Papyri and artifacts found in tombs and pyramids indicate that the Egyptians also possessed

considerable medical knowledge. Their well-preserved mummies demonstrate that they had a thorough
understanding of the preservative properties of herbs required for embalming; plant necklaces and bas-
reliefs from various sources also reveal that the ancient Egyptians were well aware of the medicinal
value of certain plants. An Egyptian compilation known as the Ebers papyrus (c. 1550 BCE) is one of the
oldest known medical texts.

In ancient China, three mythical emperors—Fu Xi, Shennong, and Huangdi—whose supposed ruling
periods extended from the 29th to the 27th century BCE, were said to possess medical knowledge.
According to legend, Shennong described the therapeutic powers of numerous medicinal plants and
included descriptions of many important food plants, such as the soybean. The earliest known written
record of medicine in China, however, is the Huangdi neijing (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal
Medicine), which dates to the 3rd century BCE. In addition to medicine, the ancient Chinese possessed
knowledge of other areas of biology. For example, they not only used the silkworm Bombyx mori to
produce silk for commerce but also understood the principle of biological control, employing one type of
insect, an entomophagous (insect-eating) ant, to destroy insects that bored into trees.

As early as 2500 BCE the people of northwestern India had a well-developed science of agriculture. The
ruins at Mohenjo-daro have yielded seeds of wheat and barley that were cultivated at that time. Millet,
dates, melons, and other fruits and vegetables, as well as cotton, were known to the civilization. Plants
were not only a source of food, however. A document, believed to date to the 6th century BCE,
described the use of about 960 medicinal plants and included information on topics such as anatomy,
physiology, pathology, and obstetrics.

The Greco-Roman world

Although the Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Chinese, and Indians amassed much biological
information, they lived in a world believed to be dominated by unpredictable demons and spirits. Hence,
learned individuals in those early cultures directed their studies toward an understanding of the
supernatural, rather than the natural, world. Anatomists, for example, dissected animals not to gain an
understanding of their structure but to study their organs in order to predict the future. With the
emergence of the Greek civilization, however, those mystical attitudes began to change. Around 600 BCE
there arose a school of Greek philosophers who believed that every event has a cause and that a
particular cause produces a particular effect. That concept, known as causality, had a profound effect on
subsequent scientific investigation. Furthermore, those philosophers assumed the existence of a
“natural law” that governs the universe and can be comprehended by humans through the use of their
powers of observation and deduction. Although they established the science of biology, the greatest
contribution the Greeks made to science was the idea of rational thought.