Prescription to Prediction: The Ancient Sciences in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Prescription to Prediction: The Ancient Sciences in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore—Charles Commons (3301 N Charles St.)
October 6–۷, ۲۰۲۲

Registration, programme, and abstracts available here: https://scientific-papyri-from-ancient-egypt.org/conference-2022/conference-2022-2/
* This event will be hybrid, with in-person and remote participation available.

The collaborative research project, Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt in Cross-Cultural Perspective (SciPap), is pleased to announce its 3rd international conference—an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural event facilitating new research into the sciences of the ancient Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Greek worlds, focusing on medicine, astral sciences, and divination. ‘Prescription to Prediction’ will open scholarly and public access to an extremely large, varied body of source material currently unavailable to both non-specialists and many specialists while also advancing theoretical models of intercultural interaction.

Understanding and controlling mechanisms of nature that affect the quality and possibilities of human life have been universal concerns throughout history. All cultures, arguably, have observed and theorized about the various processes of the body, the environment, and the cosmos as they strive to function and thrive in their worlds. It is important to recognize that although the resultant explanations are embedded in culturally specific worldviews, they rarely develop in contextually isolated bubbles. Scientific exchange affords a particularly rich area of inquiry for cross-cultural transfer of knowledge in antiquity, since technologies, whether in the form of specialized apparatuses or technical formulae, can be borrowed and applied at a practical level without the adoption of the worldviews that ground them. The special competencies held by the leading experts convening for this conference will foster a high degree of interdisciplinarity and will facilitate the engagement of cross-disciplinary interpretive frameworks with an expanding base of primary evidence.

Keynotes:
Ann E. Hanson: Prescription to Prediction: A Plethora of Greek Doctors
Francesca Rochberg: Hellenistic Astrology and Astronomy in the History of Ideas

Speakers:
Troels Pank Arbøll: Assyro-Babylonian String Theory: Can We Use Treatments for Curing Diseases Affecting the Stringy Structures of the Body (šerʾānu) to Evaluate Ancient Medical Conceptions?

Claire Bubb: Galen and Greco-Roman Theories of Digestion

Ida Christensen: “It is the Exaltation of Jupiter”: Scientific Classifications and Theoretical Content in Demotic Astrological Manuals from the Tebtunis Temple Library

Elaine van Dalen: The Arabic Hippocrates: Classical Islamic Reconstructions of the Aphorisms

Anne Grons: Coptic Pharmacological Prescriptions: Ways of Organizing and Structuring Knowledge in Collections of Prescriptions

Friedhelm Hoffmann: P. Vienna D 6257 and Some Insights into the History of Scholarly Textual Transmission in Antiquity

Amber Jacob: Cross-cultural Encounters in the Transmission of Medical Knowledge: Case Studies from Graeco-Roman Egypt

Alexander Jones: Greco-Egyptian Almanacs and the Astronomy Underlying Them

Kassandra Miller: Immediately, Immediately, Quickly, Quickly! The Need for Speed in the Medical Marketplaces of the Roman Period

Willis Monroe: Tabular Data and Knowledge Formation

Luigi Prada: The Evolution of Ancient Egyptian Oneiromancy from Ramses II to Trajan: Differences and Reasons of Change between Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman Dream Books

Joachim Quack: Some Unpublished Demotic Astrological Fragments

Tonio Sebastian Richter: A Coptic Archive of Medical and Alchemical Papyri, Supposedly from Nagʕ al-Mašāyḫ (Lepidotonpolis)

Matthew Rutz: “It is the Bound Tablet-Basket of the Gods”: Legibility in Mesopotamian Dream Divination

Kim Ryholt: Demotic Astrological Literature: A Survey

Francesca Schironi: Using Babylonian Astronomy to Improve Greek Astronomy: Hipparchus’ Exegesis of the Phaenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus

Sofie Schiødt: Solar and Lunar Dependent Recipes in Ancient Egypt

Calloway Scott: Back to the Future: Hereditary Seer-craft in Ancient Greece

John Steele: A New Cuneiform Eclipse Text

Ulrike Steinert: Cross-Cultural Transmission of Medical Knowledge in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean: Glimpses from Mesopotamian Women’s Health Care Texts

Lingxin Zhang: “Gender Trouble” in Ancient Egyptian Divinatory Texts

Conference organizers:
Amber Jacob, Sofie Schiødt, Alexander Jones, Richard Jasnow
Contact:
scipapcollaboration@gmail.com