The exhibition Ancient Egypt: Magic and Medicine in the Swansea University Egypt Centre is unusual as there are just two ancient objects on display. One is a limestone fragment that was used like scrap paper to write or draw on. On this fragment, a man has written asking a magician to send goose fat to heal his eyes. Remarkably, a follow-up letter from the same man also survives. It requests more fat because his cat had eaten the last lot.

The other object is a magnificent statuette covered with spells in hieroglyphs and images of Egyptian gods. The statue shows the child form of Horus (the god of sky, war, and divine kingship) standing on a pair of crocodiles while grasping snakes, scorpions, a lion and an ibex.

The statuette encapsulates much of what makes Egypt so fascinating to people of all ages. On the one hand, anyone can identify the animals. On the other hand, the constellation of images is utterly alien and invites speculation.

In this case, the object is a “Cippus” – a medical-magical object used by Egyptians to protect themselves from the dangerous animals that lived in the Nile valley and surrounding deserts. It healed by........

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