Years ago, a young girl came into my clinic with her mother, who was having her feet seen to. The girl looked thoroughly fed up, so I asked her what was wrong. She had to write an essay about the ancient Egyptians, she told me, and she knew almost nothing about them.
So I told her about a toe.
A couple of weeks later she came back with her mother, ran across the room and gave me a hug. She had been given a gold star for her essay, the first gold star she had ever received at school. It remains one of my favourite moments from practice, and it was all thanks to a 3,000-year-old wooden toe.
The Toe on the Mummy
It is known today as the Cairo Toe. It was found on the right foot of the mummy of a woman named Tabaketenmut, the daughter of a priest, buried in a tomb at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna in western Thebes, near modern Luxor. She lived some time between 950 and 710 BC, and her toe is now held at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The artificial toe is made of three carved pieces of wood with leather, shaped to fit her foot closely. Holes drilled along the edges carried leather lacing around the foot, which held the toe firmly in place while still allowing it to move. It even has a neatly carved toenail.
Worn in Life, Not Just for Burial
Egyptian embalmers sometimes added false body parts to a mummy so the person would be whole in the afterlife. For a long time, it was assumed the Cairo Toe was one of these. The evidence now says otherwise.
The toe shows clear signs of wear. Its design also makes practical sense: a flattened underside for stability, a bevelled edge where it meets the foot, and a simple hinge that mimics the joint at the base of the big toe. More recently, a team led by the University of Basel examined it with microscopy, X-rays and CT scanning, and found that it had been refitted to her foot several times. Someone kept adjusting it so that she could keep using it.
Researchers at the University of Manchester went further. They made replicas and asked two volunteers who had lost their right big toes to walk in them, wearing replica Egyptian sandals. Both found the Cairo design comfortable, and one walked extremely well in it. That work helped establish the Egyptian toes as among the oldest known functional prosthetics, older than the Roman bronze leg from Capua, dated to about 300 BC, which had long held the title.
Why Would Anyone Go to Such Trouble?
How she lost her toe is not known for certain. Researchers have suggested that diabetes may have led to gangrene, and that the toe was removed and the stump healed. As a podiatrist, that part of the story stops me in my tracks, because protecting the diabetic foot is still one of the most important jobs in podiatry today, nearly three thousand years later.
What the Egyptians clearly understood is how much the big toe matters. When you walk, your weight rolls forward over the ball of the foot, and the big toe, the hallux, is the last part to leave the ground. Podiatrists call this the toe-off phase of walking. The hallux is essential for propulsion, and it carries a large share of your body weight at that moment. The smaller toes do a different job: they are mainly there for balance.
I once saw that difference very clearly. A patient of mine had lost most of his smaller toes in an accident, but both big toes were undamaged. He had the opposite problem to Tabaketenmut. He could walk perfectly well, because his halluces still gave him a strong toe-off, but he struggled to keep his balance when he stood still.
Tabaketenmut had lost the toe that drives you forward. A replacement that let her walk more normally, in sandals, would have made a real difference to her daily life.
The Bottom Line
The Cairo Toe is a reminder that caring for feet is one of the oldest crafts there is. Three thousand years ago, someone carved, fitted and refitted a wooden toe so that a woman could keep walking comfortably. That is not so different from the work podiatrists and orthotists do every day. And it was enough to earn one young girl her first gold star.
Sources
- Egyptian toes likely to be the world's oldest prosthetics — University of Manchester, 2012
- The sophisticated design of a 3,000-year-old wooden toe — Hyperallergic, on the University of Basel study
- False mummy toes let owners walk like Egyptians — Live Science
- Egyptian artificial toe — Archaeology magazine