Ancient peoples didn't have the luxury of air-tight containers to keep insects out of food, screens to keep insects out of the house, or a local pest control specialist that could help keep your home pest-free. These menacing pests could cause much more than an inconvenience. They could spoil food stores or ruin crops.
However, archeologists have found that ancient people had their own ways of coping with bugs, rodents, and other annoyances. Ancient people weren't about to let these pests ruin their crops or their lives.
Ancient Pest Annoyances
Archeologists have two ways in which they can identify how pests perturbed ancient people. The first is through cultural materials such as artwork that depicts what the ancients found bothersome and how they approached the problem, says Linda Evans, an Egyptologist specializing in environmental history and an associate professor at Macquarie University in Australia.
“Images on the walls of tombs occasionally show workmen attempting to control small birds that are attacking their fruit trees or quail that have invaded their fields,” Evans says.
Similarly, ancient Egyptian medical texts give advice on how to cope with lice and fleas, which indicates people at the time found both to be a nuisance. Complaints about pests are also documented in literature such as “The Satire of the Trades,” which Evans says mentions the “unwelcome effect of biting insects” like mosquitos and sandflies.
Archeologists can also learn about ancient pest control through physical remains. Evans says the discovery of grain stores has allowed scientists to understand that ancient Egyptians were bothered by grain pests such as weevils.
Physical remains, of course, also include human remains, and unearthing ancient corpses has enabled researchers to learn what ailed the dead while they were still living. Scientists, for example, have found human remains in what is now Brazil that were covered with lice or nits dating back 10,000 years. Mummies can be particularly helpful in revealing what ailed ancient people while they were living but also after they passed.
“Analysis of mummified human body tissue has detected the presence of Plasmodium falciparum, the blood parasite that causes mosquito-borne malaria,” Evans says. “The preserved eggs and worms of intestinal parasites, such as tapeworms, roundworms, and Guinea worms, have confirmed their infestation of the living, while skin, flesh, and bone beetles, and fly pupae show how bodies were attacked by other pests after death.”
Read More: These 5 Ancient Civilizations Treasured Their Pets
Coping with Critters
The discovery of archeological remains has helped scientists better understand how ancients coped with bothersome critters. Tools like ancient Egyptian lice combs, for example, have been identified. These double-sided combs had closely spaced, tight teeth meant to pull nits and lice from a person’s hair. Thus, ancient parents also knew the struggle that came with combing a wiggling child’s hair.
Like the lice combs, ancient people had instruments for responding to bothersome pests. But often, these tools demanded constant use. In ancient Egyptian art, for example, Evans says there are depictions of how agriculture workers used nets to combat crop pests.
“Agricultural scenes show that quail were caught in nets that were dragged through grainfields by running workmen,” Evans says. “Marauding birds in fruit trees were also caught, either in small, spring-loaded traps or via nets slung over the trees, becoming entangled in the mesh after calling workmen caused them to flush upward.”
Similarly, ancient traps were also used to capture rodents, and Evans said a clay box found in Kahun may have been a rat trap. Elsewhere in the ancient world, clay boxes dating back 4,000 years have been found in Bampur (a city in Iran), Mohenjo-Daro (an archeological site in Pakistan), and Mundigak (an archeological site in Afghanistan).
The clay boxes had strings that closed a sliding door, indicating that mouse-trapping was a hands-on activity. Whereas modern extermination tends to involve poisons or traps that a professional later clears, ancients had to take on pests one by one. In ancient Egyptian art, for example, there are illustrations of “fly whisks,” often bunches of horsehair and twigs used as fly swatters.
Constantly swatting at insects or chasing after rodents could be as annoying as the pests themselves. Ancient Egyptian art involving cats does depict them as mouse-hunters, and Evans says the popularity of cats may have been partly due to their pest-control abilities.
Repelling and Ridding
Although much of the ancient approach to pest control involved nets, swatters, traps, and other tools, there is also evidence the ancients tried to use natural alternatives. In Egypt, for example, grain pests increased along with agricultural production, and ancient farmers had to protect their grain stores.
“Plant ash was scattered around storage facilities and grinding stones, possibly to prevent beetle pests from contaminating the grain, as dust can dehydrate insect bodies and affect their respiration,” Evans says.
Other natural remedies were designed for personal use. Oils such as castor oil were used as a treatment for headlice. A mixture of fleabane (a daisy-like plant), charcoal, and other plants was used to remove fleas from households.
Like us, ancient people wanted fleas out of their homes, lice off their bodies, and weevils out of their grain supplies. But Evans says there is also evidence that the ancients had an understanding that pests were simply something they had to live with.
“Their use of repellents and other practices tell us that the Egyptians definitely took action to try to reduce the impact of pests, but in reviewing the evidence, what we also know is that – unlike us — they did not want or try to annihilate them,” Evans says.
Whereas people today go for poisons or chemical sprays, Evans says ancients had a greater tolerance. “... They accepted that the presence of these creatures was part of the world in which they lived, and so — unlike us— their approach was more one of keeping them at a distance, rather than killing them,” she says.
Read More: From Growing Crops to Cooking Food, Fire Shaped Ancient Civilizations
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Linda Evans, Egyptologist specializing in environmental history and an associate professor at Macquarie University in Australia.
RIULL. Egyptian Predynastic Lice Combs: Analysis of an Ancestral Tool
Bethany Brookshire. Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains
American Entomologist. Begone from Me, O Crooked-Lips! Integrated Pest Management in Ancient Egypt
Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of the country's largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MA from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago with an emphasis on media framing, message construction and stigma communication. Emilie has authored three nonfiction books. Her third, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, releases October 3, 2023, from Chicago Review Press and is co-authored with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
