The woman who gave her breast for hire: notes on a Christian wall-painting from Tebtunis

This article gives a new reading and interpretation of a Coptic legend accompanying a wall-painting in a medieval church at Tebtunis, first published by C. C. Walters in this journal in 1989. Among depictions of the punishment of various sinners, the figure of a woman whose breasts are attacked by snakes can be connected with a belief in the sinfulness of wet-nursing, which is paralleled in Byzantine, Zoroastrian, and Mandaean contexts. Such scruples, foreign to Egypt in earlier times, may be owed to Gnosticism.