How did ancient civilizations clean their teeth?
julian k asked:
I’ve been wondering this for a while.
I’ve been wondering this for a while.
How did people keep their teeth clean before the invention of conventional tooth brushes and tooth paste?
In ancient drawings, people were depicted as having white teeth like today, so how did they do it?
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May 29th, 2010 at 5:08 am
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They did not clean their teeth, and it has been proven that in ancient Egypt, people actually died from tooth decay.
May 30th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
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careful with this one. if life has taught you anything, paintings and the like aren’t what’s real. want white teeth? the painter is told to make your teeth and the rest of you perfect. ever wonder if mona lisa has a wig on, doesn’t have any teeth at all or spots on her skin? however, until the intro of sugar and other cavity making foods into the human diet, wholesale, bad teeth and cavities weren’t a big deal. want to brush your teeth in the 1300s or 1500s? table salt sprinkled on your fingers, rubbing your finger across bottoms and tops does the trick, then and now. earlier people in other parts of the world used baking soda with the finger trick. boy that really worked and cleaned/whitened at the same time. still works as most good toothpaste uses baking soda. whitens teeth and cleans for the price of a box of baking soda.
June 3rd, 2010 at 3:50 am
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I know how the Elizabethans cleaned their teeth – toothpicks and cloths with a gritty paste rubbed onto the teeth. The Elizabethans had a NEW ingredient to add to their regular gritty paste,instead of salt, they used SUGAR. Of course, only the people who could afford it were the VERY rich. Queen Elizabeth I had lost nearly all of her teeth by the time she died. (Toothpicks were a fashion statement for the Tudor court, they were gold and worn on a chain around the neck)
I would assume that the ancients used the same basic thing for their teeth, a gritty paste, usually salty, rubbed on the teeth with cloths, and toothpicks to get between the teeth. In Herculaneum, near Pompeii, the bodies of Slaves had the best teeth.
Tooth decay was a major cause of death among the upper classes, the people who could afford sweeten foods. Poor people lost teeth because of vitamin deficiencies and the effects of starvation.
June 3rd, 2010 at 6:12 pm
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They didn’t have to go to dentists because there were no artificial ingredients, sweeteners, and preservatives to destroy teeth. If you look at tribes today in the amazon, you can see that they have good teeth, without ever having to go to a dentist.
June 6th, 2010 at 9:02 pm
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There is ample archaeological evidence that many cultures used small brushes and picks for teeth cleaning. The brushes were typically made with wood handles and natural fibers as bristles. It obviously wasn’t made by Colgate or Crest, but it did the same job as a modern tooth brush in exactly the same way. Such dental implements were common in China and many other ancient civilizations.
June 8th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
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A clue may be had from the practise in India among the rural and poor people, who clean their teeth with a twig from the Neem tree, One end of a green twig is frayed by a little pounding until the fibrous end resemble a crude brush, and this is used to brush the teeth. It helps that the Neem has medicinal qualities and is also used in soap. The taste is not great, but not bad. The dental health of the Indians is well known.
June 11th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
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People seem to have used toothpicks, they were known from 3000 BC in Sumer and were a common element in Roman ‘pocket sets’. Simple sticklike toothbrushes were also used by the Romans. (Ones with bristles originated in China about AD 1000, where they were used with powder made from soap beans). Unfortunately, the positive effects of attempts at oral hygiene in the Roman world were ruined by the use of tooth powders with abrasive ingredients such a semery, those made teeth look nice and shiny but at the same time ground away the surface, exposing the pulp.
Skeletons from medieval times that ahve been examined have shown very little tooth decay. In ‘Medieval Lives’, Terry Jones writes:
‘When the graveyard at Wharram Percy was excavated, archaeologists found 687 peasant skeletons, enoughj for them to draw some firm conclusions about health and ageing. There was very little tooth decay – none in any of the children’s skeletons. In fact the medieval diet, with lots of coarse grains and grit in the bread, was much better for human teeth than our own. It meant they were worn down to a flat plane leaving no crevices in which food could fester. But fossilized plaque in some skeletons teeth does suggest that many of the people at Wharram Percy ha dsuffered from chronic bad breath. This was a bit of an issue in medieval times, Wales a woman could divorce her husband on the grounds of his halitosis.’
June 12th, 2010 at 11:32 am
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I don’t know about other cultures, but I do know that in Egypt they would rub a paste made out of sand on their teeth. Probably not too effective…