37. Ancient Egyptians Had an Odd, and Oddly Effective, Pregnancy Test
Before modern medicine or even the concept of medicine as a professional discipline came into being, the ancients had no firm grasp on why some women became pregnant and others did not. Nor did they have any way of predicting pregnancy, or telling the gender of a fetus in a woman’s womb. That did not stop some ancient healers – whether they were charlatans or whether they were simply acting on sincerely held but mistaken beliefs – from trying. Some of those tries even worked. One of the earliest written records of pregnancy is found in an ancient Egyptian papyrus, dating to around 1350 BC. It called for a woman who might be pregnant to pee on wheat and barley seeds over the course of several days.
According to the ancient Egyptian test: “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“. Surprisingly, when tested in 1963, it turned out there might be something to the ancient Egyptian pregnancy test. It did nothing for predicting gender, but the urine of pregnant women actually promoted growth 70% of the time, while the pee of non-pregnant women (and men) did not. It was the earliest known example of testing for pregnancy by detecting something unique in the urine of pregnant women. In this case, the elevated levels of estrogen in pregnant women’s urine might have been the key to the test’s success.