A number of valuable books dealing with =Medicine= have come down to us, and of these one of the most interesting is the papyrus in the British Museum, No. 10,059. It contains copies of a number of prescriptions which date from the reign of Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, about B.C. 3730, and several of the time of Ȧmen-ḥetep III (B.C. 1450). The largest work on medicine is contained in the Ebers Papyrus at Leipzig, and there are medical papyri in the Museums of Paris, Leyden, Berlin, and California (Hearst Medical Papyrus). In all these we find that magic was considered to be as efficacious as drugs; many of the prescriptions are to all intents and purposes magical formulas, and several suggest charlatanism. Oil, honey, and tinctures or decoctions of simple herbs were largely used, and the long list of names of plants, herbs, seeds, etc., in the Ebers Papyrus proves that, though the Egyptians had little idea of scientific =Botany=, they had a very wide knowledge of the properties of plants, etc. =Anatomy= was studied in a practical manner, especially for the purposes of embalming and bone-setting, but as no treatises on the subject have come down to us, it is impossible to say whether the Egyptians deserved the great reputations which they enjoyed as physicians. It is tolerably certain that they made no experiments in dissection, for the body was sacred to Osiris, and might not be dismembered, at all events in the later times. The commonest diseases among the Egyptians seem to have been ophthalmia, fever, maladies of the stomach, ulcers, “Nile boils,” epilepsy and anaemia. =Biographical inscriptions= form a very important section of the Literature, and they throw much light, not only on the social condition of the people, but also on the history of the country. Thus, the inscription of the =official Ptaḥ-shepses=, who was born under the IVth dynasty, besides enumerating the various high offices which he held, proves that he lived through the reigns of eight or nine kings, and thus fixes the order of the succession of several of them (see Egyptian Vestibule, No. 32). The =official Ȧntef= lived under three kings, whose names he gives, and thus fixes the order of their succession (Bay 4, No. 99). (=Plate XXII.=) The stele[17] of =Erṭā-Ȧntef-Ṭāṭāu= says that the deceased was “Governor of the South” in the reign of Usertsen I, and thus we know that an Egyptian viceroy governed the Sûdân as early as B.C. 2433 (Bay 4, No. 196). The =stele of Sa-Menthu= describes how he went to the Sûdân to bring back gold for the king of Egypt, and tells us that he made men, women, and children to work in digging out the quartz, and in crushing the ore and washing the gold from it (Bay 6, No. 145). From the biographies of the great Egyptian officials much of the history of Egypt can be pieced together.