Scroll Reveals Ancient Egyptians' Venomous Snake Problem

A study of a scroll made more than 2,300 years ago has revealed how there were likely far more venomous snakes in ancient Egypt than are living in the country today.

The document, known as the Brooklyn Papyrus, is a medical treatise from ancient Egypt that dates back to around 660–330 B.C.

Now kept at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, the manuscript is one of the oldest preserved writings about medicine and ophiology—a field that deals with the study of snakes.

The text of the scroll—likely copied from a much older document—lists different kinds of snakes known at the time, the effects of their bites, and possible treatments for them.

The information in the scroll provides remarkable details about the animals it describes and experts have proposed identities for many of those included. But the identities of some of the species remain uncertain, partly because the closest matches no longer live in Egypt.

"Six different researchers have tried to identify the snakes in the papyrus. But they have differed in their identifications of the snakes and there has been lots of speculation about which species may have been described. Some of the proposed identifications include snakes that don't currently live in Egypt," Elysha McBride, a masters student at Bangor University in the United Kingdom and lead author of the study, told Newsweek.

For the study, which was published in the journal Environmental Archaeology, researchers attempted to shed light on the issue by modeling the ancient distributions of 10 of the unidentified snakes.

One of the snakes that has yet to be identified in the manuscript had four fangs and was associated with the ancient Egyptian deity Apophis, who took the form of a serpent.

"As well as the symptoms of the bite, the papyrus also describes the deity associated with the snake, or whose intervention might save the patient," study authors Isabelle Winder and Wolfgang Wüster from Bangor University wrote in media outlet The Conversation.

"The bite of the 'great snake of Apophis,' for example, was described as causing rapid death. Readers were also warned that this snake had not the usual two fangs but four, still a rare feature for a snake today."

For the Apophis snake, no reasonable contender currently lives within the former borders of ancient Egypt.

"Like most of the venomous snakes that cause the majority of the world's snakebite deaths, the vipers and cobras now found in Egypt have just two fangs, one in each upper jaw bone," the authors wrote.

The modern snake that most closely resembles the description is the boomslang (Disopholidus typus) that lives in the savannas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the territory of the snake now only begins more than 400 miles south of present-day Egypt.

"Its venom can make the victim bleed from every orifice and cause a lethal brain hemorrhage," the authors wrote.

To find out whether the snake of Apophis was an early description of a boomslang—and to try to identify the other enigmatic serpents in the study—McBride used a statistical technique called "climate niche modeling" to shed light on the issue.

This technique enabled the researchers to explore how the territories of various African and eastern Mediterranean snakes have changed over time.

"Niche modeling reconstructs the conditions in which a species lives, and identifies parts of the planet that offer similar conditions. Once the model has been taught to recognize places that are suitable today, we can add in maps of past climate conditions. It then produces a map showing all the places where that species might have been able to live in the past," the authors said.

The modeling revealed that the climates of early ancient Egypt—which were much more humid—would have supported many snakes that do not live in the area today.

"We focused on 10 species from the African tropics, the Maghreb region of north Africa and the Middle East that might match the papyrus' descriptions. These include some of Africa's most notorious venomous snakes such as the black mamba, puff adder and boomslang," the authors said.

The team found that nine of the 10 species they looked at could probably once have lived in ancient Egypt, indicating that it was home to a much more diverse range of snakes than previously imagined.

"Many could have occupied the southern and southeastern parts of the country as it then was—modern northern Sudan and the Red Sea coast. Others might have lived in the fertile, vegetated Nile valley or along the northern coast. For instance, boomslangs might have lived along the Red Sea coast in places that 4,000 years ago would have been part of Egypt," the authors said.

"Our study shows how enlightening it can be when we combine ancient texts with modern technology. Even a fanciful or imprecise ancient description can be highly informative."

The study indicates that ancient Egyptian people may have encountered and interacted with a much larger variety of venomous snake species than the current distributions in the region suggest, McBride told Newsweek.

"Modeling ancient ranges can also teach us a lot about how ecosystems have changed as a result of climate or environmental change. It can also help clarify how our ancestors may have interacted with the animals around them and what impact that may have had," McBride said.

Update 10/23/2023, 10:00 a.m. ET: This article was updated with comments from Elysha McBride.