Registration Open for Prescription to Prediction

Registration Open for Prescription to Prediction

The Ancient Sciences in Cross-cultural perspective

The Department of Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University and The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University present Prescription to Prediction: The Ancient Sciences in Cross-cultural perspective. The conference is October 6-7 at Johns Hopkins University.

Aims

The collaborative research project Scientific Papyri from Ancient Egypt in Cross-Cultural Perspective (SciPap) is pleased to announce its 3rd international conference – an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural event facilitating new research into the sciences of the ancient Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Greek worlds, focusing on medicine, astral sciences, and divination. Prescription to Prediction will open scholarly and public access to an extremely large, varied body of source material currently unavailable to both non-specialists and many specialists while also advancing theoretical models of intercultural interaction.

Concept

Understanding and controlling mechanisms of nature that affect the quality and possibilities of human life have been universal concerns throughout history. All cultures, arguably, have observed and theorized about the various processes of the body, the environment, and the cosmos as they strive to function and thrive in their worlds. It is important to recognize that although the resultant explanations are embedded in culturally specific worldviews, they rarely develop in contextually isolated bubbles. Scientific exchange affords a particularly rich area of inquiry for cross-cultural transfer of knowledge in antiquity, since technologies, whether in the form of specialized apparatuses or technical formulae, can be borrowed and applied at a practical level without the adoption of the worldviews that ground them. The special competencies held by the leading experts convening for this conference will foster a high degree of interdisciplinarity and will facilitate the engagement of cross-disciplinary interpretive frameworks with an expanding base of primary evidence.