Regardless of how many
dusty mummies you've watched Brendan Frazier blast
apart with a shotgun, odds are you have no idea what ancient
Egypt was really like. So it might surprise
you to learn that everyday life in
the time of the pharaohs was pretty modern
in a lot of ways. Today, we're exploring
what everyday life was like for ancient Egyptians. Education and medicine were
remarkably sophisticated, and men and women
enjoyed an equality under the law that
wouldn't be seen in other societies
for centuries to come. But before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to the Weird History channel. Now, let's go to Egypt. In addition to being the
primary source of water for crop irrigation
and clothes making, the Nile River was basically
the interstate in ancient Egypt. Both the lower and upper
class alike traveled along it in simple skiffs
and wooden boats to get from place to place. It was also used to transport
the heavy stone blocks used to build the pyramids, and to
ferry the bodies of dead nobles in elaborate
funeral processions. But rather than having to
keep an eye on their speed and watch for state
troopers, the Egyptians had to constantly be on guard
against hippo and crocodile attacks. The Pharaoh Menes was killed
by a hippo while traveling on the Nile, and
it's been suggested that a hippo may have maimed
King Tut in a similar attack, leading to his premature death. Insert Hungry Hungry
Hippos joke here. Beer making was first
recorded 18,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. Like my uncle Gilbert,
Egyptians loved beer. Beer was considered
a staple meal, which is why both children
and adults drank it, and wages were paid
in brewable grain. That said, beer in
ancient Egypt wasn't like the stuff you order by
the glass at the local pub. It was more like a
thick, sweet soup, with a lower alcohol
content so you could have a bowl
or two for dinner without getting into a drunken
fistfight with a hippo. Despite what you
may have assumed, ancient Egyptians
practiced a number of advanced medical
fields, including dentistry, gynecology,
surgery, and even autopsy. Although, maybe that last one
isn't too surprising to anyone. Medical procedures were a
mix between medical treatment and religious
ceremony, but weren't restricted to the upper class. Health care was apparently
available to everyone, including slaves. And hygiene was a big
deal in ancient Egypt, because the Egyptians had
realized that walking around with a three inch layer of
sweat ripened filth clinging to your skin was a
Petri dish for disease. As a result, they
bathed constantly, using soap made from salt and
animal and vegetable oils, and it was commonplace
for both men and women to completely shave off
all their body hair, even the hair on their heads. The Egyptians also
made fragrances. Perfumes brewed
from lily, myrrh, and cardamom were
common, and they may have even created
the first deodorant using a mixture of
citrus and cinnamon. We call that scent breakfast. Despite the undeniable
anatomical knowledge the ancient Egyptians
possessed, they hadn't figured out everything
about the human body. They believed that the mind was
located in the heart, or ibb, and that all thought
originated from it. The heart was also thought to
be the seat of intense emotions like love, sadness,
and bravery, a belief shared by almost every culture. As for the brain, the
ancient Egyptians clearly didn't think much of it,
because it was simply thrown in the trash during
the mummification process. Maybe they thought it
was just skull filling. The judicial system
in ancient Egypt was split between two courts,
the Kenbet and the Great Kenbet. The lower Kenbet basically
dealt with misdemeanors, while the Great Kenbet was
reserved for serious crimes like robbery and murder. Typically the pharaoh's
vizier ruled over each case, with ultimate judgment coming
from the pharaoh himself. But in especially
complicated cases, the courts would defer to
the wills of the oracles. Or, since the oracles
never bothered to show up, the statues of the oracles. In these cases,
both the prosecution and the defense teams would
write out their arguments on a slip of paper
and place them on opposite sides of the street. Whichever direction the statues
appeared to lean more towards was declared the winner,
and the defendant was judged accordingly. That is the most elaborately
arbitrary system of justice, ever. As we mentioned
earlier, gynecology was a medical field
present in ancient Egypt. But much like the
heart and brain debate, the ancient Egyptians hadn't
quite worked out all the kinks yet. They knew that sex
led to childbirth, but they believed the
womb was connected to the alimentary
canal, the path that carries the food from
your mouth to your anus. So in order to test whether
or not a woman was fertile, a clove of garlic was inserted
into a woman's hoo hoo. And if the garlic could
be smelled on her breath, it meant she was able
to bear children. If the garlic
couldn't be smelled, that meant there was some kind
of blockage, or obstruction, and kids were out
