00:00They found the tomb of a royal doctor who lived over 4,000 years ago, a man who held
00:07Pharaoh's lives in his hands.
00:09This man knew secrets that only deities and kings were allowed to hear.
00:13And yet, when they opened his tomb in 2024, there was no body, just vivid paintings untouched
00:20by time and cryptic symbols carved into stone.
00:24Who was he, and why was he buried with spells linked to a scorpion deity?
00:28The tomb was buried deep beneath the sands of Saqqara.
00:33The doctor's name was Tete Nebe Phu.
00:35He lived around 4,100 years ago, during one of Egypt's most mysterious turning points,
00:41right at the edge of glory and collapse.
00:44These were the final days of Egypt's old kingdom.
00:48The sun still glinted off freshly built pyramids, but the shadows were already creeping in.
00:54The pharaoh, Pepi II, had ruled longer than anyone before him, 90 years.
01:00But by the end of his reign, the country was cracking.
01:03The power was slipping, the regional leaders were rising, and the Nile floods grew unpredictable.
01:10In this shaky period, the mysterious doctor thrived.
01:14His tomb was discovered by a Swiss-French archaeological team in the shadows of old pyramids.
01:20The weirdest part was that, when they uncovered his burial chamber, they found no body.
01:27No golden treasures, either.
01:29Unfortunately, the tomb had been robbed long ago.
01:32But what remained was something even more fascinating.
01:36The words and images left on the walls.
01:39The paintings are still vibrant, bright colors that somehow survived all those years underground.
01:44The walls show jars, containers, strange abstract patterns, and geometric shapes.
01:51And then, there are hieroglyphs.
01:54Lines and lines of sacred script carved with precision, like someone had poured their soul into every curve.
02:01These inscriptions revealed who Teti Nebe Phu truly was.
02:06Turns out, he wasn't just any doctor.
02:09He was the conjurer of Sarkhet.
02:11Now, Sarkhet was the female deity of scorpions, sacred and terrifying.
02:17Egyptians believed she could stop venom, heal bites, and protect the living from toxic elements.
02:23The title, conjurer of Sarkhet, meant Teti Nebe Phu was a specialist in treating dangerous stings and bites.
02:31And if he got an entire tomb for himself, he may have been Egypt's top expert in those things.
02:37A man who healed with both medicine and magic.
02:41But that wasn't all.
02:43He also held the title, Director of Medicinal Plants.
02:46A title seen only once before in all of ancient Egypt.
02:50That means he knew the healing power of herbs, roots, and oils like no one else.
02:56Now, you might wonder, what plants in a huge land of sand?
03:00But in reality, ancient Egyptians used herbal medicine that would hold up in some labs today.
03:05They created pills, ointments, and inhalers.
03:09Most often, they chose some active ingredient, a flavor to make it easier to take, and something to deliver it into the body.
03:16Sound familiar?
03:18And yeah, they didn't have many traditional plants.
03:21So, some of these ingredients were bizarre by our standards.
03:24Like using crocodile dung and acacia mixed with honey.
03:28Mmm.
03:29They even had formulas for anti-wrinkle creams.
03:31And apparently, our mysterious healer was also chief dentist.
03:37This title is almost never seen in ancient records.
03:40Evidence of Egyptian dentists is incredibly rare.
03:43Turns out, our ancient genius didn't just fight stings and study plants.
03:48He was also trusted with teeth and jaws, which were actually a huge problem in ancient Egypt.
03:53These people may have built wonders, but their teeth paid the price.
03:58Ancient Egyptians constantly caught grains of sand in their mouths.
04:02They often ate grit-filled bread and raw vegetables, which wore down enamel and caused a horrible condition called attrition.
04:10This led to tons of problems, including tooth loss.
04:13They had to improvise back in the day.
04:16For example, crafting the world's oldest known toothpaste from crushed rock, mint, and pepper, which ironically only made things worse for the gums.
04:25Or a toothpaste from things like eggshells, pumice, and natron, a salty mineral used for cleaning.
