Spotlight on Research Matthew Adams
Senior Research Scholar; Field Director, The Institute of Fine Arts/NYU Expedition to Abydos, Egypt
Abydos in the News — World’s Oldest Industrial-Scale Brewery Found in Egypt
O 38 The Institute of Fine Arts Annual 2020 - 2021
ne of the most important results of the Abydos project’s work in recent years, and one that has garnered considerable global media attention, is the discovery, or more properly rediscovery, of a 5000-year-old brewery at the site. Originally found more than a century ago by British archaeologist T. E. Peet, its nature and significance were not recognized at the time, and the exact location was lost in the intervening years. The Abydos team identified the brewery site and began excavation in 2018, with a second season following in 2020. This work has demonstrated conclusively that features Peet interpreted as kilns for drying grain were in fact used for brewing beer. Even more significant, however, is the picture that has emerged of the scale of beer production.
Two brewery structures excavated in 2020, bringing the total investigated by the Abydos project to six. These had been cut through and built over by later tombs. Photo: Ayman Damarany.
Excavation technician (Qufti) Wagi Hamed Ali, right, and assistants excavating part of brewery structure 6, 2020. Photo: Matthew Adams.
The 2018 and 2020 excavations exposed six long narrow structures, each approximately 20 x 2.5 meters and containing around forty large ceramic vessels. These vessels, or vats, were used for slow cooking, or mashing, a mixture of grain and water that was then filtered and fermented to produce beer. The interiors of the structures served as gigantic fire boxes; they were filled with wood fuel and set alight, providing the heat for cooking. Each individual vat could hold up to 70 liters of liquid, which means that each structure with its 40 vats could produce up to 2800 liters per production cycle. The six structures documented in the current excavations, plus two more mentioned by Peet, make a total brewery facility of at least eight individual structures with a total production capacity of approximately 22,400 liters per batch. A useful point of reference for appreciating how much beer this is: It’s enough to serve a pint to every person in a full 40,000-seat baseball stadium. Although earlier brewing facilities are known from a few other sites in Egypt, these are quite modest in comparison. The production capacity of the Abydos brewery is nothing short of an order of magnitude greater than anything else in early Egypt. Why would the Egyptians have made beer on such a scale 5000 years ago? The answer may be in what was happening more broadly at that time in the development of Egyptian society. Around 3000 BCE Egypt experienced profound changes that today we might characterize as the emergence of Egyptian civilization. Political unity, state administration, and control of the vast human and productive resources of a huge territory all crystalized at just this time. The early kings who achieved this, including the well-known King Narmer, were from Abydos. It was their ancestral home, and generations of these kings established Egypt’s first great royal necropolis, or cemetery, akin to the Valley of the Kings later, at the site. As part of this phenomenon, each king with a tomb at Abydos also built a monumental structure, or cultic enclosure, in which funerary and other royal rituals were conducted. The Abydos project’s longstanding excavations of these monuments have demonstrated that beer was used in these rituals and on a huge scale. In fact, the scale of the use of beer seems entirely commensurate with the scale of production at the brewery just a few hundred meters
