Ancient Egyptians appear to have carried out surgery on people with cancerous cells, a study has found.
Scientists already knew from their texts that ancient Egyptians were exceptionally skilled with medicine – and could treat diseases, traumatic injuries, build protheses and put in dental fillings.
But an international team of researchers studied two human skulls, each thousands of years old, and found “extraordinary” evidence of attempts to treat cancer.
The study’s lead author, Professor Edgard Camaros, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela, said: “This finding is unique evidence of how ancient Egyptian medicine would have tried to deal with or explore cancer more than 4,000 years ago.
“This is an extraordinary new perspective in our understanding of the history of medicine.”
Tatiana Tondini, a researcher at the University of Tubingen and first author of the study published in Frontiers in Medicine, added: “We see that although ancient Egyptians were able to deal with complex cranial fractures, cancer was still a medical knowledge frontier.
“We wanted to learn about the role of cancer in the past, how prevalent this disease was in antiquity, and how ancient societies interacted with this pathology.”
The researchers examined two skulls held at the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Collection, one dated between 2687 and 2345 BC belonging to a man aged between 30 and 35, and the other from between 663 and 343 BC to a woman who was older than 50.
Cut marks found on the male skull. Pic: Tondini, Isidro, Camaros, 2024.
On the male skull, microscopic observation showed a big-sized lesion consistent with excessive tissue destruction and around 30 metastasized lesions.
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