Ancient Egyptian Pregnancy Tests
In ancient Egypt, long before modern medicine or even the concept of medicine as a professional discipline existed, people did not have a firm grasp on why some women got pregnant and others did not. They also had no way to predict pregnancy, or to tell the gender of a fetus in a woman’s womb. That did not stop some ancient healers – whether they were charlatans or whether they simply acted on sincerely held but mistaken beliefs – from taking a stab at it.
Some of those attempts even worked. One of the earliest written records of a pregnancy is found in an ancient Egyptian papyrus that dates from around 1350 BC. It called for a woman who might be pregnant to urinate on wheat and barley seeds over the course of several days. As the test put it: “If the barley grows, it means a male child. If the wheat grows, it means a female child. If both do not grow, she will not bear at all“. As seen below, it was not just innocent ancient gibberish: the test actually had some substance to it.