of the picture. While garlic is a fine
ingredient in penne pasta, we cannot recommend its
use in this scenario. Board games were a popular
pastime in ancient Egypt, and easily the most popular
one was a game called Senate. Senate was played on an
elongated, chess-style board, with each player
rolling dice or throwing sticks to move the pieces. Senate was so popular
that paintings of Nefertari playing the
game have been discovered on ancient temple walls. Archaeologists have yet
to discover evidence of anyone playing Hungry Hungry
Hippos, that game just hit too close to home. In modern cultures, male infants
are circumcised at birth. But in ancient
Egypt, it was seen as more of a rite of
passage into manhood, and as such, it wasn't
performed until much later. There are temple paintings
depicting priests performing the procedure on boys and
their mid-to-late teens, in case you were wondering
whether or not nightmares existed in ancient Egypt. History is unclear about
the cultural significance of circumcision
in ancient Egypt. For instance, most
pharaohs were circumcised, but the procedure was also done
to humiliate captives and mark slaves. Confusing. Makeup was ubiquitous
in ancient Egypt. Men were not afraid to dip
into the mid-2000s Pete Wentz catalog to wear some
pretty amazing eyeliner. The eye makeup was made
from grinding lead ores into a substance called kohl,
to produce what was essentially lead paint. The makeup used by
ancient Egyptians was high in nitric oxide,
which boosts the immune system and helps fight off disease. So the eyeliner might
have had the added effect of protecting the
eye from infections, while hopefully balancing
out that whole lead poisoning thing. Temples in ancient Egypt
were true community centers, in that they acted both
as places of worship and as depositories for
the nation's wealth. That meant for
most of the period each temple was also a granary. Remember earlier when we said
that people were paid in beer? That's partially because
beer is delicious, but mostly because money
just didn't exist yet. Coinage didn't appear in
Egypt until much later, which meant grain was the
currency everyone used. Administrators at each
temple would dole out grain accordingly, to pay everyone's
wages, with a low income job bringing home about
10 loaves of bread and two jugs of beer. Despite living next to
one of the mightiest rivers in the world,
people in ancient Egypt didn't eat much fish. In fact, they ate very
little meat at all. The ancient Egyptian
diet consisted mostly of wheat and barley, which
makes complete sense when the majority of your population
was paid in bread and beer. Fruits and vegetables, such as
celery, dates, pomegranates, and of course, garlic,
were also plentiful. And even though
meat wasn't common, it was still occasionally
enjoyed during festivals. Or if you were rich,
pretty much whenever you felt like having a steak. If you've ever lived
close to the equator, or watched Miami
Vice in the '80s, you're familiar with the
appeal of linen clothing. Linen is specifically
good for hot weather because it's a thin,
breathable fabric that feels cool to the touch,
and the ancient Egyptians made plenty of it. Linen was made by
picking flax plants from the banks of the Nile and
spinning them into threads that could be then woven into cloth. In addition to simply
being a practical garment for the desert
climate, the fabric was also a symbol of
status, the finer the weave and the lighter the color,
the more important you we're in the social hierarchy In ancient Egypt both sexes
appeared to be equal as far as the law was concerned. Women could buy
and sell property, including both slaves
and land, and were also able to file lawsuits
and petition for divorce. Additionally, the
Egyptians did not practice female
infanticide, which indicates baby girls were
just as valued as baby boys. This seems like the absolute
bare minimum of gender equality until you consider
that the practice was common in other societies
at the same time period. When the Greeks conquered
Egypt in 332 BCE they were surprised to find
that Egyptian women had more independence and civil
liberty than Greek women, which we assume some
Greek general discovered when he tried to give an
Egyptian noblewoman his drink order. Education was a
privilege exclusively reserved for the children
of upper class citizens. Students studied a
variety of subjects that, more or less, resembled
a modern curriculum, including reading and writing,
mathematics, history, science, and medicine. The wealthiest kids, such
as the pharaoh's sons and the sons of nobility,
went to the Prince's School. But scholarships did
exist that allowed certain exceptional lower
class students to attend. It's unclear whether
the scholarship was awarded in beer. Ancient Egypt was surprisingly
modern in several ways, allowing its citizens to
lead lives not totally unrecognizable from
the ones we lead today. Would you like to live
or walk like an Egyptian? Let us know in the comments
below, and check out some of these other videos
of our weird history.
