Most ancient Egyptians ate bread and beer, every day, for their whole lives. Onions, and whatever vegetables were in season. Fish out of the Nile. Dates and figs when they ripened. Meat rarely, unless you were rich or a festival was on.
That sounds thin, and it was not. Egyptian bread and beer were both made from the same two grains and between them they carried most of the calories, most of the protein and a good share of the vitamins in the diet. They were also money.
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Try It Now →Bread and beer were wages
Egypt had no coinage until very late in its history. Workers were paid in goods, and the two constants were loaves and jugs of beer. Ration lists survive with exactly that accounting: so many loaves and so many jugs per man per day, with more for the foreman.
So “bread and beer” was not only what you ate. It was what you were owed. When the tomb-builders at Deir el-Medina went on strike in the reign of Ramesses III — the first recorded strike anywhere — it was because the rations had not arrived.
The beer was not what the word suggests now. It was thick, cloudy, only lightly alcoholic, and closer to a thin porridge than to a modern pint. Children drank it. It was safer than river water and it was food.
What was actually on the table
| Food | Who ate it | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Bread (emmer wheat) | Everyone, daily | Dozens of shapes; the basic unit of pay |
| Beer (barley) | Everyone, daily, including children | Thick and nutritious, weakly alcoholic |
| Onions, garlic, leeks | Everyone | Onions especially — eaten raw with bread |
| Lentils, chickpeas, beans | Everyone | The main plant protein |
| Lettuce, cucumber, melon | Common | Lettuce was linked to the god Min and fertility |
| Fish | Common for ordinary people | Dried and salted to keep; avoided by some priests |
| Dates, figs, grapes | Seasonal | Dates were the everyday sweet |
| Honey | Rare, expensive | The only real sweetener — there was no sugar |
| Duck, goose | Sometimes | Trapped in the marshes; also salted |
| Beef | Mostly the rich, and festivals | Temple offerings were redistributed afterwards |
| Pork | More common than usually said | Pig bones are frequent in settlement rubbish |
| Wine | The wealthy | Jars were labelled with vineyard, year and quality |
The bread wrecked their teeth
This is not a guess. It is written on the mummies.
Grain was ground between stones, and the grinding shed grit into the flour — fragments of the quern itself, plus windblown sand, which in Egypt gets into everything. The bread came out gritty, and eating gritty bread twice a day for forty years grinds the enamel off your molars.
Egyptian mummies, rich and poor alike, show teeth worn flat, often down to the pulp, with the abscesses that follow. Pharaohs were not spared: several royal mummies have severe dental disease. It is one of the clearest pictures we have of ordinary Egyptian life, and it comes from the food.
Did they really eat that much meat?
It depends who. For most people meat was occasional — a festival, an offering redistributed from a temple, a bird caught in the marshes.
But the excavations at Giza complicate the picture. The settlement that housed the pyramid workers has produced animal bone in quantity: cattle, sheep and goat, enough to suggest the workforce was supplied with meat regularly. Whoever organised the pyramid project was feeding its people properly, which fits the other evidence that these were paid workers rather than slaves.
What they did not have
No sugar, no chicken until late, no rice, and none of the foods that came from the Americas — no potatoes, tomatoes, maize, chillies or chocolate. No citrus for most of Egyptian history.
Modern “ancient Egyptian” menus often include things that arrived thousands of years later. If a recipe calls for lemon and sugar, it is not Egyptian.
How bread and beer were actually made
Making bread started long before the dough. The everyday grain was emmer wheat, and emmer is stubborn: each grain sits inside a tough husk. Workers moistened the grain, pounded it in limestone mortars, dried it in the sun, then winnowed and sieved it before it could be ground into flour on a saddle quern, a flat stone rubbed by hand with a smaller one. That grinding was hard, daily work, and it is where much of the grit in the bread came from.
In the Old Kingdom, loaves were baked in clay moulds set in the hot embers of a hearth. Proper bread ovens only became common in the New Kingdom. Under the microscope, surviving loaves show mostly emmer flour, sometimes with barley, figs or dates mixed in, and traces of yeast from around 1400 BC.
Beer was brewed in the same kitchens from the same grains. Research on brewing residues suggests Egyptian brewers mixed malted (sprouted) grain with grain that had been soaked and cooked, and that there were several different methods. That fits the many different Egyptian words for beer: like bread, it came in more than one kind.
Fish, birds and the Nile marshes
For ordinary families the Nile was the meat counter. Fish were caught with nets, traps and spears, then eaten fresh or split, salted and dried in the sun so they would keep. Some fish were sacred in particular towns and some priests avoided fish altogether, but for most people it was everyday food.
