Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  Analyses of the Hierakonpolis vat residue by Yordan Popov of the Ferrosilicon factory in Edfu on the upper Nile and by the Archaeobotany Laboratory of Cairo University yielded intriguing results. Popov claimed to have detected a very high-sugar, caramelized product smelling like burnt brandy. The Cairo laboratory reported that more than a quarter of the residue was composed of preserved sugars, organic acids (including malic, succinic, lactic, and tartaric) and amino acids; the remainder was sand and pottery debris. The laboratory also noted intact grains and other remnants of domesticated emmer wheat and barley, fragments of date-fruit endocarp (Phoenix dactylifera), and domesticated grape pips embedded in the residue. A colleague of mine at the Penn Museum, the archaeobotanist Naomi Miller, confirmed the presence of emmer wheat, but did not observe any domesticated grape in the limited material that she examined. If the Cairo University’s finding holds up, it would push the earliest grape remains from Egypt, which must have been imported from the Levant, back another two hundred years. Geller himself expressed some doubts about the finding: he wrote that “due to deflation and disturbance from burrowing insects, their [the dates’ and, by inference, also the grapeseeds’] association with the vats cannot yet be asserted beyond doubt.”

  Geller went on to make some telling comparisons with similar vat installations at other Predynastic sites in Upper Egypt, which were excavated at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. At Abydos, which eventually became the religious capital of the country, T. Eric Peet and W. L. S. Loat found eight complexes, of which the largest had thirty-five vats in two parallel lines of seventeen and eighteen vessels, each supported by long, upright firebricks around the outside. The staggered arrangement of the vats enabled alternating stoking holes for fuel to be built into the sidewalls that connected the vats. A roof and end walls enclosed the firing chamber surrounding the vessels, leaving the vats open to the air. A bowl, probably used to collect yeasty sediments, had been placed at the bottom of each jar, where lumps of black material similar to the Hierakonpolis residues were recovered. This residue, which had probably spalled off the inside of the vats, was described as carbonized, with whole grains of wheat in its matrix. At nearby Mahasna, John Garstang discovered a single vat; its features are nearly identical to those of the other installations, except that short clay bars were also used to buttress the bottom of the vessel. J. E. Quibell reported another badly damaged vat at Ballas, just a short distance farther downstream from Mahasna.

  The excavators at each site ruled out the possibility that the vats were used in the Predynastic preparation of beer, as the pottery wares were too porous. However, a thin layer of clay had been applied to the vessels’ interiors, and the buildup of a thick deposit on their interiors is suggestive of heating some kind of sugar-rich liquid. If the vessels were used to parch grain, as the renowned archaeologist W. M. Flinders Petrie proposed, then how had such a uniform residue formed?

  Geller at first argued that the Hierakonpolis vat installation was used for preparing a malt. This suggestion was in keeping with Petrie’s proposal because malt often goes through a final roasting. Later Geller revised his view and thought it more likely that the vats were used to mash the malt. In mashing, low heat (66–68°C) is applied to the liquefied malt (for approximately one hour in a modern microbrewing facility, but up to three days by traditional African methods), to speed up the conversion of starches to sugars. If the temperature exceeds 70°C, the diastase enzymes may be destroyed. Because the installations clearly seem to have been intended to achieve a moderate heat, and both wheat and barley grains have been found in the congealed interior residues, this interpretation is in accord with the facts and beer making practice. If the vessels were used over and over again, one might expect a caramelized deposit to build up, which would in fact help in moderating the heat.

  What remains a mystery is where and how other stages in the beer making process were carried out at any of these sites. For example, where were the malting facilities if the vats were used for mashing? How was the liquid wort separated from the spent grain? If separate vessels were used to ferment the wort after it had cooled, can they be identified in the excavation corpus? Most important, the telltale chemical evidence of barley-beer fermentation—beerstone, or calcium oxalate, as was detected inside the Godin Tepe beer jug (see chapter 3)—has not yet been confirmed from any vessel at these Egyptian sites.

