Setting the Womb in Its Place: Toward A Contextual Archaeology of Graeco -Egyptian Uterine Amulets Marino, Katherine R.. Brown University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2010.

Setting the Womb in Its Place: Toward A Contextual Archaeology of Graeco -Egyptian Uterine Amulets

Marino, Katherine R..Brown University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2010.

Amulets from Roman 1-6 C ACE show a uterus, fallopian tubes, locked, inscriptions from latin, greek, semitic, 

and magic, Egyptian and Babylonian gods

are these just to protect fertility and parturition? or are they related to women;s diseases and other aspects of omens health? There is a lack of symbols of fertility and birthing gods

p 19 The prayers focus on stoping the womb from wandering, a cause of debilitating and fatal illness.

p 25 Frazer understood magic in a functionalist way ( The Golden Bough 1913), p 27 but his model separates religion and magic, is based on an evolutionary framework, also Malinoswki both use a reductivism,  absolutist and normative approach

p26 however magic and irrationalities are found in all phases of societies

p 28 Marcel Mauss saw magic as cultural, from religion and myth

p 30 magic comes from the Greek word mageia

Betz saw magic as  a world view  as for example Egyptian concepts of the world was that magic was immanent and the driving force of much of it. Heka is th word they used for it and the priests spent their time using it in order to retain Maat

p 34 There was a huge influence from Mesopotamia and Persia on the Greek world and it would seem that magic was so defined as external to Greek culture and coming from the Near East.

p 35 the Derveni papyrus, 4th C from Thessaloniki links magoi to the Dionysian mystery  cult as both have initiates and perform sacrifices, and were able to summon daemons and bring disease and chaos.

even from Homeric times the use of epoide, charms or spells to promote healing of wounds and soothing of pain

Odysseus has his boar-inflicted wound healed by his uncle’s recitation of an epoide over it in the Odyssey (Odyssey XIX) (Graf 2003, 28, n. 29).

Gorgias in his apology for Helen speaks of the power of words to influence soul and body, and Plato even juxtaposes epoide with three other medical treatments, namely drugs, cautery and surgery, indicating that the division between what we would consider magic and medicine was not yet in place in 4th century Athens (Gorgias DK 82 B 11,10, Plato Republic

p 36

A significant difference between Greek and Egyptian magic is that Greek magic is distinctly private and not used by the polis. It was used by individuals to cope with crisis and while it could have a negative connotation it did not always. Greek magic also aligned more closely with Frazer’s model in that as early as Plato’s Laws magic is seen to be something that attempts to persuade and manipulate the gods, while religion was viewed as a practice that gave the gods free choice (Plato, Laws as cited in Graf 2003,public 426 B, Graf 2003, 26-29). 

p37 The earliest codified Roman laws, the Twelve Tables, included at least one provision for magical practice when they set a ban on the enchanting away of a neighbor’s crops or the use of a charm to slander another. The verb used for “to enchant” is excanto, literally to sing out, and a charm is a carmen, a song (Graf 2003, 42-43). The oral nature of magic and the power of the spoken word is a strongly emphasized aspect of the Roman magical tradition.

p 40 These magical papyri (many of which have been collected into the Papyri Graecae Magicae) offer some of the best sources for piecing together the rites and rituals of the performance of magic, since many include detailed instructions on how, when, where and under what circumstances the magician was to act.

p43 Magic does not only overlap with religion but in the ancient Mediterranean also with medicine. “What distinguishes the purifier from the doctor is not rationality, but cosmology…” (Graf 2003, 32). Indeed physicians and magicians had much in common. In the early days of Greece both were probably itinerant and both used the same methods of observation and diagnosis (Graf 2003, 32-35; Lloyd 1999a chapter 1). Their difference lies in that one looks for a physical cause for ill health while the other searches out the daemon which harasses the afflicted (Graf 2003, 32). To this end physicians treat the body while the magical healer addresses the daemon or disease agent directly or persuades a more powerful deity to intervene (Graf 2003, 37-38). A deity may be compelled to help the one suffering by invoking the god by a secret name, goading the deity into action by blaming the affliction on his traditional enemy, using prayers, asking forgiveness for a transgression, threatening the deity, using a short story analogy to convince the god that he or she is involved in the situation, or calling on the guardian deity of various body parts amongst other techniques (Graf 2003, 37-38).

