Speaker A
It's around 1250 BCE. You're standing in a village in the desert, west of the Nile, just over the ridge from the Valley of the Kings. The sun is barely up. It's already warm. Down the single, dusty street, men are gathering for the
Explores how ancient Egyptian women managed menstruation using linen, ritual purity, and medical practices, revealing unique cultural insights.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Menstruation in ancient Egypt was linguistically and conceptually linked to purification, not impurity.
- Linen was the primary material used for menstrual hygiene, supported by medical and cultural evidence.
- There is no direct ancient evidence for papyrus tampons; this is likely a modern myth.
- Ancient Egyptian society valued ritual purity highly, influencing bodily practices including menstruation.
- Reconstructing ancient menstrual practices requires piecing together indirect evidence from diverse sources.
What the video covers
- The video investigates how ancient Egyptian women handled menstruation around 1250 BCE using historical and archaeological evidence.
- Ancient Egypt had extensive written records but no direct documentation on menstrual hygiene, likely due to male scribes focusing on institutional matters.
- Menstruation and the purifying salt natron shared the same Egyptian word 'hemin', linking menstruation conceptually to cleansing rather than contamination.
- Linen, a major Egyptian crop and industry, was the most plausible material used for menstrual management, supported by medical texts describing linen pessaries.
- Common claims about papyrus tampons lack primary evidence and are likely modern assumptions rather than historical facts.
- Egyptian religion emphasized ritual purity, with priests practicing frequent washing and using natron for cleansing, reflecting the cultural context of bodily purity.
- Medical papyri describe treatments involving linen soaked in honey, oil, or herbs for vaginal health, indicating advanced medical knowledge.
- Laundry and washing of menstrual cloths were documented as part of daily life, showing the practical aspects of menstrual management.
- The video highlights the importance of detective work using language, materials, medicine, and labor records to reconstruct ancient practices.
- Ancient Egyptian women had notable legal rights, but menstrual hygiene remains a subtle and under-recorded aspect of their daily lives.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Setting the Scene in Ancient Egypt
- 01:41The Challenge of Finding Direct Evidence
- 03:20Concept of Cleanliness and Ritual Purity
- 04:55Natron and the Linguistic Link to Menstruation
- 06:40Linen as the Likely Menstrual Material
- 08:19Laundry and Practical Menstrual Management
- 10:04Medical Treatments Using Linen and Herbs
- 11:48Broader Cultural and Social Context
- 14:02Conclusion: Piecing Together the Evidence
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
walk to work, because this village exists for exactly one reason. These are the craftsmen who carve and paint the tombs of the pharaohs. This is Dare El Medina. And standing off to the side is a scribe with a shard of broken
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limestone and a reed pen taking attendance. Because even 3,000 years ago, somebody was tracking your PTO. He writes down who showed up. He writes down who didn't. And next to the names of the men who didn't, he writes the
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reason. Brewing beer, building his house, scorpion sting, wrapped his mother's body, drinking with a colleague, which respect for the honesty. And then next to more than one name, he writes a single word. Hezman.
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His daughter was menstruating. That shard of limestone still exists. You can go look at it. Which means the oldest surviving workplace absence record in human history. The great-great-grandfather of every working from home today slack message you've ever sent
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casually mentions a teenage girl's period as a normal statable write it in the official log fact of life. So today we're going to Egypt. Just Egypt. Not a tour of the ancient world, not a highlight reel. One civilization in
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depth because Egypt left receipts. We're going to get into the linen, the laundry, the medical papyri that predate the pyramids at Giza's most famous neighbors. A pregnancy test involving barley that shouldn't work but sort of does. An amulet made from a goddess's
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blood. And one word in the Egyptian language that quietly reframes the entire subject. Let's go. The problem with asking this question at all, here's the thing nobody tells you about ancient Egypt. We know an absurd amount about it. We know what they ate. We know how
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much beer a tomb worker was paid per day. We know the names of the guys who complained about it. We have 3,000 years of continuous written record from a civilization that was obsessed with writing things down and even more
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obsessed with building things out of stone in a desert, which is the single best archival strategy anyone has ever accidentally invented. And yet, if you go looking for a clear, direct, unambiguous answer to what did an Egyptian woman physically use during her
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period, you will not find one. There is no papyrus that says, "Here is how you do it." There's no illustration. There's no tomb painting of it. And the Egyptians painted everything. They painted men making sandals. They painted geese being counted. There is a tomb
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wall somewhere with a detailed depiction of a guy force-feeding a hyena, which again, they painted everything, but not this. And that gap is not because Egyptians were squeamish about it.
