What can the study of ancient teeth tell us about the dietary habits of our ancestors? Diet plays a prominent role in the organisation and evolution of human cultures and an increasingly diverse array of analytical techniques are available to help reconstruct diet in ancient populations. Dental palaeopathology is particularly important as it can provide direct evidence of the type of diet an individual consumed during life. Heavy occlusal tooth wear is the most frequent condition recognisable and an examination of both macro and microscopic patterns of wear can establish the differences between the hard fibrous diet typical of a hunter-gatherer, and a diet primarily consisting of softer plant foods consumed by an agriculturist. The distributions of trace elements and stable isotopes in food webs make it possible to use them as natural tracers of foodstuffs. Through a consideration of photosynthetic pathways, the ratios of the different stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen can determine which specific groups of plants and animals were dominant in the food chains of various populations - a fact that has been used to trace the spread of agriculture in ancient civilisations.
This paper addresses the questions of whether a dental profession existed in ancient Egypt and if it did then considers whether these practitioners were operative dental surgeons as we know them today or whether they were pharmacists. Evidence from hieroglyphic inscriptions, from the dentitions of the surviving mummified and skeletal remains, and from ancient documents and artefacts are examined. The conclusion would suggest that operative dental treatment if it did exist at all was extremely limited. The dental treatment that appears to have been provided was mainly restricted to pharmaceutical preparations that were either applied to the gingival and mucosal tissues or used as mouthwashes, and these at best may only have provided some short term relief. It seems apparent that many ancient Egyptians suffered from widespread and painful dental disease, which the available treatments can have done relatively little to alleviate.
In ancient Egypt the exceptionally dry climate together with the unique burial customs has resulted in the survival of large numbers of well-preserved skeletal and mummifi ed remains. Examinations of these remains together with an analysis of the surviving documentary, archaeological and ethnographic evidence has enabled a detailed picture of the dental health of these ancient people to be revealed, perhaps more so than for any other civilisation in antiquity. In this, the fi rst of two articles, the dental pathological conditions that affl icted the ancient Egyptians is considered. The commonest fi nding is that of tooth wear, which was often so excessive that it resulted in pulpal exposure. Multiple abscesses were frequently seen, but caries was not a signifi cant problem. Overall the fi ndings indicate that the various pathological conditions and non-pathological abnormalities of teeth evident in dentitions in the twenty-fi rst century were also manifest in ancient Egypt, although the incidences of these conditions varies considerably between the civilisations.
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