Kemet Beyond the Pyramids · Episode 4

Paid in Bread and Beer

For two thousand years, Egypt ran without coins. Its builders, scribes and soldiers were paid in grain.

Ashraf Osman · اقرأ بالعربية

Ask what the builders of the pyramids earned, and the honest answer is: lunch. And breakfast, and dinner, and something to drink with it.

Egypt had no coins until very late in its history. Value was counted in grain, and grain turned into the two things every Egyptian ate every day: bread and beer. The most common prayer carved in Egyptian tombs asks the gods for exactly that: "a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer" for the dead.

Two grains, two staples

Egyptian farmers grew two main cereals: emmer wheat and barley. Emmer went mostly into bread, barley mostly into beer. Egyptian beer was thick, cloudy and filling, closer to a nourishing drink than to the beer we know. Tomb scenes and wooden models show every step: women grinding grain on stone, dough being shaped and baked, mash being strained into jars.^[1]

Feeding the pyramid town

In 1991, Mark Lehner's team found two bakeries in the workers' town south of the Giza plateau, with their hearths, their vats and their pottery bread moulds still in place.^[2] Thousands of these bell-shaped moulds, called bedja, have since been found there. The largest held enough dough for a loaf that could feed eight to ten people.^[3]

Bread was not the whole menu. Based on the animal bones found at the site, archaeologists estimate that the workers ate several thousand cattle and over fifteen thousand sheep and goats a year, as well as fish.^[3] And in the papyri from the Red Sea we met in Episode 3, the boat crews' rations were measured out according to each man's rank.

A well-fed workforce was not kindness. It was how the king got his pyramid built on time.

Doing the sums

Egyptian scribes learned to divide wages in school. One exercise in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus asks how to share 100 loaves among ten men when three of them earn a double share. The answer: 7 9/13 loaves each for the seven ordinary men, and 15 5/13 for the three senior ones.^[1]

A Middle Kingdom temple list from Lahun gives a real wage: about ten loaves a day for a labourer or porter, with a ration of beer. Bread and beer even had an official exchange rate, called pesu, which measured how much grain had gone into each loaf or jug. A jar of beer was worth the same as a loaf made from the same amount of flour.^[1]

Grain as money

Because everyone needed grain, everyone accepted it. A sack of grain worked like a purse. A Fifth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara shows a buyer handing over two measures of wheat for six loaves.^[1] For larger deals, values were written in a weight of copper, the deben, but the payment itself could be made in grain, oil, cloth or animals.

The best-paid workers in Egypt

Fifteen hundred years after the pyramids, the craftsmen who cut and painted the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived in their own village, Deir el-Medina. Their ration lists survive. A workman received 4 sacks (khar) of emmer and 1½ sacks of barley every month.^[4] A New Kingdom khar held roughly 77 litres.^[5]

That was far more than one family could eat. The physician and Egyptologist John Nunn estimated it at over 35,000 calories a day, about ten times what a manual worker needs.^[4] The extra grain was spent: on furniture, on cloth, on a coffin, on a goat.

"We are hungry"

Wages in grain had one weakness. If the granaries were empty, there was nothing to pay with. In the 29th year of Ramesses III, around 1158 BCE, the tomb-builders' rations came late again and again. The workmen put down their tools and sat in protest outside the royal mortuary temples on the west bank. A scribe recorded their words:

Officials released some grain, then not enough, and the protests continued until the workers threatened to take their complaint to the vizier himself. Only then were they paid in full.^[6]

• ~2560 BCEBakeries feed the pyramid builders at Giza.
• ~1850 BCEThe Lahun lists set a labourer's day at about ten loaves.
• ~1550 BCEThe Rhind Papyrus teaches scribes to divide loaves into wages.
• ~1158 BCETomb-builders strike when their grain is 18 days late.
• 1991Archaeologists uncover the Giza bakeries.

Bread and beer sound humble. But they were Egypt's salary, its currency and its safety net all at once. When they arrived on time, tombs and temples rose. When they did not, even the king's own craftsmen put down their tools.

And behind every loaf was someone grinding the grain, usually a woman. That is the next story: the women of Deir el-Medina.

Ashraf Osman writes about ancient Egypt for everyone who loves it, starting with children and young adults. His books for young readers tell Egyptian history from a human point of view, so readers live the experience instead of memorising dates. This is episode 4 of Kemet Beyond the Pyramids.