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That's the interesting part. The gap exists because of who was holding the pen. Egyptian scribes were overwhelmingly men writing for institutional purposes. Temples, tax records, tomb decoration, legal contracts, state bureaucracy. Nobody writes down the stuff everybody already knows. You have never once written down
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how to use a doorknob. So, what we're doing for the rest of this video is detective work. We're assembling the answer out of side evidence. Materials, medicine, magic, labor records, and language. And the picture that emerges is much stranger and much better than
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you'd expect. Starting with the word foundation. Egypt ran on the concept of clean. To understand anything about the body in ancient Egypt, you have to understand that Egyptian religion was completely magnificently obsessed with ritual purity. Not morality, purity.
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Those are different things and confusing them is where most people go wrong. Egyptian priests shaved off all their body hair. All of it. Every few days they washed multiple times a day, including in the middle of the night.
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They wore linen only because linen comes from a plant and animal fibers like wool were considered unsuitable for entering a temple. They rinsed their mouths with a salt solution before speaking to a god. None of this was because they
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thought they were bad people. It was because approaching the divine required you to be in a specific state and there was a checklist and you either met the standard or you waited until you did.
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Purity in Egypt was much less clean versus filthy and much more ready versus not ready. [snorts] It was a status you could lose and then get back by washing.
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And the substance that did the washing was natron. Natron is a naturally occurring salt that collects in dry lake beds, especially in Wadi Natron northwest of Cairo. It's a mix of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate. And it is genuinely useful stuff. It's a cleaning
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agent. It's a preservative. It's what you use to dry out a body when you're mummifying it. The Egyptians used natron to purify temples, purify priests, purify the dead, and purify themselves.
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Natron was the material of becoming clean and the Egyptian word for natron is hemin. Now the Egyptian word for menstruation is also hemin. A menstruating woman was a heminet. Menstruation was filed linguistically in the same drawer as the purifying salt. Now I want to be careful
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here because this is the kind of fact that gets flattened on the internet into Egyptians thought periods were holy and that's not quite what's going on.
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Egyptologists have argued about this for a long time, and the honest answer is that the overlap probably reflects a shared underlying idea of the body cleansing itself, a purging, a discharge that clears something out. But sit with what that means anyway. In one of the
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most influential civilizations in human history, the conceptual category that menstruation got sorted into was not contamination. It was cleaning. Hold on to that. We're coming back to it and it's going to explain something. What they actually used: the linen answer.
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Okay, practical question. What was the material? You will read on approximately 9,000 websites that Egyptian women used softened papyrus as tampons. It's everywhere. It's in listicles. It's stated with total confidence. And it might be true, but I want to be straight
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with you. That claim has almost no primary evidence behind it. Nobody has found a papyrus tampon. No text describes one. It appears to be a modern inference that got repeated so many times it calcified into a fact. It's
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plausible papyrus was abundant and could be processed soft. But if someone tells you the Egyptians definitely used papyrus tampons, they're telling you a rumor with a nice tan. The much better supported answer is boring and it's linen. Egypt was a linen civilization in
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a way that's hard to overstate. Flax was one of the great crops of the Nile Valley. Linen production was an enormous industry largely run by women from the growing and reeding of flax through spinning and weaving. Linen was
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clothing. Linen was bedding. Linen was currency, sometimes literally used in payments and exchange. Linen was what you wrapped the dead in. Hundreds of square meters of it per mummy. And critically, Egyptian linen came in grades. There was fine royal linen,
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sheer enough that you can see through it in tomb paintings. And there was coarse everyday cloth. And there was the stuff at the end of a garment's life when it had been worn and washed and patched until it wasn't a garment anymore. It
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was a rag. Egyptian medical texts confirmed they used soft folded and rolled linen internally in a medical context. Recipes call for medicated pessaries and plugs of cloth soaked in honey or oil or herbs placed in the vagina to treat various conditions. So
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the technology of folded absorbent linen placed where it needs to be is documented. It's not speculation. It's just documented in a treatment context rather than a menstrual one. Everything else follows logically. Folded linen pads, rolled linen, a belt or a sash to
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hold it. Washed in the Nile or in a basin, dried in a climate that dries things almost
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here's a detail I love. At Dare El Medina, laundry was a state provided service. The village had assigned washermen, recti, who took the household laundry down to the water and washed it as part of the government's support for
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the workforce. We have their lists. We have records of disputes about laundry. Somebody in the 13th century BCE filed a complaint about their washing, which means the most tedious, invisible, thankless part of managing a period in the ancient world. The washing was for
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at least this one village somebody's actual paid job. the medicine, the oldest gynecology on earth. Now, let's talk about what Egyptian doctors thought was going on because Egypt is where written gynecology begins. Not one of the places, the place. In 1889, the
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archaeologist Flender's Petri was excavating at Lahun, the town built for the workers on the pyramid of Senoset II. He found a papyrus badly damaged in fragments. It dates to around 1825 B.CE.
