AO Wants to Know is an ongoing interview series where we ask experts in extraordinary subjects to share their knowledge with us.
For most people, the phrase “Ancient Egypt” conjures images of treasure-filled tombs, linen-wrapped mummies, and monuments to departed kings. But archaeologists know Ancient Egypt as a vibrant society in which people enjoyed the best life had to offer. Just ask Mennat-Allah El Dorry, an assistant professor of Coptic studies at the American University in Cairo. The Ancient Egyptians “weren’t obsessed with the afterlife,” says El Dorry. “They were obsessed with life.”
As in any society, Ancient Egyptian joie de vivre included a healthy appreciation for food and drink. The first written references to food appear very early in Egypt’s long history. “Somewhere in the fourth millennium, between 3300 BC and 3100 BC, we’ve got little ivory labels that were tied around the necks of jars,” says El Dorry. “These were wine labels, and they said the quality of the wine and the vineyard.”
Food also appears prominently in Egyptian art. With no surviving Ancient Egyptian cookbooks, the oldest-known Egyptian recipe is a comic strip–like illustration on the walls of a tomb from the 15th century BC, showing how to make a sweet from native African tiger nuts. “Historically, everyone relied on the tomb scenes and the texts in interpreting Ancient Egyptian cuisine,” says El Dorry. “But now, more and more people are doing these more advanced analyses, and more importantly, bringing things together.” She cites isotope analysis as being a particularly significant innovation because it allows us to identify trace organic material, like the contents of a cooking pot, that may no longer be visible. Food: The Gift of Osiris by William J. Darby, which El Dorry calls “the last really substantial work” dedicated to Ancient Egyptian cuisine, was published in 1977, meaning that today’s scholars of Egyptian food history still have plenty of new evidence to uncover and outdated claims to revise.
El Dorry specializes in archaeobotany, the study of ancient plant remains. She holds degrees in both Egyptology, which covers Ancient Egypt, and Coptology, which covers Egypt’s early medieval Christian era, giving her a broad perspective on Egypt’s culinary past. As an Egyptian herself, El Dorry finds food to be an ideal way of bridging the gap between past and present. “It’s a way I can get Egyptians excited about our heritage,” she says. “Everyone knows about Ancient Egypt, everyone thinks it’s kind of cool, but food is another, very dynamic way of tying people with their history.” And beyond that, she says, compared with some other areas of study, food is “just more fun.”
Atlas Obscura spoke with El Dorry about how archaeologists study ancient diets, what nourished the workers who built the pyramids, and whether Egyptians are still eating dishes from the distant past.
What kinds of evidence do archaeologists look at to learn about food?
Of course, we’ve got the remains of plants and animals that tell us a little bit about how people cultivated and what they cultivated. In archaeological remains, you get to see the butchering marks on the bones of animals, so you actually know what kind of cut [of meat] people wanted. A friend of mine discovered quite a few big jaws that had burn marks at the bottom, so you can tell the animals were being spit-roasted, probably.
If you’re preparing a stir-fry, you’ll do it in a wok. If you are preparing rice, you’ll do it in a pot that you can close. Different containers are used in different ways, and we have a lot of different containers from throughout history that can tell us how food was prepared. Because it’s all mostly made out of clay, we can take microsamples from the walls of the clay vessels for DNA and lipid [fats] analysis.
There’s a particular type of vessel called the “Bes vessel” [after the Egyptian god Bes] because they’ve got a grotesque Bes face. Scholars thought maybe they were used for milk. Then, when someone actually took samples and analyzed them, they found cow DNA, and the percentage of fats in the sample they took was very similar to cow’s milk. So it was clear that this was, most likely, cow’s milk.
And of course there are texts, and we’ve got all these beautiful tomb scenes of food preparation and food offerings left for the deceased to eat in the afterlife. They wanted to make sure [the dead] would keep living in the afterlife to the same standard, or even better. So they would have food offerings in tombs—like ducks, geese, beef, fruits, and grains—and they would also draw these in the tomb scenes, because then they would symbolically [manifest] in the afterlife.
“Ancient Egypt” covers thousands of years. Did the Egyptian diet change a lot over time?
We don’t always have the evidence to tell us how the diet is changing. You would need two sites from different time periods that are close geographically, and close in terms of class and social background, so you can compare them. But we do what we can. We know, for example, that pomegranates were introduced to Egypt in the New Kingdom [in the 1500s BC]. Chickens were introduced in the Ptolemaic period [between 323 and 30 BC].