p44 The Egyptian medical papyri often mix magic in among their medical remedies, indicating that the distinction between the fields is not a valid one for the ancient Egyptian world (Pinch 1995, 65).

“Man’s interpretations of the universe and of his place in it have always constituted the mould in which his magical practices and his medical theories about disease have been formed” (Ghalioungui 1965, 18). Further, regardless of magic’s ability to cure disease, in its power to explain disease and give hope for a cure it also provides a means to alleviate psychological anxiety (Ghalioungui 1965, 17).

In the Greek world the situation was not much different. According to Pindar amulets fell into the class of f ar m aka, or therapies by which to influence the body (Pindar Pythian Ode 3, 47-54, Kotansky 1991, 109-110).

p 45 One of the results of the Enlightenment is that medicine, religion and magic have been divorced from each other, a case which was not so in ancient Egypt and Greece (King 1998, 102-103).

Medicine is never neutral. In any society it carries cultural values, including beliefs about the human body and about the roles and relative importance of different age/gender groups. It constructs its object in a dialogue with culture; before treating sickness, it is necessary to decide who is sick and who is not, what behaviour is abnormal and what is normal. King 1998, 114

p 49 Medicine in the classical period was deemed to be the supreme sign of humanity. Aeschylus’ Prometheus produced between 483-478 BC13 Indeed Greece had several divine physicians including Apollo and later his son Asclepius, both of whom accepted votive offerings. Unlike the biomedicine of today which has moved with colonialism, it is the temple medicine of Asclepius which was exported from Greece (King 1998, 101). While in the Hippocratic corpus more male than female patients are recorded it is not clear if this means women regularly availed themselves more often of temple medicine (King 1998, 105, Dean-Jones 1994). Indeed, heroized medicine, called it the greatest of arts (technai) and the one means by which humans are given hope of overcoming the savage misfortunes stalking the world (King 1998 115). Introduced by Prometheus to mankind, it was a gift of the gods. This connection between the divine and medicine appears repeatedly in the Greek world. Indeed, as King points out medicine and religion both operated within the same social conventions, used the same symbols and agreed, for instance, on the place of women’s bleeding in the proper order of the world (King 1998, 99).

p 53 the accumulation of blood in the womb

When these things occur in this way, the young girl is mad from the intensity of the inflammation; she turns murderous from the putrefaction; she feels fears and terrors from the darkness. From the pressure around the heart, these young girls long for nooses. Their spirit, distraught and sorely troubled by the foulness of their blood, attracts bad things, but names something else even fearful things. They command the young girl to wander about, to cast herself into wells, and to hang herself, as if these actions were preferable and completely useful. Even without visions, a certain pleasure exists, as a result of which she longs for death, as if something good. R. Fleming & A.E. Hanson, Hippocrates’ Peri Parthenion, 1998, 251 

p 80 1989, Jean-Jacques Aubert wrote an article in Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies entitled “Threatened Wombs: Aspects of Ancient Uterine Magic.” In this piece his primary purpose was to discuss “the ancient evidence for magical practices and religious beliefs pertaining to the womb and its reproductive capacities, and the ways in which human and supernatural interventions were thought capable of interfering with the natural process of reproduction” (Aubert 1989, 421).