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That is roughly 3,800 years ago. That is older than the Trojan War. Older than Tuten Camun by 5 centuries. Older than Moses by any dating you like. Older than the Greeks having an alphabet. It's now called the Kahun gynecological papyrus.
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And it is the oldest known medical text about women's health anywhere in the world. It's organized in numbered sections, each one following the same clean format. A description of a woman's complaint, a diagnosis, a treatment.
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Pain in the abdomen, problems with the eyes and the neck that the physician connects to the uterus, discharge, difficulty conceiving. Some of the theory is wrong in ways that are almost charming. Egyptian medicine held that the uterus could move around the body
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and cause symptoms elsewhere. An idea that eventually gets exported to Greece and becomes the wandering womb, which then haunts Western medicine for literally 2,000 years. Egypt started that. Sorry about that one. Egypt. But the practice is often startlingly
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reasonable. Fumigations, massage, herbal preparations, vaginal peseries, honey which is genuinely antibacterial, acacia gum which fermentss into lactic acid which is genuinely spermicidal which is why acacia shows up in Egyptian contraceptive recipes and why Egyptian contraceptive recipes were not entirely
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wishful thinking. Three centuries later around 1550 B.CE CE you get the Eber's papyrus which is enormous over 100 pages of text and contains a large section on women's conditions. Remedies to make menstruation come. Remedies to stop excessive bleeding. Treatments for pain.
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The remedies to bring on a late period are worth pausing on. That category of medicine, substances to restart a stopped cycle, exists in basically every ancient medical tradition. And it always sits in an interesting gray zone because a drug that restarts menration and a
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drug that ends in early pregnancy are frequently the same drug. Egyptian texts don't editorialize about this. They just list the recipe, which tells you something about how the whole subject was handled. Not with horror, with a recipe, the barley test. I have to tell
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you about the pregnancy test because it's my favorite thing in Egyptian medicine. There's a text preserved in the Berlin papyrus and in a later copy that gives the following instructions.
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Take barley. Take emwhew wheat. Put them in separate cloth bags. Have the woman urinate on them every day. If the barley sprouts, she is pregnant with a boy. If the emmer sprouts, a girl. If neither sprouts, she is not pregnant. Now,
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obviously, the sex prediction is nonsense. 50/50 guests dressed up in agriculture. But in 1963, researchers actually tested the underlying claim.
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They took urine from pregnant women and urine from non-pregant women and men and they poured it on barley and emmer seeds and the seeds soaked in the urine of pregnant women germinated noticeably more often. The commonly cited figure is
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around 70% accuracy for detecting pregnancy. The likely mechanism is elevated hormone levels in the urine of a pregnant woman promoting germination.
