watched Brendan Frazier blast apart with a shotgun, odds are

you have no idea what ancient Egypt was really like.

So it might surprise you to learn

that everyday life in the time of the pharaohs

was pretty modern in a lot of ways.

Today, we're exploring what everyday life

was like for ancient Egyptians.

Education and medicine were remarkably sophisticated,

and men and women enjoyed an equality

under the law that wouldn't be seen

in other societies for centuries to come.

But before we get started, make sure you subscribe

to the Weird History channel.

Now, let's go to Egypt.

In addition to being the primary source of water

for crop irrigation and clothes making,

the Nile River was basically the interstate in ancient Egypt.

Both the lower and upper class alike traveled along it

in simple skiffs and wooden boats

to get from place to place.

It was also used to transport the heavy stone blocks used

to build the pyramids, and to ferry the bodies of dead nobles

in elaborate funeral processions.

But rather than having to keep an eye on their speed

and watch for state troopers, the Egyptians

had to constantly be on guard against hippo and crocodile

attacks.

The Pharaoh Menes was killed by a hippo while traveling

on the Nile, and it's been suggested

that a hippo may have maimed King Tut in a similar attack,

leading to his premature death.

Insert Hungry Hungry Hippos joke here.

Beer making was first recorded 18,000 years ago

in ancient Egypt.

Like my uncle Gilbert, Egyptians loved beer.

Beer was considered a staple meal, which

is why both children and adults drank it,

and wages were paid in brewable grain.

That said, beer in ancient Egypt wasn't

like the stuff you order by the glass at the local pub.

It was more like a thick, sweet soup,

with a lower alcohol content so you

could have a bowl or two for dinner

without getting into a drunken fistfight with a hippo.

Despite what you may have assumed,

ancient Egyptians practiced a number

of advanced medical fields, including

dentistry, gynecology, surgery, and even autopsy.

Although, maybe that last one isn't too surprising to anyone.

Medical procedures were a mix between medical treatment

and religious ceremony, but weren't

restricted to the upper class.

Health care was apparently available to everyone,

including slaves.

And hygiene was a big deal in ancient Egypt,

because the Egyptians had realized that walking around

with a three inch layer of sweat ripened filth clinging

to your skin was a Petri dish for disease.

As a result, they bathed constantly,

using soap made from salt and animal and vegetable oils,

and it was commonplace for both men and women

to completely shave off all their body hair, even

the hair on their heads.

The Egyptians also made fragrances.

Perfumes brewed from lily, myrrh,

and cardamom were common, and they

may have even created the first deodorant

using a mixture of citrus and cinnamon.

We call that scent breakfast.

Despite the undeniable anatomical knowledge

the ancient Egyptians possessed, they

hadn't figured out everything about the human body.

They believed that the mind was located in the heart, or ibb,

and that all thought originated from it.

The heart was also thought to be the seat of intense emotions

like love, sadness, and bravery, a belief

shared by almost every culture.

As for the brain, the ancient Egyptians clearly

didn't think much of it, because it was simply

thrown in the trash during the mummification process.

Maybe they thought it was just skull filling.

The judicial system in ancient Egypt

was split between two courts, the Kenbet and the Great

Kenbet.

The lower Kenbet basically dealt with misdemeanors,

while the Great Kenbet was reserved for serious crimes

like robbery and murder.

Typically the pharaoh's vizier ruled over each case,

with ultimate judgment coming from the pharaoh himself.

But in especially complicated cases,

the courts would defer to the wills of the oracles.

Or, since the oracles never bothered to show up,

the statues of the oracles.

In these cases, both the prosecution

and the defense teams would write out their arguments

on a slip of paper and place them

on opposite sides of the street.

Whichever direction the statues appeared to lean more towards

was declared the winner, and the defendant

was judged accordingly.

That is the most elaborately arbitrary system of justice,

ever.

As we mentioned earlier, gynecology

was a medical field present in ancient Egypt.

But much like the heart and brain debate,

the ancient Egyptians hadn't quite worked out all the kinks

yet.

They knew that sex led to childbirth,

but they believed the womb was connected

to the alimentary canal, the path that

carries the food from your mouth to your anus.

So in order to test whether or not a woman was fertile,

a clove of garlic was inserted into a woman's hoo hoo.

And if the garlic could be smelled on her breath,

it meant she was able to bear children.

If the garlic couldn't be smelled,

that meant there was some kind of blockage, or obstruction,

and kids were out of the picture.

