The Ancient Egyptian Understanding of the Brain and Behavior

Long before the word “neuroscience” existed, ancient Egyptian physicians were documenting something remarkable: that injuries to the head could silence speech, cause paralysis, and alter behavior in ways no herbal remedy could fix. These observations, recorded on papyrus scrolls thousands of years ago, represent some of the earliest known attempts to understand the relationship between the brain and human behavior – making ancient Egypt an unlikely but important starting point in the history of neuropsychology.

The heart as the seat of the mind 🔗

To understand what ancient Egyptians thought about the brain, you first have to understand how central the heart was to their entire worldview. In Egyptian medicine, religion, and philosophy, the heart was considered the source of intellect, character, emotions, and memory – not just a pump. It was called the “house of intelligence,” and this belief ran deep. During the famous afterlife ritual depicted in the Book of the Dead, the heart of the deceased was weighed against the feather of Ma’at to judge their moral worth. The Egyptians believed the heart contained all the thoughts, intentions, and actions of a person’s life – making it the ultimate moral and cognitive organ.

The brain, by contrast, was considered far less important. The brain’s function and importance were not understood; instead, the heart was recognized as the source of intelligence, emotions, and memory. This philosophical divide had a very practical consequence: during mummification, the brain was removed through the nostrils and discarded, while the heart was left in the body to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. The brain was essentially treated as filler – something to be scooped out and thrown away.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus: a turning point in medical history 🔗

Despite this heart-centric philosophy, Egyptian physicians were making careful, detailed observations about the brain in clinical settings – and nowhere is this more evident than in the Edwin Smith Papyrus, an ancient medical treatise believed to be a copy of a text originally composed around 3000 BCE. The surviving copy dates to approximately 1600 BCE and is considered a milestone in the history of medicine. Unlike most Egyptian medical texts of the era, which relied heavily on magical spells and incantations, the Edwin Smith Papyrus is remarkable for its rational and empirical approach, describing observations, diagnoses, prognoses, and treatments in a structured format.

The document covers 48 cases of physical injury, most of them to the head, neck, and upper body. Several cases discuss the brain, meninges, spinal cord, and cerebrospinal fluid for the first time in recorded history. In fact, the papyrus contains the first written example of the word “brain,” as well as the earliest known descriptions of the meninges and cerebrospinal fluid. That single fact alone marks a significant moment in the long story of human self-understanding.

A structured approach to diagnosis 🔗

What makes the Edwin Smith Papyrus especially notable is how it organized clinical thinking. Each case followed a consistent structure: a description of the injury, an examination procedure, a diagnosis, and a prognosis. Physicians then classified each case into one of three categories: “an ailment which I will treat,” “an ailment with which I will contend,” or “an ailment not to be treated.” This tripartite system reflects genuine prognostic reasoning – an early attempt to distinguish treatable conditions from fatal ones based on observed symptoms, not supernatural judgment.

Observing the brain’s surface 🔗

In one of the papyrus’s most striking passages, a physician examining a patient with an exposed brain after a skull fracture describes seeing “corrugations” on the brain’s surface – comparing them to the texture of molten copper. These “corrugations” represent the first known written description of the cerebral cortex, with its characteristic folds and grooves. The physician recording this observation may not have understood what he was looking at, but he documented it with precision – a sign of genuine scientific curiosity.

Brain injury and behavioral change: early neuropsychological observations 🔗

Perhaps the most relevant contribution of ancient Egyptian medicine to neuropsychology is the recognition that damage to the brain could change how a person thinks, speaks, and moves. The Edwin Smith Papyrus records several cases that modern readers would immediately recognize as neurological symptoms.

Paralysis and lateralization 🔗

The influence of brain injuries on parts of the body is recognized in the papyrus, such as paralysis. The relationship between the location of a cranial injury and the side of the body affected is also recorded, while crushing injuries of vertebrae were noted to impair motor and sensory functions. This is a rudimentary but real observation of what we now call lateralization – the idea that the brain’s two hemispheres control opposite sides of the body. Whether the Egyptian physicians understood this mechanistically is uncertain, but they noticed the pattern and recorded it.

