14 DAY TRIAL // When they didn't build pyramids or other impressive and mindbogglingly complex monuments, people in ancient Egypt very much enjoyed indulging in the occasional glass of wine. Hence, they weren't exactly strangers to hangovers.
Interestingly, a millennia-old papyrus found at the site of the town of Oxyrhynchus in the governorate of Al Minya shows that ancient Egyptians knew exactly how to treat them. Or at least believed they did.
How people dealt with hangovers in ancient times
The papyrus in question, a photo of which is available below, is estimated to date back to around 1,900 years ago. It is written in Greek, and among other things, it details an ancient cure for the headaches and the nausea that follow a night of heavy drinking.
According to this papyrus, people in ancient Egypt treated hangovers by wearing necklaces made from the leaves of a shrub dubbed Alexandrian chamaedaphne. Whether or not the necklaces actually worked or if maybe it was the placebo effect that made people feel better remains a mystery.
“The hangover cure involves handing a laurel around the neck. I have my doubts if this would have worked but perhaps it had more of a placebo effect,” said researcher Margarent Mountford with the Egypt Exploration Society.
As detailed by Live Science, the papyrus describing this ancient cure for hangovers was found together with about 500,000 documents detailing medical practices in ancient Egypt. Researchers are yet to decipher all of these millennia-old texts.
Let's not be too hasty to dismiss this ancient hangover cure
True, wearing a necklace made of leaves in a desperate attempt to survive a hangover sounds a bit, well, foolish. Still, perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss this ancient cure. Not when, in a recent study, a medieval potion made with garlic and cow bile was proven to kill antibiotic resistant bacteria.
It may be that they didn't have any state-of-the-art chemistry labs growing up in ancient times, but this doesn't mean that our ancestors were utterly and completely clueless about how to address the symptoms of various ailments.
