The Ancient Egyptians have made remarkable discoveries that have had a significant impact on modern life, some of which we now consider commonplace, such as calendars and clocks. However, a recent extraordinary finding involving an Ancient Egyptian text reveals that women were conducting pregnancy tests 3,500 years ago!
A papyrus from Ancient Egypt contains hieroglyphic instructions detailing how women could determine their pregnancy status by urinating into a bag of barley and a bag of emmer, a type of wheat cultivated in ancient Egypt at that time.
A researcher at the University of Copenhagen, studying this document, deciphered the text which stated: "If they grow, she will give birth. If the barley grows, it is a boy. If the emmer grows, it is a girl. If they do not grow, she will not give birth." CNN reported that the text dates back to the period between 1500 and 1300 BC.
This discovery is among a collection of papyri owned by the University of Copenhagen, which contains several medical texts from that era."We are dealing with an incredibly rare type of material," said Egyptologist Kim Ryholt, head of the Carlsberg papyrus collection and a member of the international research team responsible for translating the texts, in an interview with CNN. "There are fewer than a dozen well-preserved ancient Egyptian medical papyri... Any new finding will provide important insights."
Experts also noted that this method of pregnancy testing was utilized in ancient Greek and Roman medicine, as well as in various European medical traditions.
According to CNN, researchers tested this theory in 1963 and discovered that in 70% of cases, the urine of pregnant women did indeed cause the grains to sprout.
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