Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East collects the select proceedings of papers delivered at two conferences held in Copenhagen and New York in 2018 and 2019, respectively, both organized by an international collaboration called Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt (SciPap), established in 2017 on the initiative of Kim Ryholt, director of the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection.

The contributions presented in Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East engage with topics in medicine, astronomy, astrology, and other forms of divination, as seen from a variety of textual sources in several languages and scripts from Egypt and the Near East spanning more than a millennium, including some texts that are edited and discussed here for the first time. These include new treatises on divination, including dream interpretation, personal astrology, and Sothis divination, as well as treatises on medicine, including dermatology, gynecology, and apotropaic incantations. The contributors, which include both established and early-career scholars, were tasked with approaching their texts not only as specialists, but also from a cross-cultural perspective, and the resulting body of work reveals new and exciting evidence for the transfer of scientific knowledge across cultural borders in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.

This book will be of interest to specialists in the history of medicine, science, divination, and magic, as well as to papyrologists, Egyptologists, and Assyriologists.