Ancient Egyptian dentists come into the spotlight in this dissertation. While some scholars doubt their existence, it is indisputably shown that not only did they exist as a profession, but evidence is offered as to the various diagnoses and treatments they rendered. The Ebers medical papyrus together with other ancient similar medical ‘textbooks’ are analysed and prescriptions dealing with dental maladies are presented. Dentistry as a profession is elucidated in all its facets: diagnosing and treating dental diseases; prevention and care; and restorative and surgical treatment. This dissertation discusses dental anthropology as a vital part of bioarchaeology, which is the study of human remains in archaeological contexts in ancient Egypt. Dental enamel is the hardest material in the human body, and teeth are often preserved even when bones are not. Teeth are one of the most informative parts of the human body, and are incredibly well preserved archaeologically. Teeth provide insight into numerous issues that palaeodemography and historians are concerned with, including diet changes, general stress, how closely groups were related, and markers of social identity / Biblical and Ancient Studies / M.A. (Ancient and Near Eastern Studies)

Ancient Egyptian dentists come into the spotlight in this dissertation. While some scholars doubt their existence, it is indisputably shown that not only did they exist as a profession, but evidence is offered as to the various diagnoses and treatments they rendered. The Ebers medical papyrus together with other ancient similar medical ‘textbooks’ are analysed and prescriptions dealing with dental maladies are presented. Dentistry as a profession is elucidated in all its facets: diagnosing and treating dental diseases; prevention and care; and restorative and surgical treatment. This dissertation discusses dental anthropology as a vital part of bioarchaeology, which is the study of human remains in archaeological contexts in ancient Egypt. Dental enamel is the hardest material in the human body, and teeth are often preserved even when bones are not. Teeth are one of the most informative parts of the human body, and are incredibly well preserved archaeologically. Teeth provide insight into numerous issues that palaeodemography and historians are concerned with, including diet changes, general stress, how closely groups were related, and markers of social identity / Biblical and Ancient Studies / M.A. (Ancient and Near Eastern Studies)

The ongoing project of digitising a corpus of ancient Greek texts on papyrus dealing with medical topics raises some problematic questions involving general issues of digital papyrology. The main electronic resource of papyrological texts, the Papyrological Navigator (papyri.info), has indeed been designed to host documentary items, while the special technical, even literary nature of medical papyri (which include, besides documents related to medicine, also handbooks, school books, and treatises by both known and unknown authors) requires new ways to treat the relevant data (paratextual devices such as diacriticals, punctuation, abbreviatios, layout features). Such issues are currently under discussion by the team charged of the forthcoming Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP), but further options need to be taken into consideration in order to develop a fully functional, interactive, dynamic database of ancient technical texts: in particular, this paper will present and discuss the potentialities of a multi-layer linguistic annotation (useful to fulfil the needs of a multifaceted technical language) and of a multitextual digital edition (helpful in consideration of the fragmentary condition of the texts and of their often problematic relationship with the known manuscript tradition).

The ongoing project of digitising a corpus of ancient Greek texts on papyrus dealing with medical topics raises some problematic questions involving general issues of digital papyrology. The main electronic resource of papyrological texts, the Papyrological Navigator (papyri.info), has indeed been designed to host documentary items, while the special technical, even literary nature of medical papyri (which include, besides documents related to medicine, also handbooks, school books, and treatises by both known and unknown authors) requires new ways to treat the relevant data (paratextual devices such as diacriticals, punctuation, abbreviatios, layout features). Such issues are currently under discussion by the team charged of the forthcoming Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri (DCLP), but further options need to be taken into consideration in order to develop a fully functional, interactive, dynamic database of ancient technical texts: in particular, this paper will present and discuss the potentialities of a multi-layer linguistic annotation (useful to fulfil the needs of a multifaceted technical language) and of a multitextual digital edition (helpful in consideration of the fragmentary condition of the texts and of their often problematic relationship with the known manuscript tradition).