Janssen, RMH; (2016) Making an Ancient Egyptian contraceptive: learning from experiment and experience. In: Price, C and Nicholson, P and Morkot, R and Tyldesley, J and Chamberlain, A and Forshaw, R, (eds.) Mummies, Magic and Medicine: Multidisciplinary Essays in Egyptology for Rosalie David. (pp. 398-405). Manchester University Press: Manchester, UK.

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Abstract

It is a great pleasure to dedicate this article to Professor Rosalie David as an educator who has been at the forefront of university adult education. Having single-handedly set up her innovative Certificate in Egyptology at the University of Manchester, she then ran a consistently oversubscribed course for over twenty-five years, enabling successive cohorts of locally-based adult learners to study Egyptology seriously for the first time. I was privileged to be involved as the programme’s external examiner for several years during the 1990s, and witnessed several completers subsequently publish their dissertations; I was particularly delighted to be asked to append the foreword to that by Peter Phillips (2002). It is a testament to her inspirational teaching that several of Rosalie’s students subsequently went on to make a considerable mark on our discipline – I think particularly of the late Bob Partridge in this regard. Others are still actively involved in adult education with the editing of publications such as Ancient Egypt magazine, in the running of their own, now longstanding, Egyptology societies, and as sought after lecturers at conferences both at home and abroad. It is those firm foundations laid by Professor David as an educator and the resultant reputation of the University of Manchester as a provider of Egyptology for adult learners that has enabled the current Egyptology Online distance learning courses, run by Joyce Tyldesley and Glenn Godenho from the Faculty of Life Sciences, to prove equally popular to a now global audience. This is particularly significant when we have in recent years witnessed the sad demise of adult learning provision in the United Kingdom with the amalgamation or, in most cases, the complete closure of several long-established University departments of continuing education. The aim of this article is to describe and discuss one recent experimental learning session of my own which involved the recreation of an Ancient Egyptian contraceptive. Links to a similar prescription in the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus mean that it stands as a further acknowledgement to Professor David’s outstanding contribution to both the study of Egyptian medicine, and to her seminal inception of the Kahun Project with its in-depth analysis by experts of the pottery, metals, and textile evidence from the site (David 1986). In my current role as a Lecturer in Education, I finally come full circle from those early days when Rosalie and I worked together on her Certificate to explore what recent educational theory has to tell us about the value of learning from experiment and experience.

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