Loss of speech after head trauma 🔗

Two cases in the papyrus – Cases 20 and 22 – describe patients who became speechless following head injuries. Researchers believe that Case 20 presents the first possible documented case of aphasia, which occurred following head trauma. The patient, frustrated by his inability to speak, developed neck stiffness, which may have been due to meningeal irritation. The case concludes with the physician advising that such a patient could only be comforted, not cured – a candid acknowledgment of the limits of ancient medicine.

Case 22 describes a similar situation: a blow to the temple resulting in bleeding from the nose and ear, loss of consciousness, neck stiffness, and speechlessness. The physician’s verdict: “An ailment not to be treated.” These descriptions show a clear awareness that the brain – or at least the skull and its contents – played a role in controlling speech and consciousness, even if the philosophical framework of the time attributed those functions to the heart.

The Ebers Papyrus and mental health observations 🔗

The Edwin Smith Papyrus was not the only Egyptian medical text to touch on the brain and behavior. The Ebers Papyrus – the largest and only complete surviving medical scroll from ancient Egypt, containing 879 individual entries – includes treatments for conditions affecting the heart in a psychological sense, addressing what we might today call cognitive and emotional disturbances. One entry prescribes a remedy to “eliminate forgetfulness of the mind, flight of the mind, stitches of the mind,” combining plant-based ingredients with honey. The Ebers Papyrus also contains what is recognizable as a description of migraine, along with other neurological complaints.

What these texts reveal is that ancient Egyptians recognized the need to treat not just physical wounds but cognitive and emotional disturbances – a holistic perspective that foreshadows the modern understanding that brain health and mental health are inseparable.

What this means for the history of neuropsychology 🔗

Ancient Egyptian physicians never developed a theory of the brain as the organ of thought. That intellectual leap came later, with Greek thinkers like Alcmaeon of Croton in the 5th century BCE. Ancient Egyptians as a whole did not argue that the brain was the center of thought, movement, and emotion – their philosophy remained heart-centered. Yet their clinical observations told a different story. By carefully documenting what happened to patients with skull fractures, spinal injuries, and temporal lobe trauma, they were accumulating empirical evidence that the brain mattered – even if they lacked the conceptual framework to fully interpret it.

Although the author of the Edwin Smith Papyrus may not have been fully aware of the importance of the brain, the papyrus is meaningful because of its rational descriptions at a time when most medical writings were filled with mysticism and magic. It represents an early, evidence-based attempt to understand the human nervous system – a foundation that later civilizations would build upon.

The ancient Egyptians remind us that scientific progress rarely follows a straight line. A culture can observe something important – that head injuries change speech, movement, and cognition – without yet having the theory to explain why. Their contribution to neuropsychology is not a fully formed understanding of the brain, but something arguably more foundational: the discipline of careful, structured observation of how brain damage affects behavior. That practice, more than any single discovery, is what links ancient Egyptian medicine to the science of neuropsychology as we know it today.

What do you think? Given that the Egyptians clearly observed the effects of brain injuries on behavior, why do you think they still maintained the belief that the heart – not the brain – was the center of thought and emotion? And how does knowing the cultural and religious context of ancient medicine change the way you interpret their medical findings?

References

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8320262/
2. https://drvictorbodo.com/2024/08/26/why-was-the-heart-so-central-in-ancient-egyptian-beliefs/
3. https://papyrus-stories.com/2019/10/10/his-mind-is-shrouded-in-darkness/
4. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Edwin-Smith-papyrus
5. https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~duchan/new_history/ancient_history/edwin_smith_papyrus.html
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/096777200301100214
7. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2018/02/21/neuroscience-in-ancient-egypt/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Smith_Papyrus
9. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12717541/
10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0072975208021039
11. https://www.brainhq.com/brain-connection/think-like-an-ancient-egyptian-the-first-mention-of-the-brain/