JCollins
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Food and agriculture
🕑 Added 2025-03-16 14:13:17 +0000 UTCHere is the next lore post, and, good news! I finally discovered that I can paste pictures into the text! Yes, I know, took me long enough.
What the hell did people even eat such a long time ago?
Short answer: very similar things that we eat today. With a few differences, of course.
The staple foods of Ancient Egyptians were bread and beer. They ate and drank them every single day and had dozens, if not hundreds, or even thousands, of different variations.
I already wrote in the previous lore post that money didn’t exist back then. Every person’s salary was paid in goods and services, and they had a trade system set in place where the value of things was determined by a unit of measurement, which was called deben. The basic salary, every week, always contained bread and beer. Working class men, miners, grave builders, farmers, shepherds, were fed some raw vegetables, 2 flagons of beer, and ten flatbreads as a daily stipend when they were at work.
What was the bread like?
The most basic, most everyday type of bread was the Egyptian flatbread. Even today, people in Egypt eat almost the exact same version by the tons. It’s sort of a pita-like bread, puffs up in the oven, and then you can put whatever you want on top of it or stuff some things on the inside. It’s delicious, if you haven’t tried it, you should. Not too hard to make at home either, my spouse sometimes makes it (although it’s more tricky to make a gluten-free version). You can find many recipes for it online.
Ancient Egyptians ate this bread every day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They also ate it as a side-dish for other meals. When the characters in the game eat bread, this is what they eat.
Apart from this, they had many other, different types of breads.
Sometimes the shape was different. Some of them were cilindrical, some were shaped into cones, some were braided, some were made into triangles. (They really liked triangles for some reason, huh?)
For special occasions, or when they were feeling fancy, they added other ingredients. They sometimes added eggs, honey, beer, spices, cheese, fruits, or oil, and made them into cakes and cookies.
The bags of grains for the bread were usually stored in warehouses, or sometimes at home. They often stored the grains whole, and then freshly ground them when they needed to make bread.
It was the men’s job to start preparing the flour. They used a mortar to break the grains into a coarse flour. After that, it was the women’s job to grind that into actual flour with the help of a tilted stone basin and a thick stone roller, so they sort of just rolled over the broken grains again and again until it became a proper flour. This was really hard to do so it was mostly the servants’ job.
They then used a sieve to get the trash and smaller rock pieces out of the flour, but this process was never perfect. The teeth of Ancient Egyptians were bad because of all the bread they ate. Usually some sand and smaller pieces of stone that broke down from the mortars were baked into the bread, and since they ate bread all the time, these small pieces of dirt and sand worn down their enamels, almost like sandpaper.
The flour was then transported into the kneading basins. In big bakeries or when they made lots of bread in a short amount of time, the kneading was made in big basins, by foot. So they were sort of treading on it like when they press the juice out of grapes for wine-making.
Before the New Kingdom of Egypt (so before 1500 BC), they baked bread in pans or on top of heated stones. They started using bread ovens in the New Kingdom, and every household had at least one at home, outside in the garden.
Unrelated but I actually tried making an Ancient Egyptian tiger nut cake this week. I used Max Miller's recipe for it: https://youtu.be/D_FabMorrMU?feature=shared
It turned out fucking delicious, although I used much less date syrup lol because date is sweeeeet. If you are interested in historical dishes, check out his Youtube channel. He makes amazing videos. I even have his recipe book and it’s super well made. (End of advertisement.)
Type of grains
Most breads were made from spelt (or dinkel wheat), or Nile wheat, but they also used rye. In poorer regions or during famines, they sometimes ate papyrus reed in itself, just by chewing on the fresh stalk. It has a bit of nutritional value but it really isn’t appetizing at all. The also used dried lotus for making flour.
For beer, they grew lots and lots of barley.
They didn’t know rice, corn, and potatoes at all.
Drinks, beers, and other alcohols
Beer was the everyday drink for almost everyone. They had many different types, with a great variety in flavor and alcohol content. Some were only very mildly alcoholic. Those were given to children as well, although every teaching in Ancient Egypt told people to only drink in moderation and the sight of a drunk person was considered just as pleasant as nowadays – not much at all.
Sometimes they put other things in the beer too, like dates, or honey, to make them sweeter.
They also drank water and juices, although these latters were not common because for lack of refrigeration, they went bad quickly. Those who didn’t want to drink beer, or when someone was simply thirsty and didn’t have any beer on hand, drank normal water. Now, I know what some of you may think… ew, dirty. Well, it was not, not really. If you drink from a puddle on the road, yeah, you may die. But back then, the general ground water was cleaner than it is today. And if the well is deep enough, the water in there may be just as clean (or even cleaner) than tap-water today. I actually drank well-water once by accident. Nothing happened to me. Even my parents drank from wells as children in the countryside and they never got sick from it, but obviously, you have to carefully choose where you’re drinking from. For ancient people, this was probably common sense.
Originally, wine was the drink of the wealthy, but after a while, it grew in popularity (and availability) and after the Middle Kingdom, it became just as common as beer. It was made from all kinds of grapes, but the most common was blue grape, which was grown over huge trellises.
They had all kinds of variety and quality as well. Some wines were even specialized and the jars were labeled with the name of the wine-maker and the type of grape it was made from.
They usually drank the wine mixed with water, very rarely by itself.
Stronger spirits were all made from wine concentrates, either from grapes, dates, or figs.
Vegetables and fruits
Onions for all!
Ancient Egyptians loved onions. They ate it fresh, but they also put it into all kinds of dishes. Onion-breath is not a problem when everyone has it, right?
