Ancient Egyptian Food: Victor and Igor

Ancient Egyptian Food
Because Egypt is in Africa, but very close to West Asia, what people ate in ancient Egypt was midway between African and West Asian food. Wheat, barley, and olive oil, all originally from West Asia, gave Egyptians most of their calories.  Egyptian models of clay beer jars (Louvre Museum, Paris)Egyptian bakers made both wheat and barley into bread and into soup and porridge (like oatmeal), and they also fermented barley to make beer. In fact, some people think the real reason that the Egyptians first began growing grain was to make beer. This is an Egyptian model of beer jars, which the Egyptians made to put in your grave when you died so you would have beer in the next world.

Every year in the Summer the River Nile rose and all the land along its banks was covered with water for three months. When the water eventually went down everywhere it had been was covered with a new layer of very fertile thick black mud.

The Ancient Egyptians farmed this very fertile strip of mud-covered land, which they called Kemmet, translated into English as Black Land. Beyond the Black Land was the Red Land which was not flooded every year, so nothing could grow in it; this was where the people built their houses.

The Black Land was so called because of its colour. Similarly for the Red Land: the Egyptian word we translate as Red Land is Desert - one of the very few words of Ancient Egyptian which has passed into other languages.

The Ancient Egyptians grew cereals such as wheat and barley and many sorts of trees and other plants, and kept cattle, sheep, goats, ducks, geese and pigs. They also kept bees, fished in the River Nile and hunted the wild animals living in the delta and desert. The only trees and plants they needed but could not grow along the River Nile were those which produced spices and incense. Spices were used for flavouring their food and many other purposes, and incense was used in the Temples. These had to be imported from other countries.

Much if not most of what we know about Ancient Egyptian farming, food and drink comes from wall-paintings and models in tombs, many of which show everyday people doing everyday things like making beer and hunting, and of course eating and drinking.

 Model of a butcher shop 

(from the Louvre, Paris, France)Egyptians didn't eat a lot of meat, but their meat also came from animals that had been domesticated further north in West Asia or Central Asia: mostly beef and lamb. You could go to a butcher shop and buy lamb there, just as people do today, or a duck or goose. Only because it rarely rains in Egypt, they could h

Drinks were an important part of a meal. The rich drank wine and almost everybody else drank beer. When somebody held a party, it was called a "House of Beer." To make their beer, the Ancient Egyptians would half bake loaves of barley, then crumble it into barley and water. They sealed this mixture and let it settle. They didn’t want to drink all those lumps so they strained the beer before they drank it.

To make wine they picked a bunch of grapes and squeezed all of the juice out by stepping on them in a trough big enough to hold at least six men. This mixture was sealed in a clay pot with the date and vineyard almost exactly like today. =Food=

Bread
The main food at every meal was bread, as in fact it was throughout Egypt, the Near East and Europe until the potato was introduced after the discovery of the Americas in the 15th century CE. The Ancient Egyptians, both rich and poor, ate so much bread that the people who lived in the lands around Egypt called them “bread eaters” (but not to their faces - it was not a very polite term!).

The bread was usually made from emmer wheat, although they also grew and used two other types of wheat, einkorn and spelt. Bread is made from flour, obtained by grinding the wheat to a fine powder. The Egyptians did not have windmills or watermills to do this, so the grinding was done by hand, using special grinding stones called querns, and the way it was done allowed some of the stone worn away from the querns to become mixed with the flour. This meant that the bread was very gritty and chewing it gradually wore away your teeth, so many older Egyptians had very poor teeth and lots of dental problems.

Pharaoh himself controlled the production of wheat and barley. In years when the harvest was very good the surplus grain was stored in huge mud-brick containers called granaries, and then in years when the harvest was poor the stored grain was distributed to prevent the people from starving. This is why cats were so important in Ancient Egypt: they were needed to control the rats and mice who would otherwise eat the grain in the granaries.

Meat
Rich people ate mainly beef, with some sheep and goat. They would not usually eat pig if other meat was available. They also hunted and ate many of the wild animals that lived in the delta and Red Land (desert), including deer and antelope. The poor people ate less beef and more goat and sheep and they also kept and ate pigs.

People working on building projects were provided with food and beer, and those working on Royal projects, for example the pyramids or the tombs in the Valley of the Kings, seem to have had a meat allowance containing a much higher proportion of beef than other workers.

Poultry
There were no chickens or turkeys in Ancient Egypt, but the Egyptians kept geese and ducks and these were eaten by both rich and poor. They also hunted and ate wild ducks and geese and many other birds such as quails and cranes. The only birds they did not eat were those they considered sacred, such as the ibis.

Fish
There were many different sorts of fish in the River Nile, but rich people did not eat a lot of fish (except salted fish) if meat was available. Poor people ate more fish, and they also preserved it by drying it in the sun or salting it. Salted fish was a great delicacy with both rich and poor, and was also one of Ancient Egypt's main exports.

They ate most sorts of fish except one species, which was sacred because it was associated with the god Osiris.

Vegetables
The Ancient Egyptians grew peas and beans, lentils, onions, garlic, radishes, turnips, peppers, leeks, lettuces and cucumbers, and also many herbs such as aniseed, fennel, mustard, thyme, coriander, cumin and dill. They could not grow spices as most spices need much hotter conditions - the spices, and also the incense, they needed they obtained from the Land of Punt. Egyptologists are not certain where this was, but it must have been somewhere much further South, possibly on the East coast of Africa.

Fruits
The Ancient Egyptians grew grapes, figs, water melons, dates, pomegranates, pumpkins, plums and many other fruits, and also walnuts and almonds and other nuts.

Grapes could be eaten as they were, made into wine or sun-dried to make raisins, and dates, figs and plums could also be eaten fresh or dried in the sun. Poor people also used dates and other fruits to sweeten their food - we now think that the hieroglyph for date could also mean any sort of sweetener except honey. Rich people sweetened their food with honey but this was very expensive.

Eggs
There were no chickens as we know them in Ancient Egypt, but the Ancient Egyptians kept ducks and geese and ate their eggs - we know this because there are wall-paintings showing baskets of eggs. But we do not know much about how they cooked them because we have not found very many recipes containing eggs.

Butter and cheese
The Ancient Egyptians milked cows, goats and sheep. They drank some of the milk and turned some of it into butter and cheese.

Honey
The Ancient Egyptians kept bees for honey and beeswax and also collected wild honey. Sugar, like the potato, was unknown in Egypt and the Near East and Europe until the discovery of the Americas, so rich people used honey to sweeten their food and to make cakes and puddings.

Honey keeps almost for ever and provided the jars have not been broken honey put into tombs is still eatable more than three thousand years later. However honey is also a very good preservative and the Ancient Egyptians used it for preserving small pets etc as a less expensive alternative to mummification. So if you do happen to come across a jar of Ancient Egyptian honey it is always advisable to check what else is in the jar before you start to eat it!

The Ancient Egyptians and other ancient people used beeswax for many purposes, but none of them ever used it to make beeswax candles, most ancient people only used lamps, burning a liquid. This is discussed on the Page on Lighting in Ancient Egypt.

Fats and oils
The Egyptians used fats and oils in food and cooking, for skin care and in perfumes and cosmetics, in medicines, and to burn in lamps to provide light at night and inside the temples and tombs. Solid fats were usually animal fat or butter; liquid vegetable oils were obtained from the seeds of plants such as castor, sesame and flax. Olive trees did not grow in Ancient Egypt although an attempt was made to introduce them during the 18th Dynasty, about the time of Tutankhamen.

Fragrances can be captured in waxes and fats, which is why candles and soaps can be scented. In wall paintings Egyptian ladies are shown with wax cones on their wigs and it is thought that these were scented and that the wax would melt and run down over the wig releasing the fragrance.

Salt
Salt is not a food but we cannot live without it: if we were to go completely without any salt at all for more than three or four days we would die (in considerable pain). Also, most foods taste horrible if cooked without any salt whatever. But too much salt is bad for you, particularly for very young and very old people and people who are very fat or have heart disease

ave the meat outside in the courtyard of the store instead of inside. Here is a model of a butcher shop, also from somebody's grave. Can you see the different cuts of meat all laid out? At the very bottom there is a whole leg of mutton. In the Old Kingdom, they ate pork, too. From the New Kingdom on, though, most Egyptian people would not eat pork, because they thought pigs were dirty and yucky.

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/egypt/food/egyptfood.htm   7/10/140