What came from the rich soil and the Nile River? Varied foods, typical veg diet, spices, sweets, breweries & wineries. How immense was the brewery at Abydos? What were typical meals for the upper class and commoners? Learn about the meals of Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamun, Ramses II, and Cleopatra VII. Explore the ancient Egyptian diet and disease nexus as well as what the Egyptians expected their diet to look like in the afterlife. Dr. Sarah Doherty* discusses these issues in an interview with Richard Marranca.
*Sarah Doherty is an archaeologist and ceramicist with a Ph.D. from Cardiff University. She teaches classes at the Egypt Exploration Society — the last being Edible Egyptology: A Taste of Egypt. She is a Tutor and Assessor in Archaeology and teaches for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. She has worked on sites in Egypt and Sudan, including the Amarna West, the Valley of the Kings, and the Gurob Harem Palace Project. Sarah’s interests include experimental ancient pottery manufacture and ethnography. Her dissertation, published by Archaeopress, was on the potter’s wheel in ancient Egypt.
Q: Your recent class at the Egypt Exploration Society (on Zoom) was brilliant. Early on, you mentioned that temples and pharaohs owned a lot of land. Did they hire farmers and/or have slaves?
Each Pharaoh (and their wider family circle and courtiers) owned a range of estates all over Egypt. By the New Kingdom, temples rivaled the royal estates in terms of land acreage, mostly because they had been granted by various kings as acts of piety over the years. Each estate had its own workers, who would be considered more as serfs or thralls comparable to the Anglo-Saxon and Early Medieval systems in the UK and Europe. These people were owned by the estate. They could originally have been prisoners of war, debtors, or born into poverty. However, most workers would have been freemen, though poor farmers, conscripted as a form of taxation or corvee labor to work on the estates.
Q: What foods, spices, and animals did the Egyptians favor?
Get the latest articles delivered to your inbox
Sign up to our Free Weekly Newsletter
In terms of crops, the main staples were wheat and barley, as well as edible oils for cooking and flavoring food, sesame, lettuce, radishes, and balsam tree fruit. Protein came from pigs, cattle, goats, wildfowl, and sheep. They also made cheeses and perhaps yogurt, but these would have to have been eaten quickly due to the climate. Fish from the Nile, and the Mediterranean and Red Seas. They grew a wide variety of pulses, fruits, and vegetables including (there were more than this) pea lentil, grass pea, cucumber, onion, garlic, lettuce, pomegranate, grape, watermelon, dom-palm, sycamore fig, olive, almond, date, Persea, and Egyptian bean or pink lotus. Herbs included cumin, dill, coriander, mustard, thyme, marjoram and cinnamon.
Q: Did the Egyptians like sweet dishes and desserts?
The Egyptians did not have sugar, but they cultivated bees for their honey and beeswax, and also enjoyed juices from sweet fruits such as pomegranate, dates, dom palm and grape. They favoured honey nut cakes made with tiger nuts a form of tuber, the process for making it is featured in the tomb of Rekmire in Thebes.
Q: Do the remains of mummies tell us about their tooth decay and other ailments? And can you talk a little about the relationship between diet and disease?
Most mummified remains are of elite members of Egyptian society. The elite diet consisted mainly of beef, wildfowl, bread, fruit, vegetables, cake, wine, and beer. Many of these food items would obviously have contributed to an intake of saturated fat, and many mummies show evidence of coronary artery disease. Salt intake is likely to have been high because it was often used as a preservative for meat. Most ordinary Egyptians would have had a vegetarian diet, supplemented by fish and occasionally meat on festival days.
Many mummies also show evidence of tooth decay, tooth wear, tooth loss, and numerous dental abscesses. The most common dental disorder was profound tooth wear caused by heavy attrition/abrasion. The overwhelming majority of Egyptians, both noble and peasants, experienced heavy toothwear. This is attributed to rough, stringy food with high fiber content together with contamination of bread with inorganic particles. Some of them (quartz, feldspar, mica, and others) were in the sand, which came from the desert, while others may have originated from the use of flint-tooth harvesting equipment and soft sandstone tools in the process of grinding grain.
