Egyptian knowledge, health, and piety: Herodotus, the Greek “Father of History,” remarks on Egyptian learning and character.

The Egyptians who live in the cultivated parts of the country, by their practice of keeping records of the past, have made themselves the most learned any nation of which I have had experience. I will describe some of their habits: every month for three successive days they purge themselves, for their health’s sake, with emetics and clysters, in the belief that all diseases come from the food a man eats; and it is a fact – even apart from this precaution – that next to the Libyans they are the healthiest people in the world. I should put this down myself to the absence of changes in the climate; for change, and especially change of weather, is the prime cause of disease. They eat loaves made of spelt – cyllestes is their word for them – and drink a wine made from barley, as they have no vines in the country. Some kinds of fish they eat raw, either dried in the sun or salted; quails, too, they eat raw, and ducks and various small birds, after pickling them in brine; other sorts of birds and fish, apart from those they consider sacred, they either roast or boil. When the rich give a party and the meal is finished, a man carries round amongst the guests a wooden image of a corpse in a coffin, carved and painted to look as much like the real thing as possible, and anything from eighteen inches to three feet long; he shows it to each guest in turn, and says, “Look upon this body as you drink and enjoy yourself, for you will be just like it when you are dead.”

…The practice of medicine they split up into separate parts, each doctor being responsible for the treatment of only one disease. There are, in consequence, innumerable doctors, some specializing in diseases of the eyes, others of the head, others of the teeth, others of the stomach, and so on; while others, again, deal with the sort of troubles that cannot be exactly localized.

Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt and A.R. Burn