4,000-year-old skulls suggest ancient Egyptians tried to treat cancer with surgery

Ancient Egyptians may have tried to treat cancer with surgery, according to a new study that has uncovered the earliest known evidence of a procedure for the disease.

Texts dating back thousands of years describe ancient Egyptians’ advanced knowledge of medicine, including identifying and treating numerous diseases and traumatic injuries, using prostheses and dental fillings.

But it was not believed that they knew how to treat cancer, until now.

Studying ancient skulls, scientists discovered cut marks around cancerous lesions – appearing to provide evidence of experimental treatments or medical explorations of the disease.

Lead author Prof Edgard Camaros from the University of Santiago de Compostela, in Spain, told The National that the team’s research “changes our understanding of the history of medicine”.

“This is the earliest known, at least for the moment, surgical procedure related to a cancerous tumour,” he said.

“Was it a treatment or a postmortem intervention? We cannot tell, but clearly they were trying to deal with it.”

Researchers made the discovery as part of efforts to understand more about the role of cancer in the past and how prevalent it was in ancient societies.

They studied two Egyptian skulls in the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Collection. One, from between 2687 and 2345BC, belonged to a male aged 30 to 35. The other, from between 663 and 343BC, belonged to a female who was older than 50 years.

The man’s skull showed evidence of a large lesion consistent with excessive tissue destruction, a condition known as neoplasm. There were also 30 or so small and round metastasised lesions scattered across the skull, with cut marks, which appeared to be from surgery.