Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt
Having examined the origins of honeybees, early human interactions in the form of honey hunting and the beginning of beekeeping, this week we explore the role of beekeeping in the ancient world!
In last months essay I discussed the earliest evidence of beekeeping, showing some of the ways in which honey hunting activity transferred to keeping bees in artificial hives. This week we move forward, but only a little bit, to explore the role of beekeeping in ancient Egypt.
The Sun Temple of Newoserre Any, the sixth pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, is our first true evidence of actual beekeeping in Ancient Egypt (and pretty much the first evidence from anywhere on the planet!).
It was built a century after the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx on the Giza plateau and contained a relief depicting Egyptians managing hives and obtaining or storing the honey. This relief formed part of a much larger array of paintings depicting activities across the seasons and, according to Hilda Ransome (1937, 26), was first discovered in 1900 by a German expedition.
I described this relief in detail in a previous essay, so I won’t go into detail here, but what this tells us, is that beekeeping practices were normalised by the time of the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt. Other evidence confirms that the relief of Newoserre Any was not the only evidence of early beekeeping practice and that, indeed, its craft was widespread and considered to be highly valuable.