Drink Read Free

resulting gruel was drunk unfiltered, hence the need for straws at banquets.
    Similar styles of brew were common in ancient Egypt, whose writings and artifacts likewise provide a detailed record of what its inhabitants drank and hint at some of their reasons for doing so. The story of Egyptian drinking begins in the city of Hierakonpolis, whose ruins contain the remains of the world’s oldest brewery, dating to circa 3400 BC. It was capable of producing up to three hundred gallons per day of a Sumerian-style brew. Heirakonpolis was also the site of a thriving pottery industry whose principal products were beer jugs and cups, the shards of which litter the ruins of the city. The sheer abundance of such relics and the relative scale of the brewing operations imply that beer was a vital part of the diet of the people who lived there.
    While the common people of Heirakonpolis drank beer, its rulers were distinguished by a taste for wine, which was an imported luxury and an emblem of power. The tomb of King Scorpion, who ruled the city in the same age that its brewery was constructed, held seven hundred or so wine jars, made from various types of clay and embellished with different designs, most of which can be traced to what is now Israel and Palestine. The presence of so many jars, so far from their places of origin, confirms that the art of winemaking had spread throughout the Fertile Crescent and that the wine trade was a stimulus to civilization in the Middle East.
    By the time that Egypt entered its dynastic era (c. 3100 BC), beer, known as hqt, had been established as the beverage for workers, whereas wine, or irp, was the drink of the elite. Beer, in keeping with its plebeian associations, was treated principally as a kind of food. Egyptian tomb paintings and clay models depicting its manufacture feature bare-breasted peasant women up to their elbows in their brews; papyrus scrolls bearing financial accounts state that the laborers who built the pyramids of the Giza Plateau were provided with a daily ration of one and a third gallons. A modern re-creation of Egyptian beer, brewed in accordance with written and pictorial evidence, weighed in at 5 percent ABV—the strength of the average contemporary pint, implying that, by the standards of the present day, the pyramids were built by an army of drunks. However, while the Egyptians have left us plenty of practical information about their brewing, they were almost silent on the matter of intoxication. The very few descriptions as to the effect of ten or more pints of beer every day are positive, if enigmatic: “The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer.”
    We can, however, be certain that the average Egyptian became intoxicated on certain ceremonial occasions. These included the annual bash celebrating the Drunkenness of Hathor, goddess of fertility, motherhood, and the Milky Way. The Egyptians considered the swath of stars under her special protection to be a river across the sky, and hence Hathor was associated with the yearly inundation of the Nile. She also possessed some of the attributes of Sekhmet, a destroyer goddess of the old kingdom of Upper Egypt, and the drunkenness festival celebrated both the beginning of the annual flood and the mythical occasion on which Sekhmet was diverted from the extermination of humanity by her fellow gods, who provided her with beer disguised to look like blood. After drinking seven thousand jars, she lapsed into a drooling slumber, and while she slept, the gods who had opposed her consolidated their hold on creation. In celebration of their ingenuity, a special red-colored beer was drunk at the festival, in sufficient quantities to induce similar stupors.
    The annual rise of the Nile was also associated with Osiris, god of the dead, of life, of vegetable regeneration, and of wine. In the dynastic era, Egypt had become a producer as well as an importer of irp . It remained an elite beverage, hence its protection by