70 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



Photograph by Katherine W. Stewart 

 GREAT PALMS ON THE SITE OE ANCIENT MEMPHIS: EGYPT 

 The walls of Memphis have crumbled and disappeared, but one of 

 the nostrums prescribed by her learned men of medicine has come 

 down through the musty centuries practically unchanged and is used 

 today. Ptah Hotep, who wrote his proverbs 6,000 years ago, prob- 

 ably knew of it and used aloes in some form. 



port him back to the 

 city of Damascus 

 about the year 1000, 

 in that ancient Syro- 

 Arab city he need 

 only seek out a Jew- 

 ish drug vender in the 

 bazaar and whisper 

 "hiera" and hiera- 

 picra,not much differ- 

 ent from what is used 

 today, would be forth- 

 coming. "None other 

 than the exact for- 

 mula of the great 

 Arab doctor, Aven- 

 zoar," the Jew would 

 murmur. 



Let him then go 

 back to Rome in the 

 day of Julius Caesar 

 and visit a "medicina" 

 kept by one of the 

 many Greek practi- 

 tioners who flocked 

 to the capital — bar- 

 bers, corn - doctors, 

 hair-dressers, herbal- 

 ists, and other irreg- 

 ular quacks — and he 

 could on demand re- 

 ceive "hiera" and be 

 assured that it was the 

 secret formula used 

 by the priests of 

 ^Esculapius, "stolen 

 from the temple, my 

 lord," the crafty 

 Greek would whisper. 



Let him even go to 

 Alexandria when it 

 was building, or back 

 to Memphis when the 

 Pyramids were being 

 planned, and the word 

 hiera would evolve 

 this same compound 

 of aloes — the oldest 

 nostrum in the world. 

 And though possibly 

 tasting a little differ- 

 ent, it would have the 

 identical action of the 

 compound dispensed 

 by the modern Lon- 



