When the Colgate company produced the first commercial brand of toothpaste in
1873, they could not have known that they were nearly sixteen centuries late with
the discovery. A recipe has been discovered which originated in Egypt in the
fourth century CE/AD, and which is in some respects considerably more advanced
than what was available a hundred years ago. The papyrus with the recipe on was
found in the papyrus collection of the Austrian National Library by Dr Hermann
Harrauer, its curator. The papyrus was originally taken from a rubbish tip
outside Crocodilopolis - present-day Medinet el-Faiyum - in the 1870s, and
purchased in 1878 by the Imperial Habsburg family. With the collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War, the family's whole collection
of about 180 000 ancient Egyptian documents was transferred to the state
collections of the newly-created Republic of Austria. Progress is now being made in
deciphering them, but it is a slow process. The recipe itself is written on the back
of a letter from one Egyptian monastery to another, leading to speculation that
the author was a Christian monk. Although Coptic, a descendent of the language
which was written in hieroglyphs, was widely spoken in Egypt at the time, the
recipe is written in Greek, which had been the language of government in the
kingdom since well before the Roman era. The ink is a simple mixture of soot
and gum arabic, but the author clearly knew a fair bit about chemistry. The
document uses alchemical abbreviations for its ingredients, and employs very
fine measures. The recipe, which follows, is described by its author as producing
'powder for white and perfect teeth', to be mixed with saliva to produce a 'clean
tooth paste':
The recipe calls for the ingredients to be crushed and then mixed. The discovery
was announced at a conference of dentists in Vienna. One delegate, Dr Heinz
Neuman, reported that the existence of such an early and sophisticated dental
formula had not been suspected at all. Dr Neuman tried the Egyptian recipe himself,
and declared that it was 'not unpleasant'. The resulting paste is painful on the
gums - no doubt partly due to the high pepper content - and Dr Neuman said that his
gums had bled after he used the paste. 'That's not a bad thing', he added. He also
reported the paste leaving a clean and fresh taste in the mouth. Salt is sometimes
used as an alternative to toothpaste, and is known to be good for the teeth. The
paste's effect on the gums is of more interest, though. Iris flowers have recently
been discovered to contain a substance which prevents gum disease, and iris
toothpastes are now on the market. But between the time of the recipe being written
and the last few years, this property was unknown. This would not be the first
example of the ancient Egyptians pre-empting modern medicine. Mouldy bread,
containing penicillin, was widely used in anti-bacterial poultices in the time of
the pharaohs.
Source: Sunday Telegraph article, January 19, 2003, with supplementary
information from my own knowledge of the subject.