Noah’s Grandson and the Brewery at Abydos

Want to found an empire that will last thousands of years? Do you yearn to be a figure of myth and legend? Would you like to start your very own cult?

Try brewing beer.

The Bible indicates Mizraim, Noah’s grandson, founded Egypt. His cousin Arphaxad lived to be 400 years old, and it’s a distinct possibility that he did, too. Maybe even longer.

And Archeologist tell us that just before the 1st Dynasty began, the Abydos brewery was set up. It existed during the reign of the first King of Egypt.

Here’s a tablet that the first King made to chronicle his forceful unification of Egypt. Not to get too conspiratorial about it, but some people’s children claim those are dinosaurs you see there to the right. I’m not sure myself. (My toddler, who is an expert on these matters, informs me it’s a lion with a dinosaur’s head.)

Let’s pretend you’ve been thrown back in time to Dynasty 1, King 1, of ancient Egypt. According to the young-earth timescale, Noah is still alive. Abraham may not be born yet. The Ice Age is laying waste to the northern latitudes. I won’t tell you precisely when because no one agrees on that, and you don’t want to waste your time listening to historians argue, do you?

I thought not.

Look around. You stand on the edge of a fertile plain, and in front of you, not a mile distant, the ground climbs to the high bluffs of a desert plateau. It’s a warm day, and the breeze carries the scent of… warm oatmeal? No, not quite, but something like oatmeal. A yeasty, tangy scent with a hint of sweetness.

It seems to come from a large brick counter or bench in front of you. It’s longer than an average semi truck, and it has two rows of openings on the top, like sinks. Eighty sinks in one countertop.

Bold time traveler that you are, you saunter over to the counter and peer into a sink. It holds a bubbling brown mash with floating bits of husk.

With a start—unless you’re the stiff-upper-lip type. Oh, you are? Then, with a raised eyebrow—you realize that the entire “counter” is hot enough to scald you. Firelight flickers from holes in the sides. The enormous structure is heated like a giant BBQ.

Raising your head, you realize for the first time (you aren’t very observant, are you?) that this isn’t the only “counter.” There are eight of them, laid out parallel to each other, eight yards apart, tended by a busy crowd in prehistoric garments. Wood smoke rises from some; others are covered with clay lids; still others are being emptied into small, portable jars.

Welcome to the world’s first major brewery, capable of producing 45,000 liters of beer per batch. If they prepared one batch per week, with time off for holidays (even ancient Egyptians need those), this facility could produce 19,000 American beer barrels per year. If they belonged to the US Brewer’s Association, they would have passed the legal output for a microbrewery (15,000 barrels) classifying them as a Regional Brewery.

Unless, as some evidence shows, it only took 3 days to make a batch of Egyptian beer, which would put them at 45,000 barrels per year, or over eleven million pints.

That’s… a lot of beer.

What did they do with 11 million pints of beer?

If you look up the Abydos brewery (as you should) you’ll discover that one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the site is what did they do with all that beer?

For reals.

In my innocence, I thought the mystery was of a different kind (as you’ll read below.) After all, doesn’t everyone know what humans do with beer? Apparently not. The going theory is that Egyptians brewed up to 11 million bottles of beer per year for religious purposes.

After all, we’ve found evidence that certain rituals at the grave of the last Pharaoh in the 2nd Dynasty, Khasekhemwy, involved beer; the trash pile behind his tomb contains thousands of broken beer jars.

But was the brewery even in operation by the end of the 2nd dynasty? We don’t know. By the time New Kingdom tombs were being built, the brewery had been abandoned for so long that the facility had begun to erode and sand over, and structures were built over its ruins.

The mystery that excites me is something very different.

The first of the god-Kings

The first king of Egypt is also notable for being buried with ten animals who were the ancestors of modern donkeys. They aren’t exactly like the pair of Equus Noah brought with him on the ark, and they aren’t actual donkeys, either, but something far earlier; a species in between. And these donkeys weren’t wild, either. Their bones showed stress marks from bearing or pulling loads.

Egyptian myth says a semi-divine mythological man named Osiris established Egypt. The Greeks called him Dionysus; the Romans called him Bacchus. And by any name, and in all three legends, he was known as the man who invented beer. After all, if you live to be 400-600 years old while the lifespans of each generation shrink, it might not be that hard to claim divinity.

So does the brewery connect the dots between Mizraim, the grandson of Noah, and the man who set himself up as the god Osiris?