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.

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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.