There is a 2025 book by Sam Kean titled Dinner with King Tut: How rogue archeologists are re-creating the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of lost civilizations. It has eleven chapters that discuss the following dates:
Africa – 75,000 years ago
South America – 7500 BC
Turkey -6500s BC
Egypt – 2000s BC
Polynesia – 1000s BC
Rome – AD 100s
California – AD 500s
Viking Europe – AD 900s
Northern Alaska – AD 1000s
China – AD 1200s
Mexico – AD 1500s
There is also an article by Sam Kean in Nautil Us on July 9, 2025 titled How to Make the Bread That Fueled the Pyramids. Similarly, beginning on page 128 of the book he says about Egypt in the 2000s BC:
“From the most wretched servant to the most exalted prince, people in ancient Egypt ate bread and drank beer with every meal. These staples were so vital to their diet that, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the combined symbols for bread and beer actually meant meal or sustenance.
During pyramid construction, bakeries the size of football fields stood near the worker villages. Every morning, battalions of men and women would grind up bushels of emmer – the main grain eaten in Egypt – into flour on stone hand mills called querns. Still more bakers mixed and kneaded the dough, probably with their feet. To bake the bread, rather than waste time making thousands of mud ovens, crews used conical clay molds. They’d dig holes in the ground, fill them with glowing embers, drop the molds in upside-down, plop some dough in, then cap each mold with a second one and heap hot ash over the top. The endless rows of these devices made the lot behind the baking huts look like giant egg cartons.
Timing was critical. The glowing embers had to be ready the same time as the dough was, and the bread had to finish just as the construction crews and other laborers were lining up for meals. Given the immense scale, there was a factory feel to the operation, and someone like Amon was as much a foreman as a baker, equally concerned with workflow and worker training as he was flour quality or seasoning.
….Blackley shows me his replica mold. It’s scorched black and much heftier than I expect – fifteen inches across and probably twenty pounds.
As a treat, Blackley has also baked a loaf for me to sample. It’s a foot wide and sand colored with a springy crust. It consists of just a handful of ingredients – salt, yeast, coriander, emmer flour – and its blunted shape reminds me of NASA space capsules [like the Apollo] from the 1960s.
….Beyond bread, Egyptian laborers were paid in beer as well – 1 1/3 gallons daily, roughly ten pints, which they happily sucked down given that temperatures on the hot sands could reach 130oF. (One scholar estimated that it took 231 million gallons of beer to build the largest pyramid). Even children drank beer, largely because the alcohol killed microbes and rendered it more sanitary than the water in rivers (a.k.a. their sewers). Egyptian doctors also prescribed beer as medicine to remedy coughs, constipation, swollen eyes, and upset stomachs.”
The Giza pyramid image came from Wikimedia Commons.
