Complex Numbers

Living in DeNile

As soon as I saw this Atlas Obscura headline, I knew it was blog fodder.

    Ancient Egyptians Celebrated the Feast of Drunkenness with Blood-Red Beer  
One of history’s earliest mixed drinks was made to appease a ferocious goddess.

Yeah, they had me at "Feast of Drunkenness" and kept me with "Blood-Red Beer." Even though the beer would have borne little resemblance to the delicious fermented beverage we enjoy today.

There’s a whole lot of hair-splitting about who came up with the first cocktail.

If one defines "cocktail" as "the combination of an alcoholic beverage with something else," it probably happened approximately 15 seconds after fermentation was invented.

A quick Google search will reveal a litany of opinions. Some claim that the Sazerac, which first appeared around the 1830s, holds the distinction. Others would say that the unnamed concoction of spirits, sugar, and bitters—essentially, an Old-Fashioned—published by an anonymous American bartender in an 1806 newspaper is the winner.

One could also quibble that fermented beverages shouldn't count for cocktails, at which point I'd pour them a mimosa.

Last year, I spoke with cocktail historian Amanda Schuster, who has a recipe for a boozy Scottish drink with roots dating back to the 1400s in her book Signature Cocktails.

And to be fair, if I had to guess who made the first mixed drink, I'd guess Scotland.

She pointed out that people have been mixing stuff with alcohol to make it taste better for a very, very long time.

But alcohol is delicious.

According to Dora Goldsmith, an Egyptologist at Berlin’s Freie Universität, the ancient Egyptians were making mixed alcoholic beverages in the Ptolemaic Dynasty, around 300 BC.

This is where you really need to go to the link. There's a picture of her there. I wanna cast her as Morticia Addams.

While there’s evidence of distilled liquor dating back to 800 BC in parts of Asia, Egyptian “cocktails” more resembled fortified wines and beers. And when the debauched Feast of Drunkenness rolled around, these fragrant, sweet elixirs flowed freely.

You know, there are very, very few things that one can mix with beer today. Lemonade comes to mind, but not much else. Though I have had some success mixing sour beer with sparkling wine.

Goldsmith has translated what may be instructions for two such libations from a religious text. “This is a hymn, as far as the text genre goes, but behind that hymn are traces of a recipe,” Goldsmith explains.

Sounds weird to modern ears, but remember, one of the bits of evidence for the importance of beer to ancient cultures is the Sumerian Hymn to Ninkasi.  

Versions of that same sacred song, known as “The Menu Song,” were chiseled onto the temples of Dendera, Philae, and Athribis.

Gotta love "The Menu Song."

“The Menu Song was probably sung on these [feast] days, while they drank this fragrant beer, and were in complete ecstasy,” Goldsmith says. “What is important to understand is that beer-brewing here is a mythological act. The brewing itself ensures that the cosmic order remains intact.”

Well, look at that, something I agree with the Ancient Egyptians on.

Before we look at the drinks themselves, let’s talk about Hathor, the goddess for whom they were created...

“She has two sides,” Goldsmith says. “On the one hand, she’s very loving, but she can also be a raging lunatic. She’s a cute little kitty cat one day and a raging lioness the next.”

Sounds like my ex.

Goldsmith attempted to recreate the elixir that got the population so wildly intoxicated by following 18 steps laid out in the hymn.

Because of course she did.

There's quite a bit more at the article (though not the recipe itself), mostly the mythological underpinnings of the celebration, which of course I find fascinating. Not because I believe them, of course, but because of what they say about the people who promulgated them.

And what they say in this case is that Egyptians loved their beer.