Over 3,500 years ago, Egypt, a country that sits on two continents (northeast corner of Africa and a southwestern portion in Asia), experienced some of the primary forms of literature, agriculture, urban development, and precursors to the sciences we know today. While astrology and religion were among those “sciences” back then, the Ancient Egyptians were renowned for their medical knowledge.
How do we know this? It turns out that Professor H. O. Lange had been gathering an Egyptian papyrus collection as early as the 1930’s. These purchases are known to be funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, later to be call the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection, as it grew in size. The collection has three other major additions in the 1950’s, early 2000’s, and 2012, now holding over 1,400 papyri and the substantial vestiges of ancient Egyptian scientific understanding. While the history and reach of these assembled texts cannot be fully known, they raise new questions about the veracity of Ancient Egypt’s medical sciences and what is to be learned from further study.
Ancient Egyptians knew more about anatomy, we’ve learned
Through the collaboration between academics in universities and museums, translations are being published of the medical texts within the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection. As translations are a tedious process–the papyri can be worn and damaged, must be handled with care, read by experts interpreting an ancient language communicating complex ideas–it’s not surprising it has taken so long for them to be understood.
However, new light is shed on ancient Egyptians’ understanding of human anatomy. One such example is that Egyptologists have long-posited that they were unaware of kidneys’ presence in the human body. But, this is undoubtedly false, as the papyri includes a clear discussion of the kidneys.
Further on in the analysis of the texts, you see that the civilization had an understanding of not just the inner maladies of the body, but also external disorders such as trichiasis, a medical condition where the eyelashes grow invertedly toward the eye.
Ancient Egyptians used urine-based pregnancy tests
If you think that you’re pregnant today, it’s very likely that you might go to a nearby drugstore and pick up a pregnancy test to get an answer. Well, it turns out ancient Egyptians had such a protocol three-and-a-half millennia ago. In 1939, a Danish Egyptologist translated that portion of the text that lays out a pregnancy test using barley and wheat.
The papyrus explains that a woman, in order to determine pregnancy and sex of the would-be child, she is to urinate into barley and emmer (a variety of wheat used back then). If the wheat or emmer grow, its determination is that the woman is pregnant.
If it’s the emmer that grows, the baby is to be a girl. If it’s the wheat growing, it’s a boy.
The importance of this finding is that it stands the test of time throughout antiquity, reaching other global powers’ medicine (including Greeks, Romans, Ottomans and even Europeans in the 17th century). It shows how Ancient Egypt’s medicine was venerated and passed along to other cultures.
Modern research suggests ancient Egyptian medical texts may have some scientific bases
More important than the pregnancy test’s endurance and reach across foreign waters across the ages, is the scientific accuracy of the test. In 1963, 20 or so years after its first translation, medical researchers examined and investigated the method.
As you might guess, it worked! Now, not about the sex of the unborn child, but the ancient Egyptian medical texts’ pregnancy test was able to determine pregnancy 70% of the time. Another decade later, the first home pregnancy tests made it onto the market, monitoring for the hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which presents in a woman’s blood after conception.
In laboratory testing, the home pregnancy test provides 97.5% accuracy, but out in the real world, that number is only about 75%, according to a National Institutes of Health’s US National Library of Medicine meta-analysis. So, it turns out that the wheat and emmer urine tests can give almost the same accuracy as what modern medical science has provided. While I’m not advocating trying this at home, it’s important to acknowledge how trial-and-error in the ancient worlds has led to scientifically-validated medical knowledge.
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While medical practitioners today tend to think of the scientific method that has dominated modern medicine, we know that there is more to healing one’s self than merely rational data. These Ancient Egyptian medical texts were steeped in spiritual stories and lore, that we are seeing through to the underlying wisdom of these practices can be beneficial to complementary and integrative medicine.