Innovation No. 6 of 77 in the book
The Pregnancy Test
Sprouting grains used to predict pregnancy
- When
- c. 1300 BCE
- Dynasty
- 18th Dynasty
- Era
- New Kingdom
Around 1300 BCE, a New Kingdom papyrus lays out a pregnancy test: a woman waters two bags of grain, barley and wheat, with her urine for several days. If the grain sprouts, she is pregnant.
The startling part — it half works. When scientists tried it in 1963, the urine of pregnant women really did trigger growth far more often than not, thanks to elevated hormones.
The same test claimed to guess the baby’s sex from which grain grew first. That part is folklore. But the pregnancy detection was real, and it is the first one known.
The world’s first pregnancy test grew in a bag of Egyptian barley.
The recipe survives in hieratic script on Papyrus Berlin 3038, a medical text of the Nineteenth Dynasty, around 1300 BCE, where it sits among other gynaecological treatments. In 1963 Paul Ghalioungui, Sh. Khalil and A. R. Ammar reproduced the method in a laboratory: urine from pregnant women prompted germination in about 70 percent of grain samples, while urine from men and from women who were not pregnant produced no sprouts at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why would urine make grain sprout?
The likely trigger is the high concentration of oestrogen in the urine of a pregnant woman, which acts on the seed. That makes the test a working bioassay — reading a hormone through a living organism — thousands of years before hormones were known.
Did the sex-prediction part work?
No. The claim that barley sprouting first meant a boy, and wheat a girl, is folklore and fails under testing. Only the detection of pregnancy itself holds up.