IFA Archaeology Journal

Abydos 2021

NYU COVID-related travel restrictions in early 2021 did not allow for a regular field season at Abydos. That does not mean, however, that 2021 has not been an extremely eventful year for the project.

First, in February, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, as well as NYU, announced to the international press the discovery of Egypt’s—and the world’s—oldest industrial scale brewery, dating to around 3000 BCE. The announcement was based on the results of the project’s 2018 and 2020 excavations. Although evidence of ancient Egyptian beer making is known from a number of other earlier sites, ca. 3500–3300 BCE, nothing presently known even comes close to the scale and production capacity of the Abydos brewery, which could produce more than 20,000 liters, or 42,000 pints, of beer per batch. This is industrial-scale production even in modern terms. The story received extensive global media coverage, which included interviews and stories by NPR, CNN, BBC, CBS News, ABC News, Wine Spectator, Food and Wine, Art News, the New York Post, Ferment magazine (U.K.), Craft Beer magazine (Germany), Radio New Zealand, W Radio Columbia, Phys.org, The Sun (U.K.), The Independent (U.K.), Daily Mail (U.K.), Smithsonian, The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, Sky News, and Hyperallergic.com. 

The most pressing questions coming from our work is why beer in such quantities would be needed and why a facility of this scale existed at Abydos. The likely answer is to be found in the broader context of the brewery at the site. Abydos was the ancestral home of Egypt's first kings, where they established Egypt's first great royal necropolis which anticipated the pyramid fields at Giza and other northern sites, as well as the later Valley of the Kings. Each king’s “footprint” at Abydos consisted of his tomb, as well as a monumental ritual structure, called a cultic enclosure, which functioned as a kind of funerary temple for the king. Extensive evidence has been found in the project’s excavations for the ritual use of large quantities of beer at the enclosures, and it seems very likely that the Abydos brewery was a royal institution the function of which was to make the beer needed for the rituals conducted in the royal enclosures. 

A second major development for the project in 2021 relating to the brewery is the award of a major research grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will fund two field seasons focused on additional exploration and documentation of the brewery itself, as well as excavations to investigate the use of beer at the royal enclosures. COVID conditions permitting, the project team, including, as always, IFA students of art history, archaeology, and conservation, will return to the field in early 2022 to continue the investigation of the world’s oldest industrial brewery!