Scientists Discover that Ancient Egyptians Drank Hallucinogenic Cocktails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

If ZZ Top have a favorite ancient Egypt­ian deity, that deity is sure­ly Bes, whom the New York Times’ Alexan­der Nazaryan quotes cura­tor and schol­ar Branko van Oppen de Ruiter as call­ing “a beer drinker and a hell-rais­er.” In a paper pub­lished last month in Sci­en­tif­ic Reports, Van Oppen and fif­teen col­lab­o­ra­tors call the row­dy but appar­ent­ly benev­o­lent Bes “one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing and wild­ly pop­u­lar fig­ures of ancient Egypt­ian reli­gion,” and he’s come to mod­ern pub­lic atten­tion thanks to the sub­ject of that paper: a 2,000-year-old cup mold­ed in the shape of his head that has test­ed pos­i­tive for traces of psy­che­del­ic sub­stances — as well as alco­hol and bod­i­ly flu­ids.

Their analy­sis of the mug, a 3D mod­el of which you can exam­ine above, “yield­ed evi­dence of two plants known to have hal­lu­cino­genic prop­er­ties: Syr­i­an rue and the blue water lily,” writes Nazaryan, and it also bore traces of “a fer­ment­ed alco­holic liq­uid derived from fruit,” then sweet­ened with pine nuts, hon­ey, and licorice.

Those were the sorts of ingre­di­ents ancient Egyp­tians had at hand to make the med­i­cine go down — if med­i­cine it was. Nazaryan quotes dig­i­tal archae­ol­o­gist Davide Tanasi, whose lab per­formed the research, cit­ing the traces of sub­stances like blood and breast milk as under­scor­ing that “this is a mag­i­cal potion,” rather than one intend­ed as pure­ly cura­tive.

Bes, as Van Oppen and his col­lab­o­ra­tors write, “emerged from the mag­i­cal realm of the world of demons as a guardian fig­ure,” and by the Roman Impe­r­i­al age “spo­rad­i­cal­ly acquired divine wor­ship.” He “pro­vid­ed pro­tec­tion from dan­ger, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly avert­ing harm” — and also “had a cer­tain regen­er­a­tive impor­tance con­tribut­ing to the ful­fill­ment and hap­pi­ness of fam­i­ly life in all facets of repro­duc­tion, from viril­i­ty and sex­u­al­i­ty, via fer­til­i­ty and fecun­di­ty, to child­birth and growth.” Hence the spec­u­la­tion that women hop­ing to become preg­nant would drink the potion from his head in order to take a psy­che­del­ic jour­ney that would set them on the path to moth­er­hood. That’s hard­ly the most effi­cient means to the end, as we’d see it today, but giv­en the birthrates of increas­ing­ly many soci­eties across the world, we mod­erns may find our­selves in need of Bes’ assis­tance yet.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Gold­en Guide to Hal­lu­cino­genic Plants: Explore the 1977 Illus­trat­ed Guide Cre­at­ed by Harvard’s Ground­break­ing Eth­nob­otanist Richard Evan Schultes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.