Wed Nov 11 · 6:30pm
Lectures on Tap — The Role of Beer in Ancient Egyptian Medicine
Jonathan Russell, Assistant Professor of Egyptology at Brown University, reads 3,000-year-old Egyptian medical texts to ask why beer appears in their remedies. He challenges the explanations many Egyptologists have offered, that it was safer than Nile water, a daily staple or a simple sedative, and looks instead at the other ingredients and at how brewing technology and markers of brewing quality carried ritual, even sacred, meaning in healing.