How Beer Made Kings: The Abydos Brewery and the Emergence of Kingship in Ancient Egypt

FAIN: RFW-279510-21

New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Matthew Douglas Adams (Project Director: September 2020 to present)

Excavation of Egypt's first industrial-scale brewery, located at the ancient site of Abydos.

This proposal seeks support for a program of archaeological field research to investigate Egypt's first industrial-scale brewery, located at the site of Abydos, and whether it was contemporary with and functionally a part of the broad pattern of early royal activity at the site. Abydos was the ancestral home of Egypt's first kings, who established its first great royal necropolis at the site. Each of these kings also built a kind of monumental funerary temple called a "cultic enclosure" at some distance from the their tombs. Present evidence indicates the large-scale use of beer in the rituals conducted in some of these enclosures. Analysis of residues from both the brewery and deposits of offering pottery from the enclosures will test the possible association. The brewery itself represents an opportunity to understand not only the facility itself, but also how production on such a scale was organized and how it may have been integrated into other royal activity at the site.