Not just a pretty toe: a false digit found on a mummy named Tabaketenmut (above) probably helped its owner walk (Image: Kenneth Garrett/Getty) Jacky Finch led a team that built recreations of two false toes found on mummies (Image: University of Manchester)

Egyptologist Jacky Finch has a thing for toes – specifically, ancient artificial toes that she believes are the earliest known prostheses. Finch’s fetish motivated her to try something no one has ever done before: she recreated these unusual artifacts, strapped them to living volunteers and demonstrated that they could indeed have functioned as surrogate digits.


Her work suggests that prosthetic medicine took its first steps a few hundred years earlier than previously thought.

While studying man-made body parts found on Egyptian mummies, Finch, a researcher at the University of Manchester in the UK, stumbled on the two false big toes on which her latest research rests.

One, called the Greville Chester toe, was found near Luxor, Egypt. It was crafted some time before 600 BC from cartonnage – a kind of papier mâché made of linen and animal glue and covered in tinted plaster. The toe even includes an indentation that likely held an ornamental toenail.

The other belonged to a priest’s daughter named Tabaketenmut, who lived sometime between 950 and 710 BC. If Tabaketenmut had diabetes, as some researchers have suggested, she may have lost her toe to ischaemic gangrene. Her prosthesis (shown above) is an elaborate three-piece construction of wood and what Finch thinks is leather, complete with a hinge that might mimic the flexibility of the joints.

Both artificial toes had holes for lacings that likely secured them to the feet.

Posthumous adornments?

The ancient Egyptians tried to send their deceased into the afterlife in as whole a state as possible – replacing any missing limbs and repairing any damaged body parts with straw, linen, mud, and butter.

But Finch noticed that the false toes were crafted with too much attention to anatomy to write off as posthumous adornments. What’s more, both toes bore signs of wear, as though their owners had in fact used them while living.

So, were they used as early prostheses? Finch decided to conduct a little experiment to find out. Her goal: to walk like an Egyptian.

First she found two volunteers who had completely lost their right big toes. With a team of experts, she set about recreating the false toes, which are themselves far too fragile to use in modern research. She created molds of the amputees’ feet and used their left big toes as models for the artificial ones.

Test run

An expert carved one of these out of wood, and Finch herself created another made of cartonnage, using glue made from rabbit skin and linen with a thread count similar to that of the original fabric.

Finch then tied the recreations to her volunteers’ feet with linens and laces and took them for a test run – or in this case, more of a cautious walk – at the Gait Laboratory at Salford University in the UK.

As the amputees strolled across a mat that recorded the pressure created by their footsteps, motion-capture cameras analysed their gait and the movements of their joints.

Comfort vs mobility

Finch found that the volunteers could push off their false toes when taking a step, just as people with fleshy big toes do. “The results were extremely surprising in that for at least one of the volunteers, the replica worked amazingly well and produced an amazing amount of movement,” she says.

Both prostheses allowed the volunteers to walk, and although the wooden toe provided more comfort, the cartonnage toe granted greater mobility.

The research is “kind of a marriage of biomechanical assessment and archaeology”, says Finch. “It’s very challenging because it involves many different techniques to even produce the replicas.”

Before Finch’s investigation, the earliest acknowledged prosthesis was a Roman artificial leg made of bronze that dates to 300 BC. Only a plaster copy survives today, since the original was destroyed during an air raid in London in 1941.

Journal reference: The Lancet, vol 377, p 548