Usermaatra Setepenra was the third ruler of the 19th Dynasty in ancient Egypt. He became Pharaoh in 1279 bc and during his long reign, until his death in 1213 bc, he excelled as a warrior, a builder, and, somewhat tangentially, a brewer. Some of the greatest Egyptian temples and monuments are to his credit, including the Nubian rock-cut temple at Abu Simbel, numerous temples at Memphis, the court and pylon of Luxor temple, a temple at Abydos, and the Ramesseum, his own mortuary temple at west Thebes, opposite modern Luxor. On the field of combat, he won the crucial Battle of Qadesh (Kadesh), in present-day Syria against the Hittite king Mutwatallis, which preserved Egypt as the mightiest power of his age. The Ramesseum is of particular interest to modern scholars trying to determine the place of beer in ancient Pharaonic society. It was this structure that, incidentally, was incorrectly described by the 1st century bc Greek historian Diodorus Siculus as the “Tomb of Ozymandias,” which, in turn inspired the early 19th-century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to write his well-known sonnet by the same name. The complex contains several mud-brick granaries that are testimony to the importance of grain to the economy of ancient Egypt. To build his massive structures, Rameses II needed vast armies of laborers, who, in turn, required feeding and hydration. In ancient times people knew that although water might not be safe to drink, beer was trustworthy, and therefore it was the latter that constituted the daily beverage of the common man. Near the tomb’s construction site, on the west bank of the Nile, was the settlement of Deir el Medina, where Rameses II housed his workers. Extensive excavations there have yielded fascinating insight into the daily lives of the people who lived under the 18th to the 20th dynasties. The many ostraca (shards of pottery) recovered point to brewing on a tremendous scale and establish barley as the most common grain used, next to emmer. The relicts have allowed us to reconstruct the entire sequence of Egyptian brewing and baking techniques, from primitive malting to mashing and spontaneous fermentation in earthenware crocks.

See also egypt.