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For people interested in history, or in profiting from it, this was the equivalent of the gold rush: Egypt swarmed with tomb raiders and treasure hunters, such as Edwin Smith, who gathered up as many of these formerly inscrutable documents as they could.
    Smith took the scroll home to Connecticut and spent much of the rest of his life trying to make sense of it. Even the best linguist might spend years translating a single passage of hieratic. Edwin Smith was not the best linguist. He’d obtained an objectively beautiful piece of writing—the papyrus was incredibly well preserved, and its ink changed intriguingly from a deep black to, for certain words and lines, a crimson made out of ground ochre—but it refused to give up its secrets. When Smith died in 1906, his daughter donated the scroll to the New-York Historical Society, where it was found by James Henry Breasted, a professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago.
    Breasted spent nearly ten years working on his own translation of the scroll, and when he published it, in 1930, he declared the so-called Edwin Smith Papyrus “the oldest nucleus of really scientific knowledge in the world.”
    The scroll, Breasted revealed, was a medical textbook. And in its formatting, it was a strikingly modern one: The passages written in red, for example, were done to highlight the key parts of the text that the author wanted the reader to remember. But much more surprising was how modern its contents were, this despite the fact that the scroll itself was at least 3,600 years old and contained archaic turns of phrase that indicated it may have been a transcription of a text eight hundred years older than that.
    Up until Breasted’s translation, the prevailing view of medicine in ancient Egypt was that it was based in magic, not science. Previously discovered papyri about medical topics limited their prescriptions to incantations and dubious potions. And the Edwin Smith Papyrus had some of that: The scroll was organized as a series of forty-eight case studies of battlefield injuries, each with its own treatment recommendation. In case nine, a man with a bashed-in forehead, the would-be attending physician was advised to chant the following spell while standing over his patient: “Repelled is the enemy that is in the wound / Cast out is the evil that is in the blood / The adversary of Horus, on every side of the mouth of Isis / This temple does not fall down / There is no enemy of the vessel therein / I am under the protection of Isis / My rescue is the son of Osiris!”
    Most of the prescriptions, however, were secular. And most of the case studies—twenty-seven out of forty-eight—involved head trauma.
    For example:
Case 6: Medical instructions for an oozing gash/cutting wound in his head that penetrates to the bone, smashing in his cranium and exposing the brain in his cranium.
    —You have to probe his wound.
    —Should you find [in] that smash fracture that is in his cranium, ripples [like] those that occur [in] copper in the smelting process,
    —and something within that throbs and flutters under your fingers like the weak spot of the crown of a child not yet fused and made “whole.”
    You should daub that wound of his with oil.
    —Do not bandage it.
    —Do not put dressings on it until you know that he has passed the crisis!
    The smash fracture is large, opening to the inside of his cranium and the membrane enveloping his brain is ruptured and its fluid falls from the interior of his head.
    Although the treatment in this case by modern standards is conservative—clean the wound and hope for the best—it’s about as promising an approach as you could hope to find in a four-thousand-year-old hospital. Sealing the wound, for example, would have probably done more harm than good, causing death through swelling or infection. The Egyptians were apparently not only restrained physicians but accomplished neuroanatomists as well: Up until the translation of the Smith