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And I want to be honest that the study is old, small, and has never been definitively replicated. So, it lives in that lovely category of probably real still argued about. But think about what that implies. Somebody in Egypt
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thousands of years ago noticed a pattern. They had no concept of hormones. They had no idea what a chemical messenger was. They just watched over what must have been an enormous number of observations. And they clocked that something in the urine
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of pregnant women made seeds behave differently. That's not superstition. That's an experiment. It's an experiment run by people who couldn't possibly explain their own result, which is, if we're being honest, how most science actually works. And if you want the full
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story of what happened once that test came back positive, I made a whole video on how ancient Egyptians actually handled pregnancy, start to finish. And notice what a pregnancy test implies about menration. It implies women were tracking. It implies a late period was a
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known, recognized, meaningful signal, and there was a documented procedure for figuring out what it meant. the absence records and the thing we can't quite read. Back to Dare El Medina and that shard of limestone. The village is the
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single richest source we have for daily life in the ancient world because these workers were literate and they wrote on rock and rock survives. We have their letters, their laundry lists, their court cases, their love poems, their doodles, their complaints about their
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bosses and we have the attendance records. The most famous one dates to the reign of Rameses II around the 40th year of his reign and it's in the British Museum. It lists workmen and why they were absent. And more than once the
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reason given for a man's absence is that a woman in his household, his wife, his daughter, his mother was menrating.
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Here's where it gets genuinely unresolved. And I think the uncertainty is more interesting than a clean answer would be. We don't know why that meant he stayed home. One reading it was practical. If the women of the house
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were temporarily out of the normal run of household work, somebody had to do it and that somebody was him. It's a domestic labor story. Another reading.
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It was about purity. Not in a shameful sense, remember Hezman, but in the procedural Egyptian sense of a household temporarily being in a different state, requiring particular handling before normal activity resumed. It's a ritual story. A third reading, and this is
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where the debate gets sharp. There are references at Dear El Medina to something translated as the place of women and some scholars have suggested a structure outside the village walls that women used during menstruation. Other scholars think that reading stretches
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the evidence well past where it can go. The Egyptologist Janna Toyvari Vitala did careful work on exactly this question and the honest conclusion is that we cannot confirm it. So, put those three readings side by side and admit we
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don't know which one is right or whether it's some blend of all three. But notice what all three have in common. In every reading, a woman's cycle was a fact that the state's own labor bureaucracy accommodated. It went in the log. It was
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an acceptable reason. Nobody appears to have been penalized for it. Ancient Egyptian tomb construction, one of the most demanding, prestigious, deadline driven state projects in the ancient world, simply absorbed it as a normal cost of having a workforce made of human
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beings with families. Let that sit for a second and then go think about your own workplace. The blood of Isis. There's one more piece and it's the strangest.
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Among the most common amulets in all of ancient Egypt is an object called the Tayatt. It looks a bit like an ankh with its arms folded down. It's often called the knot of Isis and it's frequently made of red material, red jasper,
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carnelon, red glass, red fans. The book of the dead, spell 156 gives instructions for placing a tyot of red jasper at the throat of the deceased, and the words of the spell invoke the blood of Isis, her power, her magic, as
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protection for the dead person in the afterlife. Egyptologists debate how literally to take the blood connection and whether menstrual blood specifically is meant. But the association between the amulet, the color red, the goddess, and blood as a source of protective
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power is right there in the text. So here's the picture. In a civilization where the flooding of the Nile, the single event the entire country depended on for survival, arrived every year carrying reddish brown silt down from the Ethiopian highlands, where fertility
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was the organizing principle of the state religion, where the goddess who reassembles her murdered husband and conceives a child from him is arguably the most beloved figure in the pantheon.
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In that civilization, blood associated with the female body shows up not as something that ruins crops or kills bees, which is what a certain Roman encyclopedia writer would claim about 1500 years later, but as something you put around the neck of your dead to keep
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them safe forever. That's a different universe. Now, here's the part that changes the question. Everything up to now has been about how materials, medicine, records, magic, but there's a question hiding underneath all of it.
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And once you see it, you can't unsee it. How often did this actually happen?
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Because a modern woman in a wealthy country with good nutrition, one or two children or none, and a few months of breastfeeding, will menrate something on the order of 350 to 450 times in her life. That's the modern baseline. That's
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the number we all quietly assume is just what a female body does. An ancient Egyptian woman's number was nowhere near that. Start with menarchy. Onset of menstruation is strongly tied to nutrition and body fat. And in a pre-industrial agricultural society with
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seasonal food stress, it arrived later. Then marriage, which for many Egyptian women happened in their mid- teens. Then pregnancy and pregnancy and pregnancy in a society with high infant mortality, where large families were both desired and necessary, and then breastfeeding.
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The Egyptian wisdom text known as the instruction of Ani tells a young man to remember that his mother nursed him for 3 years. 3 years. And extended frequent breastfeeding suppresses ovulation.
