Medicine Box with Hygieia

Medicine Box with Hygieia

Medicine Box with Hygieia, early Byzantine, 6th century, ivory, 7.5 cm x 6 cm x 2.5 cm, Washington D.C., Dumbarton Oaks.

Museum description: “Most ivory and bone containers are really wooden, covered with veneers of ivory. This craftsman chose the more extravagant option of carving the box with its six compartments out of a solid block of ivory, the rounded back following the contour of the outside of the tusk. The sliding lid with its figural relief is a separate piece. There are boxes of the same design and imagery in Switzerland (in the Cathedral Treasury at Chur and in the Church at Valeria) and a third on a larger scale with different imagery here at Dumbarton Oaks (accession no. BZ.1947.8). All of these have in common the distinctive scrolls at the top of the lid. They are all designed to accommodate locks (now missing), and most, like this one, have holes drilled into the top which may have been used to attach straps for carrying. The user apparently needed to ensure that the substances stored in the tiny compartments remained unmixed and safe.

The imagery on the lid, as on the lids on the examples in Switzerland, indicates what these substances may have been. The seated woman feeding a large snake out of a bowl in her left hand is Hygieia “Health”. She was one of the daughters, according to ancient Greek tradition, of Asklepios, the god of healing. The boxes, therefore, probably housed pharmaceuticals. Early Byzantine pharmacology relied on an elaborate classification of natural substances as warmer, cooler, dryer, or moister that had been codified by Galen in the 2nd century. Aetius of Amida, a sixth-century medical writer, catalogued 613 substances, mostly vegetable, but also animal and mineral; and described how their judicious combination would bring about cures. The use of Hygieia as the symbol of health is a long-lived vestige of an undying ancient mythology.”

-J. Hanson

http://museum.doaks.org/objects-1/info/30352

Dumbarton Oaks. BZ.1948.15