How Did Ancient Egyptians Keep Their Babies Alive?

A third of Egyptian children never reached age five - and the people burying them under their own floors still built an entire medical system to stop it anyway. This video rebuilds childbirth in ancient Egypt from the ground up: the Kahun Papyrus, the world's oldest surviving medical text, and a urine-based pregnancy test that a 1963 lab trial actually confirmed works. The birth brick found at South Abydos in 2009, and the two plain lumps of mud everyone else actually used. Bes and Taweret standing guard at the foot of the bed, and the ivory wands inscribed to keep specific dangers out. Then it turns to what the diagnosis and the protection never solved - the skeletal evidence from Lahun and Amarna, and the one woman, Naunakhte, whose will is the reason we know her name and her eight children's names at all. Sources: Wegner, J., A Decorated Birth-Brick from South Abydos, 2009 Griffith, F.Ll., The Petrie Papyri: Hieratic Papyri from Kahun and Gurob, 1898 Ghalioungui, P., Khalil, Sh., Ammar, A.R., On an Ancient Egyptian Method of Diagnosing Pregnancy and Determining Foetal Sex, Medical History, 1963 Pinch, G., Magic in Ancient Egypt, 1994 Janssen, R. & Janssen, J.J., Growing Up and Getting Old in Ancient Egypt, 2007 Nunn, J.F., Ancient Egyptian Medicine, 1996 Stevens, A. et al., Human Skeletal Remains from the Workmen's Cemetery, Amarna, Amarna Project, 2013–2020 Ebbell, B., The Papyrus Ebers: The Greatest Egyptian Medical Document, 1937 Toivari-Viitala, J., Women at Deir el-Medina, 2001 What do you think your odds actually were? Let me know in the comments. #AncientEgypt #AncientMedicine #Egyptology