While garlic is a fine ingredient in penne pasta,

we cannot recommend its use in this scenario.

Board games were a popular pastime in ancient Egypt,

and easily the most popular one was a game called Senate.

Senate was played on an elongated, chess-style board,

with each player rolling dice or throwing

sticks to move the pieces.

Senate was so popular that paintings

of Nefertari playing the game have been discovered

on ancient temple walls.

Archaeologists have yet to discover evidence

of anyone playing Hungry Hungry Hippos, that game just hit too

close to home.

In modern cultures, male infants are circumcised at birth.

But in ancient Egypt, it was seen

as more of a rite of passage into manhood,

and as such, it wasn't performed until much later.

There are temple paintings depicting priests performing

the procedure on boys and their mid-to-late teens,

in case you were wondering whether or not nightmares

existed in ancient Egypt.

History is unclear about the cultural significance

of circumcision in ancient Egypt.

For instance, most pharaohs were circumcised,

but the procedure was also done to humiliate captives and mark

slaves.

Confusing.

Makeup was ubiquitous in ancient Egypt.

Men were not afraid to dip into the mid-2000s Pete Wentz

catalog to wear some pretty amazing eyeliner.

The eye makeup was made from grinding lead ores

into a substance called kohl, to produce what was essentially

lead paint.

The makeup used by ancient Egyptians

was high in nitric oxide, which boosts the immune system

and helps fight off disease.

So the eyeliner might have had the added effect

of protecting the eye from infections,

while hopefully balancing out that whole lead poisoning

thing.

Temples in ancient Egypt were true community centers,

in that they acted both as places of worship

and as depositories for the nation's wealth.

That meant for most of the period

each temple was also a granary.

Remember earlier when we said that people were paid in beer?

That's partially because beer is delicious,

but mostly because money just didn't exist yet.

Coinage didn't appear in Egypt until much later,

which meant grain was the currency everyone used.

Administrators at each temple would dole out grain

accordingly, to pay everyone's wages, with a low income

job bringing home about 10 loaves of bread

and two jugs of beer.

Despite living next to one of the mightiest

rivers in the world, people in ancient Egypt

didn't eat much fish.

In fact, they ate very little meat at all.

The ancient Egyptian diet consisted mostly

of wheat and barley, which makes complete sense when

the majority of your population was paid in bread and beer.

Fruits and vegetables, such as celery, dates, pomegranates,

and of course, garlic, were also plentiful.

And even though meat wasn't common,

it was still occasionally enjoyed during festivals.

Or if you were rich, pretty much whenever

you felt like having a steak.

If you've ever lived close to the equator,

or watched Miami Vice in the '80s,

you're familiar with the appeal of linen clothing.

Linen is specifically good for hot weather

because it's a thin, breathable fabric that

feels cool to the touch, and the ancient Egyptians

made plenty of it.

Linen was made by picking flax plants

from the banks of the Nile and spinning them into threads that

could be then woven into cloth.

In addition to simply being a practical garment

for the desert climate, the fabric

was also a symbol of status, the finer the weave

and the lighter the color, the more important you

we're in the social hierarchy

In ancient Egypt both sexes appeared to be equal as far

as the law was concerned.

Women could buy and sell property,

including both slaves and land, and were

also able to file lawsuits and petition for divorce.

Additionally, the Egyptians did not

practice female infanticide, which

indicates baby girls were just as valued as baby boys.

This seems like the absolute bare minimum of gender equality

until you consider that the practice was

common in other societies at the same time period.

When the Greeks conquered Egypt in 332 BCE

they were surprised to find that Egyptian women had

more independence and civil liberty than Greek women,

which we assume some Greek general discovered

when he tried to give an Egyptian noblewoman his drink

order.

Education was a privilege exclusively

reserved for the children of upper class citizens.

Students studied a variety of subjects

that, more or less, resembled a modern curriculum, including

reading and writing, mathematics, history, science,

and medicine.

The wealthiest kids, such as the pharaoh's sons

and the sons of nobility, went to the Prince's School.

But scholarships did exist that allowed

certain exceptional lower class students to attend.

It's unclear whether the scholarship

was awarded in beer.

Ancient Egypt was surprisingly modern in several ways,

allowing its citizens to lead lives not totally

unrecognizable from the ones we lead today.

Would you like to live or walk like an Egyptian?

Let us know in the comments below, and check out

some of these other videos of our weird history.