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That's lactational amenora. And it's real physiology, not folklore. Stack it up, later start, early marriage, repeated pregnancy, years of nursing between each one, a shorter life. And the arithmetic comes out somewhere in the range of a few dozen menstrual
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periods across an entire lifetime. Estimates vary and nobody can give you a hard number, but every serious attempt lands enormously below the modern figure, which flips the whole thing around. We've been asking how an Egyptian woman managed her period as
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though it were the constant background rhythm of her adult life, the way it is for a modern woman. For a great many Egyptian women, it wasn't the rhythm at all. It was the interruption. It was the thing that showed up in the gaps between
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pregnancies and nursing relatively rarely. And when it did show up, it carried an enormous amount of information. It meant not pregnant, which in a society where children were survival security labor inheritance and the continuation of your name, which
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the Egyptians believed was the actual mechanism of immortality, was not a small piece of news. That's why there's a pregnancy test. That's why the medical papyrie are so much more interested in bringing a period on and infertility than in managing flow. We've been
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reading their priorities as a gap in the record. It's not a gap, it's the answer.
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They wrote about what mattered most to them and what mattered most was the signal, not the logistics. The logistics were solved. It was linen. Everybody knew. Let's take a step back. So, what does the full picture actually tell us?
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First, the material was never the problem. Linen was everywhere. Egypt was drowning in linen. The physical challenge of absorbing menstrual flow was solved thousands of years before anyone thought to write about it in Egypt and in every other society using
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whatever soft absorbent thing was locally abundant. Nobody was struggling with the fabric. Second, the category was everything. This is the reframe and it's why we spent time on one word.
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Purification not pollution. Egypt sorted menration into the same conceptual bin as the salt you clean a temple with. And the downstream effects of that single categorical decision show up everywhere.
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In a scribe writing it plainly in an official log in doctors treating it as a routine clinical subject in a red amulet protecting the dead. Compare that to societies that sorted it into the contamination bin and you get isolation,
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exclusion, and shame. Same biology, same materials, wildly different lives. The culture was always the variable. Third, and I want to be careful not to oversell Egypt here, this is not a story about a feminist utopia in the desert. Egyptian
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women had genuinely remarkable legal standing for the ancient world. They could own property, buy and sell it, enter contracts, testify in court, initiate divorce. That's real and it's unusual. But this was still a deeply hierarchical society. Women were largely
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excluded from the scribal and administrative class. And almost everything we've discussed comes from a literate, comparatively privileged village attached to a royal project. The peasant woman working a field in the Delta left us nothing. She's the majority and she's invisible. Fourth, we
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only know any of this by accident. The scribe at Dare El Medina was not documenting women's lives. He was doing payroll. He wrote he on that limestone because he needed to justify a labor shortfall to his supervisor. and he
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wrote it on a rock instead of papyrus because rock was free. Everything we know about that girl's life comes from a bureaucrat cutting corners on stationary, which is when you think about it, how most of the human past
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reaches us. Not through the monuments, not through the things built to last. The temples and the obelisks and the colossal statues designed by kings specifically to make sure you'd still be looking at them in 3,000 years. Those tell you what power wanted you to think.
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The real stuff, the daily texture of being alive, survives by pure luck. A discarded shard, a grocery list, a note somebody scratched down and threw away without a single thought that anyone would ever read it. A father in a desert
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village 3,200 years ago, stays home for the day. His daughter is unwell or the household is in a particular state or there's work that needs doing that he now has to do. We don't fully know. He's not thinking about history. He's
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thinking about the fact that he's not getting paid today. And a scribe writes one word on a broken piece of rock. The pharaoh that man was building a tomb for wanted to be remembered forever and spent an immense fortune making sure of
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it. And we do remember him. But we also entirely by accident remember his daughter. Nobody carved her name into a temple wall. She got a shard of limestone and a single word. Turns out that was enough. So question for you. Of
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everything in your life right now, all the receipts and the messages and the throwaway notes, what's the one accidental thing you'd want to survive 3,000 years? Let me know in the comments. See you soon.
Topics:Ancient Egyptmenstruationmenstrual hygienelinennatronritual purityEgyptian medicinehistorical hygieneDare El Medinaancient women
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