It's based on a 7 word fragment from a 5000 year old papyri, the Kahun Gynaeological Papyrus. Like every other 5000 year old document, it is shattered, cracked, dry, and falling apart, and much of it is lost. We also are not great at translating any form of ancient Egyptian.
The fragment is from section 21, and reads (in the best translation I've found)
To prevent ..........
... crocodile's dung cut up (?) on auyt-paste ()1, sprinkled ..............
(1) Stephen Quirke: chopped over HsA and awyt-liquid
Section 20 is
A Remedy for Getting Pregnant, and section 22 is
Another Recipe. The latter is the honey based recipe that also gets trotted out for ancient Egyptian contraception.
Auyt-paste is either sourdough starter or something like gum arabic -- it's not clear from context ever. It does seem to be used as a thickener.
But there are all sorts of problems here. To prevent what? Pregnancy? Or miscarriage? We don't know the first part of the formula. We don't know where it's meant to be sprinkled, if anything is to be sprinkled, or if that means sprinkling on the dough. We don't know if this is a fresh mix, or one that is supposed to sit outside and dehydrate for a few days. We don't even know if crocodile dung is meant absolutely literally. We don't have contemporary Egyptian metaphors, euphemisms, and local idioms. (Case in point: When I refer to Rocky Mountain Oysters, most people understand that I mean breaded, deep-fried lamb or cattle testicles. They don't think there is a species of high altitude, fresh water, stream or small lake based mollusks. But in 5000 years, that bit of idiom may be lost. Same with urinal cake and air biscuits.) People have been euphemizing and making in-jokes for as long as language has existed.
Yes, there is a chance that literal crocodile dung, if gathered when fully dry (after all, we are talking a desert climate), might be spermicidal (it's alkaline without being as basic as say, lye, which they also had), might have been both sterile enough to be safely used and effective enough to be worth passing around. But there's also a lot of mythology involved. Seth, who was invoked in difficult childbirths, had a crocodile's head. There could be sympathetic magic involved -- crocodile dung, when dry, looks something like goose droppings, except white. When mixed with something like sour dough starter, it would look a little like semen. It comes from the same place, the cloaca, as eggs, so would be the polar opposite of fertility. Or it could be a simple aversion therapy -- make every act of procreation so unpleasant that nobody bothered much.
But seriously, basing anything on a seven word fragment with unclear definitions -- terrible. Bad scholarship, and honestly, worse politics.
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