How Can an Ancient Pregnancy Test Actually Work?

An ancient Egyptian pregnancy test has been found to work with about 70% accuracy. Learn how it works in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, we have a lot more in common
with ancient people than we might think. For instance, it
was as useful for a woman to know three thousand,
five hundred years ago whether she was pregnant or not
as it is today. And though some may scoff at
many of the practices the ancients considered science, in ancient Egypt,

(00:25):
astrology was cutting edge technology. You've got to hand it
to them. Some of their scientific methods have turned out
to be pretty accurate. According to some unpublished ancient Egyptian
medical texts in the Papyrus Carlsberg collection at the University
of Copenhagen in Denmark, what they had in the way
of pregnancy tests was grain, specifically barley and wheat, but

(00:46):
it worked. According to one papyrus text from around one thousand,
four hundred b C. In order for a woman to
determine whether she was pregnant or not, all she had
to do was urinate in two different bags, one filled
with barley and the other with wheat. If the grain
in either bag subsequently sprouted, the woman was definitely with
child and could start planning accordingly. But wait, there's more.

(01:09):
In order to tell the sex of the child, the
woman simply had to wait and see which of the
grains sprouted first. If the barley sprouted faster, the baby
would be a boy. If the wheat sprouted first, it
would be a girl. According to the National Institute of Health,
a study conducted in nineteen sixty three found that this
method of determining pregnancy is accurate about seventy percent of

(01:30):
the time, which isn't bad, although it was not accurate
at all when it came to determining the sex of
the baby. Modern pregnancy tests rely on proteins that can
detect a hormone called human choreonic ganatotropin or hCG, but
scientists speculate that this old timey test worked so well
because elevated levels of estrogen in a woman's urine might

(01:51):
have promoted seed growth. It's estimated that as few as
zero point zero one percent of ancient Egyptian medical text survive,
but researchers currently pouring over the papyri in the Carlsberg
collection are finding that medical information discovered in ancient Egypt
didn't disappear when the Library of Alexandria burned. By that time,
it had made its way all over the African continent

(02:13):
and beyond. Sophie Shoots, a PhD student from the University
of Copenhagen, told Science Nordic, many of the ideas in
the medical texts from ancient Egypt appear again in later
Greek and Roman texts. From here they spread further to
the medieval medical texts in the Middle East, and you
can find traces all the way up to pre modern medicine,
which goes to show that first of all, people have

(02:35):
always needed useful reproductive health advice, and second of all,
necessity has always been the mother of invention. Today's episode
was written by Jesselyin Shields and produced by Tyler Clang.
I'm supposed to remind you to contain yourself in brain
stuff themed t shirts from our online shop at t

(02:56):
public dot com slash brain Stuff, and of course from
more on this and lots of other inventive topics, visit
our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com. M