Ancient Egyptian Men Were among the Earliest to Practice Circumcision

Do clearer drawings of this image appear on the interwebs? They might, but I deliberately selected this one because the scene it depicts is maybe not one that a casual scroller would want to see — it’s widely considered one of the first extant depictions of a male circumcision surgery.

The practice of male circumcision today is controversial, and highly subject to culture. This was true in Ancient times as well. Generally speaking, Greek and Roman men, and their Germanic and Celtic neighbors, were not circumcised. On the other hand, Jewish men (and later, Muslims), were. They likely got the idea from it from the Ancient Egyptians.

Numerous scenes in Ancient Egyptian art show depictions of circumcised penises, but we don’t have a lot of portrayals of the actual surgery. What you see in this picture is from the tomb of Ankhmahor, dating from 2345-2180 BCE. Most historians have seen in it an adult male circumcision surgery. There have been some who argue that it shows another type of purification ceremony, but the majority of arguments focus on the difference between the left figure (who is being held) and the one on the right (who looks calmer). For instance, maybe one of the men had anesthesia. Or perhaps it’s a “before and after” type of situation.

There are a ton of theories about why the Egyptians practiced male circumcision. Germ theory of course wasn’t a thing, but the Greek historian Herodotus (writing much later, in the fifth century BCE) claimed that they practiced circumcision for religious purity reasons, that he lumped together with the Egyptian focus on freshly washed linen, or the priestly practice of total body hair removal — doing these things because they consider it “better to be cleanly than comely.” There were myths relating to the deity Ra giving birth “from drops of blood from his phallus in an act of (self-) circumcision”. Likely, the Egyptians themselves got the idea from peoples who lived nearby them in Africa.