When Did Humans Invent Condoms?

Picture this. You are standing at a museum, moving through an exhibit on ancient civilizations with the mild, pleasant interest of someone absorbing history at a comfortable pace. Roman coins, Egyptian pottery, Mesopotamian tablets, all very dignified. And then you turn a corner and find yourself

reading an information panel that informs you, in the careful language of academic museology, that the object in the case in front of you is a contraceptive device from approximately 1640, made from animal intestine, tied at one end with a ribbon.

You reread the panel. The ribbon detail is doing something to you that you cannot quite process. You look around to see if anyone else in the museum is having the same experience.

The elderly gentleman next to you is reading the panel with complete equanimity, apparently unbothered.

You decide to be unbothered, too. You move on. But the ribbon stays with you. Here is what that museum exhibit is trying to tell you, gently and with considerable institutional restraint.

Humans have been attempting to prevent pregnancy and disease transmission through barrier methods for a very long time, much longer than most people realize.

And the history of how they went about it, the materials they used, the cultural contexts that shaped their approaches, the religious and political battles that surrounded the entire enterprise, and the winding technological path from linen sheaths to animal intestines to vulcanized rubber to modern latex,

is one of the more consistently surprising threads in all of human social and medical history. This is that history, and it involves considerably more creativity, more failure, and more ribbon than you might expect.

The desire to prevent pregnancy is not a modern phenomenon. It is not a product of 20th century feminism or Victorian prudishness or the sexual revolution. It is as old as human sexual behavior, which is to say it is extremely old, and the archaeological and documentary evidence for ancient contraceptive

practice is abundant enough to make the occasional assumption that this is a recent preoccupation look historically illiterate.

Ancient Egyptians were addressing contraception with characteristic thoroughness by at least 1850 BCE, as documented in the Kahun Papyrus, one of the oldest medical texts in existence.

The Kahun Papyrus describes contraceptive preparations using a mixture of crocodile dung, fermented dough, and honey to be inserted vaginally before intercourse.