Chapter 5

### Chapter Four: The Bizarre Ancient Egyptian Medicine and Commerce!

Poor diet can lead to illness, and when one falls ill, they need treatment, which brings us to the topic of ancient Egyptian medicine. By the standards of ancient times, ancient Egyptian medicine was quite advanced, with a detailed division of specialties. According to the records of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus in his book "The Histories": "... (The Egyptians) divided their medical techniques in such a way that each doctor was only required to master one type of disease and not more. In every place I visited, the medical profession was strictly divided, with each physician responsible for one type of disease. Some doctors only treated eyes, some only treated teeth, and others only treated the stomach..."

In summary, ancient Egyptian medicine had a very detailed division of specialties, pioneering the concept of specialized medicine, with eye doctors, dentists, headache specialists, stomach disease specialists, hand and foot specialists, and so on. However, unfortunately, the prescriptions they gave... besides common herbs, they also liked to mix in various types of soil and all sorts of bizarre animal feces and urine—much like in "Journey to the West," where Sun Wukong and his companions used horse urine to make medicinal pills for treatment...

As for the ancient Egyptians' method of treating toothaches, it was even more terrifying—killing a fresh rat, skinning it, and then stuffing it bloody into the mouth to chew, like chewing gum, with the rat's tail still twitching outside... Archaeologists discovered a skinned rat in the digestive tract of an ancient Egyptian mummy from around 4000 BC, indicating that this "raw rat" therapy was not fictional.

In a sense, using rats to treat toothaches fully reflects the early human belief in "eating what you need to supplement what you lack."

In summary, those enthusiastic time travelers who head to the ancient Egyptian world might first be stripped, shaved, and humiliated upon arrival. Then, due to unhealthy diets, they might develop cavities and stomach ailments, only to be treated by quacks with horse manure and forced to eat raw rats!

Ancient Egyptian treatment for external injuries was also quite peculiar, primarily using moldy bread to treat infected wounds... hoping it wouldn't make things worse!

Even more fatal was when ancient Egyptian doctors couldn't diagnose a patient's illness. They would claim it was the work of evil spirits that had entered the body, draining the bone marrow and slowly consuming the flesh. The only solution was to pray to the gods to drive out the evil spirits. The method involved making the patient take an emetic to vomit profusely, then having the doctor jump on the patient's body, trampling and shouting, "Go back, evil spirit! The spell of the god Horus is summoning you—he will cut you and tear you apart!"

Clearly, after such a ordeal, a patient who was already weak and ill would likely be summoned to heaven by the gods.

Having discussed the seemingly scientific and advanced but unreliable ancient Egyptian medicine, let's now talk about ancient Egyptian commerce.

From the early stages of ancient Egyptian civilization, there was already a thriving domestic and international trade. At the time, Egypt exported large quantities of grain, beer, flax, alabaster, and papyrus, while importing mainly wood and metals, which were scarce in Egypt. In the capital and border cities, especially along the upper and lower reaches of the Nile, a series of prosperous trade markets emerged.

However, it's important to note that ancient Egypt never invented its own metal coins. It wasn't until the twilight of ancient Egyptian civilization that Greek merchants brought coins to Egypt. The earliest gold and silver coins were invented in Lydia, a region in the old Hittite Empire, where the protagonist of "The Red River" (Sakura) traveled, but this was several hundred years after the fall of the Hittites.

Therefore, in ancient Egypt, if you wanted to buy something, you could only barter or use shells, gold, and silver as general equivalents. However, shells had too low a value, and many people refused to accept them. Gold and silver were not real currency and couldn't be directly exchanged for goods; each transaction required careful weighing and a keen eye to distinguish the purity of the gold and silver—fake gold made by wrapping lead in gold foil already existed at that time.

Additionally, the ancient Egyptians used many other forms of circulating intermediaries, such as various rare stones, but the conversion issues were never resolved, and there were no official exchange rates.

This made doing business in ancient Egypt very challenging, as it was difficult to calculate accounts and determine whether one was making a profit or a loss. The exchange rates between various goods fluctuated constantly, but there was no clear currency to measure them.

Of course, according to the typical plot of time travel novels, in such a situation, grain prices could be used as a benchmark. The ancient Egyptians indeed did this—they established a unit called "sati," representing a certain amount of grain, and used it to convert the prices of goods in the market. For example, according to a preserved ledger, a bed at the time was worth about 4 "sati."

However, the problem was that grain prices in the ancient world fluctuated greatly, with prices during famine and bountiful years differing by several dozen times. Even within the same year, prices could vary by several times between different seasons. Merchant ships and camel caravans often took several months to a year or more to travel... Thus, when Egyptian merchants returned home after completing their business, they still couldn't determine whether they had made a profit or a loss.

It wasn't until the New Kingdom period, the final stage of ancient Egyptian civilization, that the Egyptian government began issuing silver rings with specified weights and purities as a legal general equivalent. Eight such silver rings could buy a cow or exchange for four days of labor from a male slave (indicating that slaves were very expensive in ancient Egypt, as one slave could be exchanged for a herd of cattle). However, before the ancient Egyptians could independently develop true currency, the Lydians of Asia Minor had already invented gold and silver coins, which were brought to Egypt by Greek and Phoenician merchants.

Mobile users, please visit: http://m.piaotia.net

Page Flip AD Start

Page Flip AD End