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Comment by smashed | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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.

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'.

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.

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.

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