The Leyden and Stockholm Papyri - University of Cincinnati

IV
A Note on Technique
4.1 Ancient Technologies
As suggested by Caley in his description of the Leyden papyrus,
it is highly probable that many of its recipes (and those of the
Stockholm papyrus as well) were copied from far older sources
which have failed to survive. The few references, both implicit
and explicit, to such writers as pseudo-Democritus (c. 200 BC),
Dioscorides Pedanius (c. 1st century AD), and Julius Africanus
(c. 220 AD) push the story back by only a few centuries, after
which the written trail goes cold. But however limited our ability
to document the earlier history of these recipes, the same is
not equally true of most of the various manipulative techniques
which they employ, such as the use of balances to weigh ingredients,
the use of charcoal furnaces, blowpipes, and bellows to
melt and cast metals, or the use of mortars, pestles and sieves to
grind and sift solids. As testified to by actual surviving artifacts
and by numerous Egyptian tomb paintings, it may be easily
shown that many of these preparative techniques predate the
Leyden and Stockholm papyri by several thousand years.
! Some pertinent examples are reproduced on the following
four plates in the form of woodcuts taken from the lavishly
illustrated two-volume work, A Popular Account of the Ancient
Egyptians, published by Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson in 1853 (1).
These have been used in lieu of photographs of the original
paintings both because of ease of reproduction and their greater
clarity. Wilkinson was none too specific about the location of
the original paintings on which these drawings were based.
However, consultation of the booklet by Wilkinson and Hill on
facsimile Egyptian tomb paintings in the possession of the New
York Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows that most of them were
based on paintings found in either the tomb of Rekhmira at Thebes
(c. 1475 BC), which depict the craftsmen of Amun in the workshops
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