How We Know What We Know
Egyptologists have learned a lot about the types of illnesses the ancient Egyptians suffered from by looking at mummies. But how did people treat these illnesses? A handful of surviving texts can help us answer this question. These texts were often written on papyri and covered a range of topics. Ancient Egyptians wrote about surgery, women’s health, children’s health, and eye health.The texts also gave people instructions to help them diagnose and treat an illness based on a person’s symptoms.
It is important to remember that these texts won’t tell us everything about
ancient Egyptian medicine. Unfortunately, many medical texts have not survived.
People also may not have written down the treatments they used. This is because only about one percent of the population could read and write!
The Papyrus Ebers is a very long scroll that contains over 700 remedies. It was written over 3,000 years ago!
Magic and Medicine
One thing we do know for certain is that the Egyptians did not separate magic from medical science. A good example of this can be found on the Metternich Stela. This huge stone slab contains rows of hieroglyphs. The hieroglyphs give instructions, or “magic spells,” for treating spider and scorpion bites. The spells often call on a god or goddess for help.
“Flow out, poison! Come forth! Go forth on to the ground! Horus will exorcise you. He will punish you. He will spit you out.”
Ancient Egyptians believed gods and goddesses, like Horus, could heal with magic. We also know that they thought a group of people, called kherep priests, could help heal too. There were five kherep priests of Serqet who were “magicians” and also had the title of swnw. Swnw was the ancient Egyptian word for “doctor.”
Although the ancient Egyptians blended magic and medicine, they still had plenty of medical remedies for illnesses and injuries. These remedies were often used for problems they could see on the body.
The World's Oldest Recorded Pregnancy Test?
Perhaps one of the most impressive facts about ancient Egyptian medicine is that they had a pregnancy test that was 70 percent accurate! For the test, women would wee on barley and wheat seeds. If the seeds sprouted, she was pregnant. Ancient Egyptians also thought you could tell if the baby would be a boy or a girl depending on which seed grew. Unfortunately, that part of the test wasn’t accurate.
A Mummy Will Make It Better
Long after the end of ancient Egypt as we know it, ancient Egyptian medicine was still being used but in a very different way.
For a few hundred years, from the medieval period onward, powdered mummy, or “mummia,” was dissolved in alcohol and taken as medicine to treat all sorts of illnesses. In fact, there is a record in a German medical catalog of powdered mummy being sold as medicine as recently as the early 1900s! People believed mummia could cure anything from a headache to a heart attack. This treatment thankfully fell out of fashion, but people’s fascination with ancient remedies continued.
From magical remedies to powdered mummies, ancient Egyptian medicine has had a very long and interesting history!