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From the most wretched servant to the most exalted prince, people in ancient Egypt ate bread and drank beer with every meal. These staples were so vital to their diet that, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the combined symbols for bread and beer actually meant meal or sustenance.
During pyramid construction, bakeries the size of football fields stood near the worker villages. Every morning, battalions of men and women would grind up bushels of emmer—the main grain eaten in Egypt—into flour on stone hand mills called querns. Still more bakers mixed and kneaded the dough, probably with their feet. To bake the bread, rather than waste time making thousands of mud ovens, crews used conical clay molds. They’d dig holes in the ground, fill them with glowing embers, drop the molds in upside-down, plop some dough in, then cap each mold with a second one and heap hot ash over the top. The endless rows of these devices made the lot behind the baking huts look like giant egg cartons.
Timing was critical. The glowing embers had to be ready the same time the dough was, and the bread had to finish just as the construction crews and other laborers were lining up for meals. Given the immense scale, there was a factory feel to the operation, and bakers doubled as foreman, equally concerned with workflow and worker training as with flour quality or seasoning.
To learn the ins and outs of Egyptian bread, I made a trip to Los Angeles to visit Seamus Blackley, a computer programmer and self-described “gastro-Egyptologist.” He’s been obsessed with Egypt ever since seeing his first mummy on Scooby-Doo as a child. Today, he’s a graying redhead with bright blue eyes and a ponytail. Among the many fascinating lines on his résumé, he invented the Xbox gaming system in a previous life.
It’s hard to overemphasize how delicious this bread is.
Blackley’s first foray into heirloom food involved medieval European bread. “My challenge to myself was to be as good at making bread as the average 12-year-old in the 12th century,” he says. Egyptian bread was a logical next step, although at first he largely improvised.
“I made this bread with supposedly ancient yeast, and a lot of people asked questions” on Twitter about its authenticity, he recalls. “They basically said, You’re full of shit—including my wife. I wanted to be not so full‑of‑shit.” So he reached out to an Egyptologist and a microbiologist for guidance, and recruited some colleagues. (“I employ a lot of people who are chemists and such, so I have a nerd army I can call on.”) Eventually, he hopped a plane to Egypt to collect yeast from ancient pottery, using sterile swabs and other microbiology equipment to gather samples. Friends also made him replicas of the conical bread molds, using representative clay. Finally, Blackley built a pharaonic-era firepit in his backyard to bake with; he even sourced acacia wood from Arizona for kindling, similar to what Egyptians used. It took a year of practice, he says, to “make bread that doesn’t suck.”
Archaeologists have documented roughly 40 different types of bread from Egypt’s 5,000-year history, everything from biscuits to baguettes to pitas. Some bakers even made loaves in fancy shapes: flowers, phalluses, fruit, obelisks, birds, cattle, crocodiles, gazelles, fish. (“Those breads would kill on The Great British Bake Off,” Blackley says.) For everyday meals, though, most people ate the conical bread. In his office, Blackley shows me his replica mold. It’s scorched black and much heftier than I expect—15 inches across and probably 20 pounds.
As a treat, Blackley has also baked a loaf for me to sample. It’s a foot wide and sand-colored with a springy crust. It consists of just a handful of ingredients—salt, yeast, coriander, emmer flour—and its blunted shape reminds me of NASA space capsules from the 1960s.
Blackley apologizes for not making toppings for the bread, like leeks in beef tallow, which he says was an Egyptian favorite. He needn’t have worried: It’s hard to overemphasize how delicious this bread is. It’s spongy and chewy and has a scrumptious sourdough tang, with the coriander sneaking in late to tickle the tongue. It would draw raves in any New York or Paris bistro. And mind you, I’m eating a two-day-old loaf warmed up in the company microwave; fresh out of the mold, it would have been orgasmic. Blackley notes that bakers in ancient Egypt had strong incentives to cook well. “Have you been to Giza and seen the pyramids? The blocks are a hell of a lot bigger than you’d think in the pictures. Bread was the primary currency used to pay those guys, and also their food. You wouldn’t want to give the guys who could move those blocks a bad meal.”
Beyond bread, Egyptian laborers were paid in beer as well—about 1⅓ gallons daily, roughly 10 pints, which they happily sucked down given that temperatures on the hot sands could reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit. (One scholar estimated that it took 231 million gallons of beer to build the largest pyramid.) Even children drank beer, largely because the alcohol killed microbes and rendered it more sanitary than the water in rivers (a.k.a. their sewers). Egyptian doctors also prescribed beer as medicine to remedy coughs, constipation, swollen eyes, and upset stomachs.
Based on residues in ancient pots, amber or mahogany beers were probably the most common in Egypt, although records do list other varieties, such as celery, dark, date, iron, and sweet. As with bread, the Egyptians mostly brewed with emmer grains (along with some barley), which would have made their beers wheatier and creamier than modern varieties. The Egyptians did filter their beer, but it still would have had husks of depleted grains floating in it, so some people likely drank through reed straws to avoid a mouthful of chaff with their morning quaff. Egyptian beer also lacked hops, so it wouldn’t have had the bitter undertones of modern brews. Instead, it probably leaned more sour, in part due to the fruit flies that swarmed their open vats and introduced bacteria that convert alcohol into vinegar. (Other microbes that produce sour tastes might have wafted in as well.) Some scholars have described Egyptian beer as alcoholic porridge, or a “sour barley milkshake.”
