Sanctuarium Imuthis, Deir el-Bahari
About
Healing shrine built into the ruins of Queen Hatshepsut's 1,300-year-old mortuary temple, where Ptolemaic and Roman-era pilgrims sought cures from the deified sages Amenhotep son of Hapu and Imhotep. Sufferers slept inside hoping for a healing dream, exactly as at Epidaurus, a case of Greek and Egyptian medicine merging into one practice. Surviving graffiti record visitors thanking the gods for cures found nowhere else. By 117 CE the shrine had treated the sick for roughly four centuries.
What happened here
A healing sanctuary where the treatment is a night's sleep. Patients purify themselves, sacrifice, and then lie down in a long open hall to wait for a dream in which the god appears and either heals them or prescribes. In the morning the priests interpret. The prescriptions are practical as often as not — diet, exercise, cold baths, a walk — and there are doctors on site alongside the priests, with no sense that the two are in competition. Cured patients pay for a plaque recording what was wrong and what was done, and the walls fill with them; a model of the healed limb or organ is the cheaper option. Snakes and dogs live in the precinct and are part of the treatment.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →