Ancient Egyptian brewery is the oldest ever found

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence for the world’s oldest known industrial-scale brewery. The brewery was an ancient complex with the capacity to produce enough beer to serve thousands of people in a single batch.The team of American and Egyptian archaeologists, who discovered the facility while excavating at the site of Abydos in southern Egypt, date the brewery to the dawn of ancient Egyptian history, circa 3000 BCE. That’s the approximate time of the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the emergence of the pharaonic state, the era of King Narmer.

“The capacity of the facility was industrial in its scale and unprecedented for its time, able to produce many thousands of liters, and probably built to supply the funerary cults of Egypt’s first kings, in which rituals were conducted both to worship them as divine figures and to sustain them in the land of the dead,” says Matthew D. Adams, senior research scholar at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, who co-leads the North Abydos Archaeology project with Deborah Vischak, assistant professor of art and archeology at Princeton University.

General view of the south exterior of the enclosure of King Khasekhemwy (circa 2750 BCE). A massive deposit of beer jars was found extending over nearly the entire excavated area. (Credit: Greg Maka for the North Abydos Project)

The brewery, located on the edge of the desert at the northern end of ancient Abydos, consisted of at least eight separate installations, built in parallel and spaced about 8 meters (26 feet) apart. Six of the eight, each approximately 20m long × 2.5m wide × 40cm deep, (about 65 feet x 8.2 feet x 15 inches) have been examined so far in the new excavations, partly buried under later tombs.

Each installation contained about 40 large ceramic vats, arranged in two rows and supported by rings of sundried mud struts, or “fire legs.” Brewers used the vats for slow-cooking, or “mashing,” a thick mixture of grain and water that was then strained and fermented to produce beer in ancient Egypt.