Its blunted shape reminds me of NASA space capsules from the 1960s.
Eager to sample this beer, I dug up a recipe online and began brewing a gallon myself. All beer starts with malted grains, grains that have been germinated and dried. Brewers today dump these directly into hot water. But some scholars believe that ancient Egyptians performed another step first: forming the grains into crude “offering loaves” and gently baking them at a low temperature; only then did they crumble the loaves into water, usually while reciting prayers. This created a symbolic connection between bread and beer, with one transforming into the other.
Admittedly, my offering loaves don’t look very appetizing: less like bread than birdseed patty-caked together with wet sand. But they smell delicious coming out of the oven. I say my prayers, crumble them into a pot of water, and simmer them. This gives the enzymes in the grains a chance to break down the long-chain starch molecules inside into simple sugars. After two hours, I’m left with a pale white liquid, which turns brown when I add cardamom, cumin, rosemary, coriander, and cinnamon. (Scholars don’t know what exactly the Egyptians used to flavor beer, but all these spices were available to them.) After a hard boil, I try a sip, and coo with delight. It tastes like sugary oatmeal runoff. I decant this into a milk jug, then measure the ABV with a device called a refractometer—around 2.3 percent, probably typical for beer then. To start the fermentation, I add a packet of yeast. Ancient brewers either added the yeasty foam from a previous batch as a starter, or else relied on wind-blown yeast or yeast from the skins of fruits they added for flavor.
After a week fermenting in my spare bathroom, the beer looks like muddy apple cider, with a quarter-inch of sludge on the bottom. I sniff it, and the rush of bubbles instantly clears my sinuses. Then I sip. All I can taste at first is a smack of sour, a pow right in the kisser. Eventually, a little citrus emerges, but sadly, none of the other spices come through—no rosemary, no cardamon, nothing. Still, those spices might be adding flavor, even if I don’t taste it. David Falk, an Egyptologist and amateur beer-maker whose recipe I’m following, compares beer spices to the vanilla in ice cream. Falk once made a batch of ice cream without vanilla, which we normally don’t think of as a dynamic taste—quite the opposite. But Falk says he immediately noticed its absence; the frozen sugar milk just tasted blah without it. The same goes for beer, he tells me: “You need something in there to offset the blandness.” Hidden flavors still contribute to taste.
In all, the description of Egyptian beer as a “sour barley milkshake” didn’t ring true to me. Mine tasted closer to Kombucha—a perfect thirst-quencher after a hot day piling up pyramid stones in the sun.
Historically, people have made alcoholic beverages from pretty much anything they could get their hands on: bananas, tree sap, corn, cactuses, rice, pumpkins, even horse milk. But grain-based beer played an outsized role in the human saga, to the point that some archaeologists believe it fueled the rise of the first complex civilizations in history.
This argument starts with the fact that both beer and bread require grain. Traditionally, archaeologists assumed that people started gathering wild grains to make bread, and that beer was a happy byproduct. But to other archaeologists, that idea doesn’t make sense—mostly because making bread was a gigantic pain in the rear. Imagine you’re a hungry lad or lass 10,000 years ago. You could easily gather some nuts or roots for dinner, or hunt some game and fill your belly that way. What you probably wouldn’t do is spend a few hours hunched over in the hot sun picking tiny grains off stalks while bugs eat you alive—especially because you then need to spend several more hours grinding that grain into flour—followed by still more time building a mud oven to actually bake the flour into bread. I mean, I love bread, dearly, but does all that effort seem worth a few dinner rolls?
All I can taste at first is a smack of sour, a pow right in the kisser.
Beer, on the other hand, would have been worth the squeeze. Beer gets you buzzed. It’s fun! It also enhances social bonding and was frequently linked to religious festivals in prehistory. Beer-making is far less tedious, too, since you don’t need to grind flour. Just warm some half-cracked grains in a pot of water, dump in some spices, and presto.
As for linking beer to the rise of civilization, people probably started making beer initially from wild grains for seasonal religious ceremonies. Over time, in order to worship more regularly, they began cultivating favorable varieties of grain in certain areas. As this work developed into dedicated farming, they began to settle down near their plots, and given the heavy investment of labor, they began eating the grains as well. Over time, as farming techniques became more sophisticated, food surpluses became common, allowing for population growth and the development of cities—plus the division of labor that cities require, including specialized roles like artisan, priest, scribe, warrior, and merchant. (For the first time, people had professions.) From there, it was only a modest step to complex civilizations like Egypt. All that glory and grandeur from a little thirst.
It’s worth noting that not every archaeologist accepts this proposed sequence of events. Indeed, some of the more genteel types find it horrifying—all the art and poetry and stirring architecture of the world’s great cultures springing from plebes swilling pints. Regardless, the spread of farming in general was inarguably linked with the rise of civilizations, and Egypt’s growth in particular would have been unthinkable without vast grain farms for bread and beer. Again, people consumed both at every meal and often got their wages paid in them. Tombs were also crammed with beer pots and bread loaves for the hereafter. Ancient Egyptians couldn’t imagine life or death without them. 
Excerpted from the book Dinner With King Tut by Sam Kean. Copyright © 2025 Available from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.
Lead image: matrioshka / Shutterstock