The borders with Nubia [to the south] were always fluctuating, but at the times where the Nubians were more powerful and pushing back Egyptian control, you would find a lot more fine dining ware that was Nubian, because they’re maybe throwing more lavish banquets. And at the times when you have the Egyptians taking more control, you would have more Egyptian fine ware.
How would you describe the Ancient Egyptian diet in general?
Everyone says it’s bread and beer, and that’s not an exaggeration; I think that those were the main staples. We have a lot of archeological evidence of bread production and beer production, which were very often related, because you sometimes used old loaves to start off the beer. But bread and beer were also used for salaries, and they were presented as offerings to the gods.
We find lentils in archaeological sites from all time periods in Egypt, not just Ancient Egypt. In tomb scenes, we see a lot of beautiful leafy green lettuce and spring onions, which we still eat today. That hasn’t changed at all. We have less [material] evidence of cheese and dairy products, but certainly they had them.
On a day-to-day basis, fish and pigs would have been the main sources of animal protein. They had many different types of Nile fish, including tilapia. Interestingly, Ancient Egyptians rarely show pork on tomb scenes—we never see pig slaughtering or pig fattening—but based on the archeological evidence of bones, they ate a lot of pork. It was a very cheap, easy source of protein. Beef was reserved for celebrations or offerings and things like that.
Where do we see echoes of Ancient Egyptian cuisine in the food of modern Egypt?
We don’t eat as much fish today, unless you live in coastal cities on the Red Sea or the Mediterranean. And of course, Muslims don’t eat pork, and a lot of the Christians don’t eat pork, so it’s not a very important source of animal protein today. There are traditions that we think are ancient, like the fermented fish with spring onions [fesikh] that we eat for Easter, which may have roots in Ancient Egypt. But I’m not sure, and I don’t want to assume continuity just because.
But we still eat lentil soup, and lentils are still the cheapest food and easiest to store. And dates, of course! Even in the Pre-Dynastic period [up to 3200 BC], they were eating dates, but we have been eating a lot of dates ever since manual pollination of the palm trees was introduced, either in the Middle Kingdom or the New Kingdom.
A lot of the traditional production methods of cheese, like the curdling bag, have probably continued [since ancient times]. There’s a type of cottage cheese that, when you produce it, you have to wrap it in little mats to drain the whey. A colleague of mine has actually seen, in some tomb scenes, these little mats tied up as part of the offerings going into a tomb, which is really amazing. I keep nagging him about publishing it.
Do you have a favorite archaeological site that you have worked on?
For my Ph.D., I worked on a Coptic monastic settlement called the Monastery of Saint John the Little (so-named because he was a very short man) in the western desert of Egypt. And there, we found tons of grape-pressing remains that indicate wine production. That was really cool, because that was the very first time those kind of remains were found and documented in Egypt, especially in such large amounts, because the monks would have been producing a lot of wine for Mass.
For Ancient Egypt, I think the coolest site is always going to be where the workers built the Giza pyramids. I worked there briefly, but there have been a lot of these fantastic finds I wasn’t involved with that colleagues of mine have worked on. Archaeologists found tons of pig and cow feet, and one of the Egyptian students suggested that the workmen who built the pyramids were eating these. I think that’s such a cool find, because we still eat them now, with all that beautiful gelatin. It’s a very nutritious, very cheap food, and if you’re building a pyramid, this is what you have to eat.
From the same site, you have an area where the workmen lived, and an area where their supervisors lived, and you can see a very clear differentiation in the quality of food they’re both eating. The workmen are eating cuts of meat that have less on the bones, smaller fishes, less diversity in plants, but their overseers have the better cuts of meat and the bigger fishes.
Do you ever try to recreate historical recipes yourself?
I really enjoy recreating recipes. I do that in two different ways. Either I try to be as accurate as possible for scientific research reasons, or I just get inspired, and I do whatever I want with what’s available. In my family, I don’t cook as often as I’d like, but I try to incorporate little details as much as I can. Every year at the beginning of Ramadan, there’s one dish that my cousins always ask me about, which is a 14th-century beef and apple stew that I make quite often when we have friends and family over.
How has studying food history affected your own relationship with food?
I have gained more appreciation for the role that food plays. It’s not just about eating and nourishing yourself. It’s the cultural aspect, the religious aspect, how it plays a role in the economy, how food is used to forge or erase identities. It feels like food is connected to everything in some way. Food is at the base of most wars and most struggles; it’s one of the most important things, if not the most important.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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