Q: You mentioned that beer was a common food in Egypt. The brewery at Abydos was vast. How much beer did it produce?
An Egyptian-American team discovered the brewery in Abydos, dated the brewery ca. 3000 BCE. The brewery consisted of eight large areas, each 20m (65ft) long and each containing about 40 earthenware pots arranged in two rows. Beer is thought to have been produced on a large scale, with about 22,400 liters (5,000 gallons) made at a time.
Q: How was wine made? Was it as popular as beer, and who drank it?
By Predynastic times, the Egyptian elite had already developed a taste for wine. As grapes were not native to Egypt, wine had to be imported from the Levant, making it rare and costly. To secure a supply, kings of the First Dynasty introduced the vines, and made their own wine on royal estates. Grapes were harvested and crushed to extract the juice, which was then fermented in large jars or amphorae. The fermentation process involved natural yeasts present on the grape skins, although additional ingredients like honey or herbs might have been added for flavoring. After fermentation, the wine was stored in sealed containers to prevent spoilage. It was considered a luxury item but was consumed by both the elite and common people, but beer was more popular. Wine was produced from grapes and other fruits, and it was often used in religious ceremonies, as offerings to the gods, and for medicinal purposes.
Q: I think it would have been safer to drink alcoholic beverages than water. Is that true?
Prior to potable, filtered water, beer would have likely been the drink of choice for many. Beer may not have been a replacement for water, but it was viewed as a more nutritious alternative than water. Even though it was weakly brewed from barley, at the time, beer was a calorie-laden beverage that pulled double-duty with workers and farmers who were thirsty and in need of energy. In the end, it would still have been more costly to drink than water. Unless home-brewed beer had to be purchased, and like wine, there often were taxes and transportation fees involved.
Q: Were there classifications for wine with preferred varieties?
Egyptian wines were graded as good (nfr), twice good (nfr,nfr), three times good (nfr,nfr,nfr)as being the finest. There was also another type of grading: genuine, sweet, merrymaking (not so good), and blended.
The burial chamber also had some wine jars around the burial. Additionally, there were fruit and flower garlands. The flowers and fruits in the funerary garlands would have been available from mid-March to mid-April, indicating that Tutankhamun’s funeral took place then.
Q: What might be a typical meal for Tut and his wife Ankhesenamun? Would that be similar to what other pharaohs – Akhenaten, Ramses II or Cleopatra — enjoyed?
Ramses II, Akhenaten, Tut and Ankhesenamun living in Egypt’s New Kingdom would probably have enjoyed quite similar meals consisting typically of leg of beef, stuffed pigeons, salads, breads of fine flour, cheeses, washed down by white and red wine from the royal estates. Desserts might have been honey cakes or nut brittles. However, on campaign in the Levant, Ramses II may have enjoyed sheep or goat stews, Levantine bread, wine, oil, fermented milk, fish, vegetable stews and fruit such as figs, grapes, pomegranates, and dates.
Cleopatra would have had access to a wider range of foodstuffs as, by the Persian period, rice had been introduced to the diet, and she would have perhaps been influenced by her Macedonian forebears in her eating habits. A typical ancient Macedonian/Greek meal might consist of bread with a chutney or relish, meat and fish or soup. Desserts might have been honeycakes, polenta cakes, sesame seed cakes. Cheeses were a common side dish too. Drinks included wine, beer, and also Kykeon, which was both a beverage and a meal. It was a barley gruel, to which water and herbs were added and sometimes grated cheese.
Q: What foods and drinks were found in Tut’s tomb? Where?
The annexe was where most of the food and drink were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. The annexe contained more than 2,000 individual artifacts. Its original contents were jumbled together with objects that had been haphazardly replaced during the restoration after the robberies, including beds, stools, and stone and pottery vessels containing wine and oils. The wine jars were labeled with the vineyards and regnal years in which they were produced. Jars that are explicitly labeled as coming from Tutankhamun’s reign range from Year 5 to Year 9, while one jar from an unidentified reign is labeled Year 10 and another Year 31. The Year 31 wine probably comes from the reign of Amenhotep III, so the remaining jars suggest that Tutankhamun reigned for nine or ten years.
