8. 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 fully understand why some women got pregnant while 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 physicians – whether they were charlatans or whether they simply acted on a sincerely held but mistaken belief – from taking a stab at it.
Surprisingly, some of those attempts actually worked. One of the earliest written records of a pregnancy test 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 barley and wheat 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 had some substance to it.