He describes the function of the key as to “open the womb to allow conception and delivery, and to lock it to avoid efflux of semen, menorrhagia, menstruation, miscarriage, and wandering of the womb.” He also focuses on the astral affiliations of uterine amulets.

p 81 Ann Hanson has considered the amulets in three articles: “The Medical Writer’s Woman,” (1990) “Uterine Amulets and Greek Uterine Medicine,” (1995) and “A LongLived ‘Quick-Birther’ (okytokion)” (2004). She acknowledges that the amulets were used for many purposes, stating that the generic uterine amulet would have fulfilled a “range of prophylactic and therapeutic functions” (Hanson 1995, 282). Nevertheless, Hanson tends preferentially to understand the functioning of the uterus in light of its effects on reproduction. “Untimely opening results in morbid uterine hemorrhages and in abortion, untimely closing in sterility” (Hanson 1995, 286). Further, rather than investigating the greater class of uterine amulets she focuses the attention of her work on a subgroup of the amulets which she believes were used during birth (Hanson 1995, 2004,).41 Nevertheless, her 1995 article is useful for placing the amulets within a general framework of Hippocratic and Graceo-Roman medicine. An interesting passage is one where she quotes from Soranus who says that “amulets used to staunch uterine hemorrhage…” should be allowed for the psychological comfort they afford patients, if not for their medical efficacy (Gyn. III.42.3). The quote is significant because it makes explicit the fact that there were such amulets in the Roman Empire. 

p83 the key could also be used for more subtle purposes, such as to prevent haemorrhage or open the womb to healing airs which may rid the body of disease or pain daemons, a commonly believed source of ill health in the ancient world (Nunn 2002). Uterine cancer is attested in the papyri and letters of the pharonic period, and mummies with prolapsed uteri have been recovered (Smith and Jones 1910, Derry 1935, Aufderheide 2004)

p177 Hanson brings up the important point that many amulets prior to the Hellenistic period and later Roman Republic appear to have been made of perishable materials. It is only at this point that gemstones and more permanent items become popular materials out of which to create amulets (Hanson 1995, 288). To that end, many of the earliest amulets from these cultures have not been preserved for scholars to compare to the uterine amulets. Hanson notes a number of amulets made of plants preserved in the literature, such as Theophrastos’ prescription to use cyclamen root to hasten birth (whereas Dioscorides and Pliny list is as an abortifacient), 153 Birth Amulets: and Dioscorides’ advice that leaves of the anagyros are ebolic and emmenagogic and can be worn as an amulet during difficult labor (Hanson 1995, 288-289). One important point she notes that has been touched on already and will reappear throughout the following discussion is that birthing amulets in the Greek tradition tend to be red in color. 

p 207 As in Egyptian magic, the best parallel in Greek and Roman magic for the amulets is found among those spells that concern binding, the katadesmoi and defixiones, the binding spells of the respective cultures.176 While superficially related to the devotio, the public imprecation, the defixio is marked apart by its enactment by an individual rather than a group and its purpose in seeking personal benefit to the agent and harm to the object (Graf 2003, 128 following Audollent).177 The earliest spells of this type date from the 5th c. BC and have been found in Olbia, Attica and Sicily (Faraone 1991, 3). A graphic example is provided by two While ritually binding someone with a katadesmos pursued different purposes at different times, Faraone has called the rite as a whole “a uniquely Greek form of cursing” (Faraone 1991, 3, Graf 2003, 135). In general the topic is well explored, having been considered even in ancient sources by men such as Pliny, and because of this it is possible to discuss it and its possible links with the amulets in great detail (Graf 2003, 118-119).inscriptions on a piece of lead in the shape of a human silhouette found at Carystus on Euboea dating to the 4th c. BC (which now resides in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris) which read: “I register Isias, the daughter of A(u)toclea, before Hermes the Restrainer. Restrain her by your side!” and “I bind Isias before Hermes the Restrainer, the hands, the feet, the entire body” (Faraone 1991, 3). Material remains of the tablets on which the curses were written are found in every part of the Roman Empire by the 2nd c. AD (Faraone 1991, 3).
 

