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| - Egyptologists agree that the laborers who worked on Giza's pyramids received rations that included beer. However, the exact amount of beer is not as securely established as social media posts about the claim suggest.
For years, a rumor has circulated online that the workers who built Egypt's Pyramids of Giza received daily rations of 4 to 5 liters of beer.
Examples of the claim appeared on social media platforms including X (archived), Reddit (archived) and Instagram. The claim has also appeared in popular books, articles and the Wikipedia entry for "Beer."
(@factsdailyy on Instagram)
In short, it is true that Egyptologists believe the ancient Egyptian state distributed beer rations to the workers who built Giza's pyramids, as we will explain in more detail below.
However, based on a review of the available research, the exact amount of beer those workers received was not as securely established as social media posts suggest. As a result, we have rated this claim as mostly true.
Beer Rations at Giza
Located opposite Cairo on the Nile's west bank, the Giza plateau is the site of three major pyramids built as tombs for the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure in the 26th century B.C. around 4,500 years ago.
In the 1980s, a team of archaeologists discovered a settlement near the pyramids that Egyptologists believe was where laborers lived during the monuments' construction.
For decades, archaeologists have believed that the workers who lived in the town and built the pyramids were part of a system of labor organization based on temporarily conscripted work crews that modern scholars call phyles (the term is an ancient Greek word for "tribe" or "clan"). These workers received rations from the state according to their assigned roles, with skilled workers receiving larger rations than unskilled workers.
Evidence for these rations survives in the form of accounting documents, many of them written on papyrus paper, as the Egyptologist Hana Vymazalová noted in an entry on rations in the "UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology." While some of these lists included items such as vegetables, cloth and meat, "the basic rations in all periods included bread and beer," according to Vymazalová's entry.
Because these ration lists appeared so consistently at different sites and across different periods, Egyptologists broadly believe that this system was the standard way in which the pharaonic administration organized projects that required large amounts of labor, such as building and maintaining royal funerary monuments including Giza's pyramids.
According to Vymazalová, "No direct evidence has survived of the system of ration distribution at the construction sites" dating to the Old Kingdom, the period of the Giza pyramids' construction, "but some information can be traced in archaeology." For example, in 1989, archaeologists discovered a brewery complex inside the Giza workers' town.
How Much Beer Did Workers Receive?
Although Egyptologists believe the workers at Giza were no exception to the ration system attested for much of Egyptian history, we did not find any demonstrable evidence of primary sources documenting exactly how much beer the Egyptian administration distributed to workers specifically at Giza during the 26th century B.C.
Rather, the commonly quoted estimate of 4 to 5 liters of beer per day appeared to be based on research about other sites and specifically on figures that two scholars published between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s.
First, in his 1989 book "Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization," British Egyptologist Barry Kemp calculated that the standard daily rations for an "ordinary laborer" throughout Egyptian history included "ten loaves [of bread] and a measure of beer that could fluctuate between a third of a jug to one or even two whole jugs."
Kemp wrote that it was difficult to translate these figures into modern units of volume because, at the time, scholars had not yet systematically measured the volumes of beer jugs discovered at different archaeological sites.
In a paper published in 1996, Czech Egyptologist Miroslav Barta established that beer jugs found at a site called Abusir had a standard volume equivalent to 2.4 liters. Abusir features a pyramid complex constructed in Egypt's 5th dynasty, which began in the early 25th century BC.
Plugging Barta's volume figure into Kemp's daily ration estimate results in a range of less than a liter of beer per day on the low end to 4.8 liters per day on the high end.
It is important to note that neither Kemp nor Barta based their figures on evidence from 26th-century B.C. Giza. Kemp largely drew on evidence from the period known as the Middle Kingdom, which began around 500 years after the completion of the Giza pyramids. Barta's volume calculation was based on ancient beer jugs found at the Abusir necropolis — a context that dates slightly later than the period of pyramid construction at Giza.
In other words, an estimate of between 4 and 5 liters in beer rations per day does have some grounding in legitimate scholarship, but no demonstrable evidence of specific primary sources from Giza could be found to prove that the workers there received that exact amount.
A 4.8-liter-per-day estimate also represents the very top of the range Kemp described for ordinary workers throughout all of Egyptian history. It is possible the beer rations distributed to unskilled workers at Giza were significantly smaller in volume.
We have previously looked into other rumors related to the Giza pyramids, including the mostly true claim that they were originally coated in white limestone and capped with 24-karat gold.
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