04:32They were also inventing mouthwashes from celery, bran, and herbs to ease the problem.
04:37Some mummies were even found with crude metal braces and gold wires attaching missing teeth.
04:44Though we're not sure if these were for the living, or was it just a nice little addition added as an afterlife gift?
04:51So, Tete Nebi Fu specialized in all these fields.
04:56Three rare titles for one man.
04:59Now, back in the day, he must have been admired as incredibly knowledgeable.
05:03In a world without modern science, he would have been like a sorcerer who knows how some leaf or bark could save a life.
05:11That's why archaeologists believe Tete Nebi Fu wasn't just any doctor.
05:15He was, most likely, the royal physician, the one who treated the pharaoh himself.
05:21We don't know for sure which king he served.
05:24Maybe it was Pepe II.
05:26And who knows, maybe that's why the guy lived so long.
05:29But if that was the case, Tete Nebi Fu may have lived through the final moments of the Old Kingdom,
05:36watching the Golden Age crumble from inside the palace walls.
05:40And then he was buried.
05:43The body was looted, or perhaps just lost to time.
05:46But the team says they're still studying the tomb, still uncovering the traces of this incredible man.
05:53Overall, ancient Egyptians were practicing medicine on a crazy advanced level.
05:57Some practices feel familiar even today.
06:01They had hospitals, specialists, surgeries, and many more things, even medical schools.
06:07Both men and women were allowed to be doctors.
06:10They healed with various methods and practiced surgery with actual tools, scalpels, forceps, even sutures.
06:18Some doctors treated only the eyes, others the teeth, the stomach, or even what they called the hidden diseases.
06:24They knew how to clean and dress wounds, could set broken bones using splints made of wood or reeds,
06:31wrapped in linen, and even prevented infections.
06:34There were even proctologists.
06:36They also built the first prosthetics, like a wooden toe with leather straps that help people walk normally again.
06:44The oldest known prosthetic is 3,000 years old.
06:47Now, the most shocking part is how they actually even tried to remove tumors.
06:53A recent study looked at a 4,000 years old skull.
06:56It belonged to a man in his 30s.
06:58There were signs of past tumors.
07:01And around 3 of them, there were marks, surgical cuts made with a metal tool.
07:06That suggests someone attempted to remove or study them.
07:09Maybe treatment.
07:10Maybe an autopsy.
07:12There was another skull of a woman over 50 years old.
07:16It also showed similar signs, but with healed fractures from an earlier injury.
07:21Which is amazing, because her treatment might have actually been successful.
07:26Being a healer in this society meant something powerful.
07:30It meant being a priest, a scientist, and a magician all at once.
07:34To ancient Egyptians, medicine was a necessary art.
07:38And they treated it with as much reverence as they did their deities.
07:42That's because they believed that sickness could be both physical and spiritual.
07:47So, a doctor could recite a spell while applying a salve.
07:50And a lot of their treatments worked.
07:53The reputation of doctors in ancient Egypt was so strong that leaders from other parts of the ancient world, like Persia, actually sought them out.
08:02Even Homer, the Greek poet, once said the Egyptians were the most skilled healers of all.
08:08Of course, their understanding of the human body wasn't perfect.
08:12For example, they thought the heart controlled thought and emotion.
08:16They also didn't know what the brain really did.
08:19But their approach, observe symptoms, diagnose, and treat, well, that's modern medicine.
08:25Sure, they prayed over the wound, but they also healed it, didn't they?
08:28Their most famous physician was Imhotep.
08:32That guy was a true polymath.
08:35An architect, priest, and a healer who became so revered he was later worshipped as a deity of medicine.
08:42Yep, a human who was so cool they turned him into a deity.
08:46He lived 2,000 years before Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine.
08:51And yet, some people joke we should drop the Hippocratic oath altogether and swear an Imhotepic oath instead.
08:58But these people weren't just laying the foundations of pyramids, they were laying the foundations of healthcare.
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