p224 Egypt The Kahun papyrus does concern itself with other issues of women’s health though, including “inanition, terrors, biting of the uterus, [and] dejections of the uterus to the eyes” among other uterine problems, some of which Ghalioungui, a senior professor of medicine at Ans Shams university in Cairo variously diagnosed as gonococcal rheumatism, uveitis, trismus, deafness, and general apathetic hysteria (Ghalioungui 1965, 119). Indeed, the uterus was used as an explanation for pains or problems involving the eyes, neck, uterus, anus, pubis, thighs, teeth, mouth, limbs, feet, legs, back of the neck, vulva, urine, and general all-over body pain and weakness that may require one to be bedridden (Mersky and Potter 1989, 752).Other papyri are also relevant to understanding the body and the female body in ancient Egypt. The Ebers papyrus contains a section on gynaecology similar to that of the Kahun papyrus, but also includes more discussion of diseases of the breasts, something akin to cancer described as an eating of the womb, the promotion of conception and easy labor and many remedies for upset stomachs (Ghalioungui 1965, 50- 52). It also attributes the source of disease to divinities or the dead (Ghalioungui 1965,
 The Leiden Papyrus also assigns a deity to each body part, which in a way makes the body a scaled down version of the cosmos, with different areas defined by different mythological episodes (Pinch 1995, 142). The Zauberspruch, spells for mother and child, and also the pyramid texts both record the practice of assigning a deity to each body part (Ghalioungui 1965, 38-39).

p 236

An interesting aspect of ancient Egyptian medicine and gynaecology is its remarkably long life. Although Greek, Arabic and western biomedicine have all been adopted in turn by the inhabitants of Egypt, nevertheless, until even the turn of the last century, much of the gynaecology, if witnesses and ethnographies are to be trusted, matched almost exactly with many of the practices discussed in the papyri. Indeed, Inhorn remarks repeatedly on the overlap between ancient and modern folk gynaecology and treatments for infertility in Egypt, even in the 1990s

p239In general the Hippocratics eschewed the use of amulets and other non rational medical methods (However see Chapter 5, Hanson 1995, 287-288). It should not be expected that the tradition of using amulets came from this quarter, but rather that the contents which the amulets bear and the ideas that they embody may be derived from this tradition. Indeed, there are many prescriptions in the Graeco-Egyptian papyri for manufacturing and activating amulets similar to the uterine talismans, and King points out that many of these recipes or at least elements of them seem to have originated in Hippocratic medicine (King 1998, 229). Finstance, the author of On Regimen links the seven Greek vowels to the seven senses of hearing, sight, smell, taste, speech, touch and breath as the seven means by which a healer is able to gain knowledge (King 1998, 40-41).

p 240 The gynaecologies of the Hippocratic corpus gain coherence in their treatment of diseases and pathologies of the womb and the female body (Hanson 1975, 569).

The characterization of women by the treatises is that of a different animal than men, as opposed to later traditions such as that developed by Aristotle where women areseen as a substandard male
 

While Aphorisms and Coan Prognoses treat male and female illnesses in the same way in other treatises such as Airs it is noted that diseases manifest differently in women than men (Lloyd 1999b 65-66). In practice, however all the treatises focused on the reproductive organs of women when illness struck, which is in itself different from the treatment of men (Lloyd 1999b, 66).From the age of menarche to menstruation her body was a constant source of danger to a woman and to those around her (Dean-Jones 1994, 47). The womb itself was so dangerous that it necessitated that a woman take a master, a kurios, for her body in order to tame this organ and prevent it from harming her (Hanson 1990, 319-320). If a woman did not marry soon enough, as shown in the Peri Parthenion her womb became dry and migrated about her body, suffocating her and inducing madness. If the womb was not moistened often enough by intercourse after a woman had married or been widowed it would become desiccated and migrate to other organs in search of moisture where it could cause mortal damage.