  Then there is the mystery of why grape and dates would have been added to the mash. Mixing barley and wheat malt together makes sense, because barley is a much richer source of diastase enzymes than wheat. Perhaps the fruit was also mixed in to provide yeast and an immediate dose of sugar that encouraged an initial fermentation, which marginally elevated the alcohol level and limited the growth of harmful microorganisms. The higher temperatures of mashing, however, would have killed the yeast, which cannot tolerate temperatures above 40°C. Another possibility, consistent with the way sorghum beer is made in the West African nation of Burkina Faso today (see below), is that the primary fermentation was carried out in the same jar as the mashing. After the wort had cooled down, fruit was added to jump-start the main fermentation, contribute flavors, and increase the alcohol content.

  Lacking chemical confirmation for beer making, we cannot exclude the possibility that the vats were used to make a hearty, nonalcoholic cereal gruel. Nevertheless, Geller’s proposal that a gruelly beer “with a kick” was being produced at these Upper Egyptian sites, thus making them the earliest breweries in the world, makes excellent sense in the long view of Egyptian history. Later Egyptian texts, art, and archaeological remains show the importance of a gruelly, sour wheat beer, which is still known as the national beverage. Along with bread, beer was a staple for commoner and king alike. Unfiltered beer has even a higher nutritional content than leavened bread, with a higher protein content (mainly from the yeast), more B vitamins, and fewer phytates (polyphenols that bind essential minerals, such as calcium, and prevent them from being absorbed in the intestines). It is doubtful that the Great Pyramids and the other grand monuments of Egypt would have been built without beer. The workers who supplied the back-breaking labor for these endeavors received a daily allotment of two or three loaves of bread and two bottles, or about four to five liters, of beer. Michael Chazan, a former student of mine and now a professor at the University of Toronto, had the privilege of excavating the bakeries and breweries at Giza, which supplied the pyramid workers around 2500 B.C. Here, vats like those at Hierakonpolis could have been used to make bread or beer, and the area was strewn with a vast number of the standard Egyptian beerbottles.

  Figure 23. (a, above) The mashing of grains for beer in Predynastic Egypt was carried out in large vats, with capacities up to 500 liters each, as at this installation near the temple of Seti I at Abydos, ca. 3500–3100 B.C. Note that each vat was supported by firebricks and was open to the air. Originally a wall with stokeholes for fueling enclosed the double line of vats. From T. E. Peet and W. L. S. Loat, The Cemeteries of Abydos, part 3 (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1913), pl. 1.2. Courtesy Egypt Exploration Society. (b, right) A modern mashing installation in Burkina Faso whose construction is remarkably similar to the facilities of Predynastic Egypt five thousand years earlier. Photograph courtesy Michel Voltz, Université de Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.

  Beer was the quintessential funeral offering, surpassing the canonical set of five wines. Even Scorpion I had a chamber full of beer bottles in his tomb at Abydos, along with his amply stocked wine cellar (see chapter 6). The goddess Hathor, “the mistress of drunkenness,” was the Egyptian equivalent of the Sumerian beer goddess, Ninkasi (see chapter 3). She was closely associated with a lesser goddess “who makes beer,” Menqet. One festival to honor Hathor, appropriately designated “the Drunkenness of Hathor,” at her temple in Dendera, recalled the story of how the goddess had gone on a rampage to destroy a rebellious humanity in one of her alternative forms as the lioness goddess, Sekhmet. Just in tim
e, Re diverted her from her mission by filling the inundated fields with red beer, which Hathor interpreted as a sign that she had accomplished her task. She then overindulged and forgot to carry out the devastation of mankind. The yearly celebration at Dendera coincided with the inundation of the Nile during the summer, when reddish, iron-rich soils were washed down from the Atbara River in the Sudan, giving the waters the appearance of red beer. By drinking both wine and beer at the festival and celebrating with music and dance, humanity shared in Hathor’s transformation into her more benign form, the cat Bastet.

  Beer making is illustrated over and over again, from the Old Kingdom through the New Kingdom, on tomb walls and by small-scale models of breweries, which were intended to keep the deceased supplied with beer in the afterlife. Although subject to different interpretations, the depictions and models show both men and women grinding and pounding grain, which is then made up into flat and variously shaped breads, cut into pieces, and mashed in large open-mouthed jars by stirring. The mash is filtered through open-weave baskets and the liquid transferred to preheated bowls. The wort is finally transferred by spouted pitchers to the fermentation jars, which are sometimes shown being inoculated with a starter (likely date or grape juice, or possibly a yeasty concoction from an old batch of beer), and sealed with clay stoppers. Papyri and inscriptions refer to many different kinds of ancient Egyptian beer, including dark beer, sweet beer, iron beer (perhaps distinctively colored red?), “beer that does not sour,” enema beers, beers imbibed with celery for healthy gums, “beer for eternity,” date beer, and hes or garnished beer (perhaps specially flavored with an herb, fruit, or tree resin).

