Morphological changes in human schistosomiasis and certain analogies in ancient Egyptian sculpture.

* Egyptian sculpture has created statues and reliefs with deformations similar to morphological changes such as found in human schistosomiasis; characteristics of splenomegaly have been depicted in naturalistic reliefs and also symbolically in order to indicate assumed qualities of deities. Such statues show usually to some degree a transformation from male to morphological female features as is observed in humans in certain cases of advanced schistosomiasis. One has, however, to keep in mind that there are also statues and reliefs which show the various mentioned characteristics without any association with schisto¬ somiasis. Examples are the sculptures representing Pharao Akhenaten.