Ancient Egytian Hangover Cure: Wrap Laurel Leaves Near Your Head
The way that hangovers are dealt with today entails taking an aspirin and sleeping it off among other cures. However, in ancient Egypt, things were more complicated.
A 1,900-year-old papyrus contains not only a hangover treatment, but also over 500,000 of such documents found in the ancient Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus by researchers Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt about a century ago. The document has just recently translated the section that includes the hangover cure.
In ancient Egypt, anyone with a hangover was encouraged to wear a necklace made from laurel leaves near your head, according to the "drunken headache cure". The plant was used in Greek and Roman times to crown distinguished athletes, orators and poets.
The 1,900-year-old text was written in Greek and was discovered during the ongoing effort to translate more than half a million scraps of papyrus which is known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyri were unearthed in 1898 from a Greco-Roman dump in the ancient Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, about 100 miles south of Cairo.
A papyrus document also describes a bizarre description of eye surgery, providing a first person account of an everted eyelid (turned inside out) treatment. Translated by Cambridge scholar Marguerite Hirt, the text reads:
"The eye ... I began ... by the temple ... the other from the temple ... to remove with a small round-bladed knife ... the edge of the eyelid from outside ... from within until I scooped out."