The papyrus marshes also supplied birds. Ducks, geese, pigeons and quail were netted in huge numbers and kept in pens, and geese were fattened for the table. Wealthy men liked to be shown hunting birds in the marshes with a throwing stick, as Nebamun is in the painting below. That was sport for the rich; for everyone else, fowl came from nets and farmyards.
Fruit, vegetables and pulses
Vegetables filled the gap between bread and the occasional piece of meat. The ones that turn up most often in tombs, texts and paintings are:
- Onions, garlic and leeks, eaten raw and cooked by everyone.
- Lentils, chickpeas and beans, a cheap source of protein that was stewed or ground.
- Lettuce, a tall, upright variety linked to the fertility god Min.
- Cucumbers, melons and radishes, grown in irrigated gardens.
- Dates and figs, the main sweet foods, alongside fruit from the sycamore fig and the doum palm.
- Grapes and, later, pomegranates, which arrived around the start of the New Kingdom.
Sweetness came mostly from dates and fruit. Honey was valued but expensive, which is why it turns up in temple offerings and royal tombs. It keeps almost forever, as the honey from Tutankhamun’s tomb shows.
Rich and poor ate differently
Everyone ate bread, beer and onions. Beyond that, diet followed wealth. A farming family ate bread, beer, lentils, onions, fish and whatever their garden produced, with meat at festivals. A wealthy official could add beef, roast geese and ducks, wine, honey cakes and fruit all year round. The difference shows up in the bodies themselves. CT scans of mummies, most of them from well-off families, often show hardened arteries, while ordinary skeletons show the wear of hard work and gritty bread.
For state workers, food was literally their salary. The tomb builders of Deir el-Medina received monthly grain rations, and when those rations were late they put down their tools; we tell that story in how ancient Egyptian tomb workers were paid.
Wine was for the wealthy
Beer was for everyone; wine was for the people at the top. Vineyards grew mainly in the Nile Delta and the oases, and wine jars were labelled almost like modern bottles. The jars buried with Tutankhamun record the year of the king’s reign, the estate the wine came from and the name of the chief vintner. A 2005 chemical study of residues from those jars by a University of Barcelona team found that at least some of the king’s wine was red.
Food for the dead
Egyptians expected to eat in the afterlife too. Tomb walls carry long offering lists of bread, beer, beef, fowl, wine and fruit, and the formula asking for “a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer” for the dead appears again and again. Tombs were also stocked with real food: loaves, baskets of fruit, jars of wine and wrapped joints of meat and poultry. Tutankhamun was buried with dozens of boxes of prepared meat and fowl. What people hoped to eat forever tells us what they valued most, and it was the same food they ate every day.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the main food in ancient Egypt?
Bread, made from emmer wheat, eaten at every meal by everybody. Beer made from barley came close behind. Together they supplied most of the calories in the Egyptian diet and were also used as wages.
Did ancient Egyptians drink beer every day?
Yes, including children. It was thick, low in alcohol and nutritious — treated as food rather than as a luxury, and safer to drink than untreated river water.
Did ancient Egyptians eat meat?
Some. Beef was expensive and mostly reached ordinary people through temple offerings that were redistributed after the ritual. Fish, ducks and geese were far more common, and pork was eaten more widely than older books suggest.
What did ancient Egyptians eat for breakfast?
There is no Egyptian word for a breakfast menu, but the everyday answer is bread, beer and onions. Field workers took the same food with them and ate it through the day.
Did ancient Egyptians have sugar?
No. Sugar cane reached Egypt long after the pharaohs. Sweetness came from dates, figs and honey, and honey was expensive enough to be a luxury and an offering.
Why were their teeth so worn down?
Because of grit in the bread. Grinding grain on stone shed particles into the flour, and blown sand added more. Decades of eating it wore the chewing surfaces flat, which is visible in mummies at every level of society.
Related
The Nile: why the flood set the calendar
Counting ancient Egypt
The honey from Tutankhamun’s tomb
How were the pyramids built?
Sources
Further reading from museums and academic publishers:
- Google Arts & Culture — “What Did Ancient Egyptians Eat?“
- Journal of Ethnic Foods (Springer Nature, peer-reviewed) — “Influence of the traditional food culture of Ancient Egypt on the transition of cuisine and food culture of contemporary Egypt“
- UCL Researchers in Museums — “3,500-year-old bread and beer from New Kingdom Egypt“
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art — “Model Bakery and Brewery from the Tomb of Meketre“
- Phys.org — “King Tut liked red wine” (University of Barcelona study, 2005)
