also spelled “hqt” or “heket,” as well as a number of other derivations (including haqu or heqa, according to Arnold), represents “barley beer” in early Egypt. As Murray reported, one of the earliest written records of beer in ancient Egypt is a reference to hnqt-ndmt, “sweet beer,” which is located on the offering stela in the Dynasty III tomb of Sekherkhabau at Saqqara. Lutz mentions “Nubian beer” as being hkt and suggests that this is derived from a root that essentially means “to squeeze” or “to press out.” Hrozný maintained that the word was connected with the Babylonian beer hîqu, deriving from the word hâqu, “to mix,” but Lutz disagreed. Lutz’s main argument against this suggestion was, “It is hardly possible to suppose that a word like Egyptian hkt, which occurs numerous times in texts of every period, should have been borrowed from the Babylonian hîqu, a word which is not at all met with frequently in Babylonian texts.” Some Egyptologists maintain that the determinative of the word hqt was a beer jug.

Zozimus of Panopolis (b. c. ad 250) described the method of brewing hekt in ancient Egypt. Details are included in his 28-volume, oft-quoted treatise of the chemical arts, which was written sometime between the end of the 3rd and the beginning of 4th century ad. Unfortunately, some of the lines are not intelligible, but the processes of malting, mashing, and fermenting can be discerned. The account commences, “Take well-selected fine barley, macerate it for a day with water, and then spread it for a day in a spot where it is well exposed to a current of air.”

Hekt was likely of low alcoholic strength, because children drank it. As an ancient Egyptian physician recorded, “With hekt the spirit is kept in balance with the liver and blood . . . hekt is the liquid of happy blood and body.” Heket (Heqat) was also an Egyptian goddess in the form of a frog, whose strongest association was with childbirth.

See also egypt, history of beer.