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The ancient Egyptian god Osiris was an all-rounder.
"If the vine was not found in a country, he taught how to prepare a drink from barley that was almost as good as wine in terms of fragrance and strength," the Greek chronicler Diodorus marveled.
That was in the 1st century BC.
BC, the inhabitants of the Nile country could already look back on 3500 years of experience in beer production.
Because beer was the elixir of life.
Even for the dead.
If they were brought before Osiris, they should be given “bread and beer”.
That should explain the dimensions of the production facility that American scientists have now uncovered in Abydos about 160 kilometers north of Thebes.
It is a brewery in which more than 22,000 liters could be produced in just one brewing process.
"The scale of production in Abydos was greater than anything else of its time," writes Matthew Adams' team from New York University.
Ceramic vats in the new find near Abydos
Source: dpa
The dating is indeed spectacular, as the 20 by 2.5 meter facility was in operation around 5000 years ago at the time of Pharaoh Narmer.
He is usually identified with the ruler of the 1st dynasty, who laid the foundations for the unification of the country from Upper Egypt, which took place around 2700.
Adams' team suspects that the brewery was mainly used for royal rituals at the tombs.
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Several large discoveries have recently shown that fermented grain is one of the early cultural creations in the Middle East.
In 2018, equipment and tools were found in the Rakefet cave near Haifa, which were used as early as the 12th millennium BC.
An alcoholic drink was brewed from the seeds of wild grains.
New experiments by the German Archaeological Institute show that malted grain and water were boiled in vats in the Neolithic cult site of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey.
That means that people were already living in the 10th and 9th millennium BC.
Before they finally settled down, they began to prepare intoxicating drinks from collected grains, which were consumed in cultic or simply interpersonal feasts.
Several breweries have already come to light in Egypt that are significantly older than the new find from Abydos.
That of Hierakonpolis, 100 kilometers south of Thebes, is discovered by the Japanese-British excavation team from 3762 to 3537 BC.
The other, discovered by Polish archaeologists at Tell el-Farcha in the eastern Nile Delta, was dated between 3600 and 3500.
Egyptian brewers at work: grave goods from the Middle Kingdom (2040–1785 BC)
Source: picture-alliance / akg-images /
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In contrast to later epochs, in which, according to the sources, a whole range of types of beer were on offer, the basic product in predynastic times was emmer.
This type of wheat, also known as two grains, is one of the oldest cultivated types of grain, along with einkorn.
The brewing process did not simply consist of fermenting cereal porridge, but was more complicated than long assumed, write the archaeologists Elena Marinova and Lucy Kubiak-Martens in the current issue of the journal “Archeology in Germany”.
Then a portion of ground emmer was first boiled in water.
A second load of coarsely ground grain, presumably emmer malt, was added later.
"This finding shows that a carefully worked out brewing technology was known in predynastic Egypt," the authors conclude.
They explain the difference in the construction of the systems with the “experimental initial phase” of the technology, which soon became common practice throughout Egypt.
Brewery workers at the Temple of Amun in Karnak
Source: picture-alliance / Herve Champol
Barley and naked wheat were soon added as raw materials, and fruit, especially date butter, served as a source of yeast and seasoning.
For adults and children alike, beer was an everyday drink.
Workers were paid with him.
On a papyrus from the 2nd millennium, eight servings of beer, bread and cheese are given as the unit of account for a day.
When Queen Hatshepsut sent her expedition to the gold land of Punt in the middle of the millennium, she also had beer with her to swap.
“Beer and bread”, write the beer historians Franz Meußdoerffer and Martin Zarnkow, “were symbols of prosperity, happiness and contentment”.
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Incidentally, this was not only true for Egypt.
In Mesopotamia, the other center of the Golden Crescent, beer was one of the main ingredients of civilization.
In the “Epic of Gilgamesh” the whore Shamshat teaches the wild man Enkidu culture by teaching him: “Drink, Enkidu, from the beer that (is) destined for the cultivated land”.
The country's large temple inns rewarded their workers with fixed amounts of beer.
But the beer boom also attracted beer fans and other criminals.
King Hammurabi I of Babylon threatened them in his code of law in the 18th century: If a landlady takes excessive prices for a beer, "she will be condemned and drowned in water".
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