Abydos beer factory: Ancient large-scale brewery discovered in Egypt (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Abydos beer factory: Ancient large-scale brewery discovered in Egypt (2021)

bbc.com

78 pointstellarin21 comments

> The brewery "may have been built in this place specifically to supply the royal rituals that were taking place inside the funeral facilities of the kings of Egypt"

Or may be people were just thirsty and the beverage was both nutritious and safe to drink? Why would everything in ancient times be about rituals?

It's a common joke that if an archeologist does not know what an item is, they call it a "ritual object".

It isn't a sex toy, it's used in a fertility ritual.

Like the 20th-century fertility ritual of attending a mutual feeding-place and then immediately engaging in a directed audio-visual hallucination?

idk about ancient egypt but I've read some articles about one of the main house duties of women in the middle ages was brewing beer for the family. They'd have a vat in the house for the purpose and it wasn't always just a single-family home just like today. Today we assume a lot of centralization (the brewery 'factory') but IRL it was very local.

Rituals is archeology speak for "no idea why they did that and refusing to guess".. It's basically the null of cultural explanations..

Artifacts are surprisingly information poor out of context. It's remains and layered structures like old outhouses were the ancient lifestyles are discovered.

Recent excavations of what archeologists are calling the 'McDonald's temple' indicate that it may have been a place of creating food offering's for rituals to their god of death 'The Grimace' and their trickster god, 'The Hamburgler'.

Location, location, location. Abydos is a necropolis so old and prominent, one of Osiris' most common epithets is "lord of Abydos." The job of the funerary priests was to present offerings of "bread, beer, and every good and pure thing" (Cf. the offering formula) at the mortuary temples and tomb chapels of the deceased.

In ancient Egypt, beer was so essential it was treated principally as a type of food – it was consumed daily and in great quantities at religious festivals and celebrations. Beer was an essential for labourers, like those who built the pyramids of Giza, who were provided with a daily ration of 1⅓ gallons (over 10 pints). Yet it still had divine status, with several gods and goddesses associated with beer. Hathor, the goddess of love, dance and beauty, was also known as 'The Lady of Drunkenness'.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/sip-history-ancient-egypt...

My recollection: When they recreated ancient Egyptian beer as best they could, they remarked that it wasn't bitter like modern beer.

Beer is mostly bitter because modern recipes use hops, which don't grow natively in Egypt.

They could use other bittering agents, but their beer was closer to lightly fermented wheat porridge than the modern clear and bubbly beverage!

Makes sense: a porridge is also more likely to be considered a type of food than a clear beverage.

Daniel Jackson was a fan of smooth brews

That was the most interesting part of the article for me. I assumed "Abydos" was just a made up name.

"Indeed"

Now we know why he really stayed on Abydos. It definitely wasn't for Sha're, I'll tell ya wut.

Heresy

Since beer was a safe drink while water sources were often polluted, this could also be viewed as an early water treatment plant.

Did you listen to the recent Experimental Brewing podcast with Dr. Travis Rupp, the Beer Archaeologist? https://www.experimentalbrew.com/2023/07/11/brew-files-145-a...

The point that many current breweries have a smaller capacity than the uncovered one is interesting since there are so many more people today than in the time of Pharoahs.

Two good articles on recreation of ancient brews:

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/zymurgy/pharaoh-ale-b... – recreation of Egyptian Beer with dates and honey

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pwp/tofi/medieval_english_ale.html – brewing of medieval ales without hops, incl. details on production process & tasting notes

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