  A very similar process for making a wheat beer is known in Egypt today, especially among peasants and boatmen along the Nile. Especially popular in Nubia, it is called bouza in Arabic (no relation to the English word “booze”). First, cereal—generally wheat, but also barley, millet, and sorghum—is ground and lightly baked as leavened bread, with a moist, yeasty center. The bread is broken, diluted with water, and combined with malt. The resulting mash is moderately heated for several hours and more water added, and, sometimes after a filtration step, the beverage is primed with some old bouza and set aside to ferment for several days. Essentially the same process was used to make beer in Egypt 1,500 years earlier, as detailed by the Greek alchemist Zosimus.

  Chemical and taste tests of bouza have been carried out. One investigator, Sabry Morcos, reported that bouza purchased in the 1970s in the Cairo souk, which had been fermented for a single day, had an alcohol content of 3.8 percent; after three days, it had risen to 4.5 percent. Alfred Lucas, who also collected samples from the souk in the 1920s, found that those beers were more powerful (6.2–8.1 percent). He described the unfiltered beverages as having the consistency of “thin gruel: they contained much yeast, were in an active state of fermentation and had been made from coarsely ground wheat.” Morcos’s beers, which had been filtered, were “a thick, pale yellow beverage with a yeasty or alcoholic odor and agreeable taste.” J. L. Burckhardt, the illustrious early nineteenth-century explorer of Nubia, noted the same differences between filtered and unfiltered bouza. One high-quality variety, strained through a cloth, was named the “mother of the nightingale” (Arabic, om belbel), because “it makes the drunkard sing.”

  Unfiltered bouza is usually drunk with a straw to screen out solids, as is customary throughout modern Africa. Pottery drinking tubes, set at a right angle and fitted with strainers, have been recovered from ancient Egyptian sites. One funerary stela from el-Amarna, the capital of the New Kingdom under Pharaoh Akhenaten (ca. 1350 B.C.), shows an Egyptian man, sporting a Semitic-style beard, quaffing his brew through a drinking tube, aided by a servant boy. The cup in the latter’s hand might have been used to dispense a special ingredient or hallucinogen, such as essence of blue lotus. Another wonderfully rendered scene in the New Kingdom Theban tomb of Ipuy shows a moored ship and its sailors coming ashore to barter grain for fish, baked goods, vegetables, and drink. One quayside booth is well supplied with beverage amphoras. A prominent drinking tube projects from one of the vessels, so that the beer can be tested first.

  Even with such a long, highly conservative history of beer making in ancient Egypt, one might still harbor doubts about whether the installations at late Prehistoric Hierakonpolis, Abydos, and the other Upper Egyptian sites were containers for mashing grain (mash tuns). I did, but my skepticism was finally assuaged by a photograph of a very similar modern-day facility: a sorghum-mashing facility in Burkina Faso. There were the large (80- to 100-liter) wide-mouthed jars clustered together, supported by firebricks, and a firing chamber enclosed by packing mud up to and around the vessel mouths. Although this site was nearly three thousand kilometers from the border of Egypt, seeing that photograph was like peering back 5,500 years to a time when the first large population and ceremonial centers, likely governed by the forerunners of the pharaohs, were developing. The late Prehistoric rulers-cum-priests probably realized that to consolidate their power and to build their towns and outfit their tombs, they needed lots of beer to slake the thirst of and motivate their people.

