purpose and meaning remain unknown, but there are some intriguing scientific speculations.

One of 150 speheres that has survived.
Researchers used CT scans and 3D modelling to look inside the spheres which are also commonly called "envelopes".
Scans reveled the spheres are hollow and contain different geometric shapes or "tokens".
The spheres range in size range from the size of a golf ball to that of a baseball.

Scans revealed the spheres are hollow and contains tokens. Image credit & copyright Orinetal Institute of Universoty of Chicago.
According to Christopher Woods, Professor at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, the spheres represent the world's "very first data storage system".

"These envelopes likely represent the earliest known - at least to our current knowledge - efforts to humans to permanently record data.

They may also be the earliest evidence of numerical literacy," Professor Woods says.

A look inside a sphere.
Sadly, there are only 150 complete spheres that have survived and museums are reluctant to open the tokens as it would mean damaging them permanently.

Inside some of the spheres there are tiny channels, 1-2 mm across, criss-crossing them.
In some way, the spheres resemble a certain type of prehistoric artifacts of unknown origin that were found mainly in Scotland and a few of them in England and Ireland. Is there a possible connection between these artifacts?

The spheres vary in shape and size.
It remains unknown what the ancient people in Mesopotania used the spheres for, but scientists believe such devices served as receipts for various administrative duties such as monitoring the flow of materials, various commodities and labor.

"The tokens represent numbers of specific metrological (measuring) systems - not words - and the envelopes themselves are receipts for the disbursements of various commodities and goods," said Professor Woods.

Researchers who examined the spheres discovered tokens within the balls come in 14 different shapes, including spheres, pyramids, ovoids, lenses and cones. Each type represents a different value. For example a pyramid might mean a certain unit, such as 20, which was used while counting a certain type of commodity.

All of the clay speheres contain, on the outside, one seal running through the middle and usually two seals, running above and below.

Professor Woods believes the seal in the middle represents the 'buyer' or recipient.
The polar seals would represent the 'seller' and perhaps third parties who would have acted as witnesses.

In order to solve this ancient mystery, researchers must crack the ancient code and uncover what purpose these clay spheres served.

The code holds clues to how token types vary and what they stand for.
"We need to study, and hopefully CT scan, the sealed envelopes in other collections," said Professor Woods.

"There are approximately 150 known world-wide."
If Professor Woods is right in his assumptions, it would mean that ancient civilizations invented the data storage system before our modern civilization.


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See also:

Alien Toy? - All Attempts To Solve This Ancient Mystery - Failed

Source: http://www.messagetoeagle.com/undecipheredcodespheres.php#.UmZcVvnIby0