The scribe sat down to do his work. It was just like any other day. He was in the

business of copying and pasting millennia before we had computers to do the job for us. Bent over

the page, he carefully scratched out over 400 lines of hieroglyphs. This was a really important project.

The document he was copying was already over a thousand years old, and its preservation was

important. But although he was a master of his craft, he was a bit out of his depth with what

he was transcribing. The source document talked about the human body from the top down

and from the inside out, and this scribe was encountering glyphs he had never seen before.

He scratched out his errors and made notes in the margins, his writing implement clumsily

making strokes for characters unfamiliar to him. In fact, according to later scholars,

he created the earliest known

asterisk in the history of bookmaking. But what did make it onto his page was really

marvelous stuff, a collection of anatomical case studies, and a treatise detailing scientific

procedures for dealing with various injuries. And then, in the middle of his project,

somewhere between the thorax and the spinal column, he quit. No one knew why, not James Henry

Brested or any of the Egyptologists who came before him. It had landed on his desk in 1920,

already estimated to be 3,500 years old. But James saw something

important and alarming. When the scribe started writing again, he started copying something

completely different, magical incantations to fight pestilence, spells to manage women's health

concerns, and tricks to make old men young again.

James and his fellow Egyptologists didn't know for sure, but they suspected that this ancient

scribe was unaware of the importance of the work he'd left unfinished, and James would go on

to spend years pouring over it. It proved to be a singular, remarkable artifact, the earliest known evidence of

...