How did the ancient Egyptians know how a sperm cell looks like more than three millennia ago without the use of a microscope? Below is a depiction of Min – Egyptian god of fertility, in the temple of Luxor.

The god appears to be ejaculating an spermatozoa. Min, son of Osiris and Isis, was an ancient Egyptian god and one of the earliest gods associated with male fertility and virility. Worship of Min began during the predynastic period around the 4th millennium BCE and was centered mainly in the cities of Coptos and Ahmin. His importance grew in the Middle Kingdom when agriculture became a prominent activity in upper Egypt. Min was usually depicted wearing a crown of feathers with his left hand holding his erect penis and his right hand holding a flail, which was a symbol of authority.

Due to his importance, Min was fused with other important gods such as Horus (Min-Hor) and Amun (Amun-Min) to give both gods a sense of procreative power. In another example of syncretism, the Greeks associated Min with their god Pan during the Ptolemaic period. The word “microscope” first appeared in print in 1625. And yet, as Ball writes, no “truly scientific use was made microscope” until 1661, when Marcello Malpighi discovered capillaries in the dried lung of a frog. the It was the Dutch Antony Van Leeuwenhoek who used the microscope to start making discoveries, not just bigger pictures of things. He is credited with discovering bacteria, protists, nematodes, and spermatozoa, among other things. [Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek (October 1632 – 26 August 1723) was a Dutch businessman and scientist in the Golden Age of Dutch science and technology.] The micrograph of sperm heads that you see in this post were obtained using a high-power light microscope. How is it possible that ancient cultures had such advanced knowledge thousands of years before the invention of the microscope?