Other than that, they also ate lots of lettuce, which was considered an aphrodosiac. They also ate radishes and garlic fresh. Beans, peas, and lentils were all basic foods, especially because they store rather well. They made pastes, stews, and other cooked meals from them.
They didn’t have as many types of fruits as we have today, but they had some. The most popular was date, which grew pretty much all over the place. Grapes were also quite common. They loved figs as well, which had 2 types: the fig we know and like today, and the sycamore fig, which is smaller and not that sweet, but it was still good as a snack. They also grew melons, which, in a hot country like Egypt, is really nice and refreshing in the heat.
They didn’t have sugar – neither beat sugar nor cane sugar. For sweetening, they used honey or date syrup. The honey was either collected in the wild, or produced by beekeepers. They had a very similar method of keeping bees than we do in modern times and the collection of honey was much the same as well, where one person smoked the bees out for a few minutes until the other one collected the honey. On the picture below, they are depicting this process. The hooked thingy the guy is holding is the smoker.
One of the most common sweeteners was carob, which I have never seen before in real life, but apparently, it’s a tree that grows pods that have seeds inside, and the seeds are very sweet. The hieroglyph for the word ‘sweet’ is a carob pod, so that’s a good indication of how sweet the thing is. It looks like this:
Apples and pomagranates were brought in by the Hyksos, Egyptians didn’t know them beforehand. Narmer probably doesn’t eat them on principle. Unless he doesn’t know that.
Heset’s famous apple pie is actually a relatively new invention :D
Citruses, tomato, bananas, and mangos were unknown to Ancient Egyptians.
Meat and dairy
Most people didn’t eat meat every day, but meat was still pretty common.
Religious texts usually discouraged eating fish for some reason, but people still definitaly ate them. Not every fish was edible though. Some had really funky names, like ‘sorrow’ and ‘disgusting’, so it’s safe to assume that you probably shouldn’t eat those lmao. But most other types were nice and tasty. They cooked them, baked them, or salted and dried them out and used them as snacks.
Fishermen worked in groups on several smaller boats, usually naked or in small loincloths, like every other working men in the fields. They used nets made of linen threads, but individuals, when they just went out fishing for themselves or the family, they used fishing rods. Fishermen could always keep a part of their daily catch as payment. Most of the fishing was done on the Nile, but many fishermen went out into the Delta as well, where the water is shallow and the fish plenty but… crocodiles are plenty too. Fishing was a dangerous job.
Pork was the meat of the poor. Wealthy people almost never ate pork, but it was still present in the country.
Instead of pork, rich people ate beef. The misconception that beef is a relatively modern food is completely false. It was never cheap, just like venison, but people definitely ate them. They also used cow milk for drinking, or making butter, cream, and cheeses.
They also loved poultry, buuuuut it looks like they didn’t have chicken. So when I wrote that the thief’s family had chicken at home, that’s incorrect. Dammit.
Anyway, they had ducks, geese, and other smaller birds. They also kept them at home around the house, but most often, they hunted them in the Delta with nets when the birds arrived in giant flocks into the reeds.
How did they cook?
Everyone had a kitchen at home. They were built outside in the garden, usually on the southern side, because the wind most often blows from the north, so if the ovens and firepits are on the south, you won’t smell the smoke in the house. Fuck your southern neighbor anyway. And fuck the northern neighbor too when they are cooking and the smoke is getting into your house.
In the kitchen, there was a firepit, and a separate bread oven. The kitchen pots were made from clay. They didn’t use glass and in most household, they didn’t use metal pots either. Plates and cups were also made from clay, with a glaze on the inside to make them waterproof.
The ingredients were stored in the cellar, which was dug under the kitchen area and was approachable from a staircase. Down here in the cool air, amphoras and clay jugs were dug into the soil, and most perishable goods were stored here, along with the grain and other dry stuff. To keep out the mice, they had cats to guard the stash.
Men and women both cooked. Most often, it was women because they were the ones whose job was to keep the household running while the men worked out in the fields or in workshops. When there was a big occasion, or in wealthy households, chefs were often men, but then that was their out-of-the-house job, while their wives cooked at home for the family.
Time to feast. How did that go?
Like I wrote before, Ancient Egyptians had 3 meals in a day. Breakfast was before sunrise, while the weather was still cool, because the men had to leave for their work. So… actually, it was probably just the men who had breakfast around that time. There is no way a teenager would wake up before sunrise if they don’t have to. Breakfast was usually lighter, some bread, fresh veggies, maybe a fig or something, and milk or chees. Men ate something more filling, some bread with meat or fish, and they also took some food with them to work because when they are out in the fields or in a workshop, the work lasts until the evening so they couldn’t run back home for lunch.
Then the dinner was again spent with the family.
During feasts and festivals, people came together to eat. That’s when they also got shitfaced drunk, although being blackout drunk and behaving like a general nuisance was always frowned upon, even in Ancient Egypt. Then again, when did that ever stop someone who was hell-bent on drinking themselves under the table? Never. We gotta be proud of our ancestors. They were the exact same as us.
Sources I used:
Francois Trassard - La vie des Egyptiens au temps des pharaons (2002.)
Laszlo Kakosy - The history and culture of Ancient Egypt (2005.)
For the pictures: I just Googled them. I don't own any of them.
Comments
J Collins
Maybe Amazon has it?
Ásgeir Þorbergsson
A really fun and informative lore post! Right now I'm really curious to get my hands on some carob pods to try out!