  Figure 24. Drinking beer through a long straw is an ancient tradition that continues today throughout Africa. (a, above) Funerary stela from el-Amarna (ca. 1350 B.C.) showing an Egyptian man, sporting a Semitic-style beard, quaffing his brew through a drinking tube, aided by a servant boy. The cup in the latter’s hand might have been used to dispense a special ingredient or hallucinogen, such as essence of blue lotus. Photograph courtesy of J. Liepe, Ägyptisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource NY #14,122. (b, right) Tiriki men of western Kenya still drink millet and sorghum beers through long drinking tubes. From J. L. Gibbs, ed., Peoples of Africa (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978), 74. Used by permission of Holt McDougal, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  The one malting facility at Hierakonpolis—more are likely to be found at the site when excavation is resumed—had a capacity of 390 liters (65 liters per vat). If the vats were repeatedly used, perhaps as many as six times per day for two-hour periods, and the liquid transferred to fermentation jars, then nearly 2,500 liters of beer could have been produced daily. The output might have been considerably less—possibly only 130 liters per day—if mashing times were lengthened and fermentation carried out in the same jars. The eight malting complexes at Abydos, the largest of which numbered 35 vats, could have produced much more. In close proximity to the tombs of the Predynastic kings, including Scorpion I, mash tuns testified to the innovative, large-scale developments that were to launch Egypt on an era of unrivaled growth, prosperity, and influence.

  Such massive prehistoric mashing facilities, however, were short-lived and have been found only at late Prehistoric sites (unless Old Kingdom Giza represents a continuation of the tradition). Freestanding jars and relatively small, preheated bowls replaced them, to judge from later tomb artistic depictions and models. The modern Burkina Faso facilities for sorghum mashing thus stand as anomalies to be explained (see below). The basic concept of the Upper Egyptian Prehistoric mash tuns is comprehensible and practical. The heat-absorptive and heat-conductive properties of the firebricks supporting the vats and enclosed in a firing chamber would conserve fuel and yield a moderate, long-lasting, and well-controlled heat source ideal for mashing.

  When the father of Tutankhamun, the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, built his capital city at el-Amarna on the middle Nile River around 1350 B.C., he included what were likely a bakery and brewery in the sun temple of his wife, Nefertiti. Excavation of the site by Barry Kemp of the University of Cambridge and palaeobotanical analyses by Delwen Samuel of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research led to a re-creation of ancient Egyptian beer by Scottish & Newcastle, which went under the name Tutankhamun’s Tipple or Nefertiti’s Nip and quickly sold out at $100 per bottle. According to Samuel’s findings, emmer wheat and barley malt and gelatiniz
ed grains were brewed together; she found no evidence that bread was part of the recipe. The end result was a cloudy, golden liquid at 6 percent alcohol, somewhat sweet, with a fruity nose.

  A CONTINENT OBSESSED WITH BEER

  Beer is a fact of life over all of sub-Saharan Africa. One eighteenth-century traveler claimed that there were “a hundred and a hundred sorts,” but African beers are remarkably consistent in style, production technique, and their role in society.

  For the Kofyar, sedentary farmers in northern Nigeria, nearly every facet of their existence revolves around millet beer, a thick, cloudy brew containing up to 5 percent alcohol. According to an anthropological observer in the 1960s, Kofyar elder males, in particular, “make, drink, talk, and think about” beer all the time. The brewery occupies the village center, both geographically and metaphorically. The six days of the Kofyar week are denoted by stages of the brewing schedule; our Friday is their jim, the second day for grinding malt. Most of the Kofyar harvest goes to making beer, consumed in a constant round of community “drinks,” at which gourds of beer are passed around, the mood lightens, disagreements are resolved, lovers sidle up to one another, and singing and dancing ensue. Harvest laborers expect and get payment in beer, like the Old Kingdom pyramid workers.

  The Kofyar’s spirit world is just as beer-centered as their social, economic, and political lives. Medicine men and shamanistic diviners receive beer without asking. Families honor their ancestors, who must be continually placated by pouring and blowing beer on to their graves and breaking beer jars over their stone markers. Religious festivals, such as the great flute chorus and dance, are liberally lubricated with beer. Finally, beer saturates Kofyar mythology. Its “culture hero” is said to have founded certain villages by stopping to brew beer there, and he purposely left a huge beer jar at the highest point of the tribal territory. In one of many Kofyar legends, a black-crowned crane (Balearica pavonina) finds a jar of beer inside the ancestral stone in an African version of the Ali Baba story, where the hero gains magical access to a cave full of treasure.