The history website The Past has published the second part of a feature by Hilary Wilson examining how the ancient Egyptians were paid for their labour, showing that wages were often issued as food and drink rather than money. The piece, titled Bread, beer, and economics - Part 2, appeared on 14 August 2026 and continues Wilson's exploration of the everyday economics of life along the Nile.
Wilson's central point is that ancient Egypt operated without coinage for most of its long history, and that the staples of daily life served as the medium through which people were compensated. Bread and beer sit at the heart of that system. Both were made from grain, and both formed the foundation of the ordinary Egyptian diet, which made them a natural unit for measuring and distributing value.
The feature belongs to Wilson's regular series for The Past, in which she draws on the texts and material remains of ancient Egypt to explain how ordinary people lived and worked. This instalment builds on an earlier part of the same discussion, extending the account of how rations were calculated and handed out to those who worked for the state and its institutions.
The idea that workers were paid in kind will be familiar to anyone who has read about the community of craftsmen and labourers who built and decorated the royal tombs. Records surviving from such settlements list the goods delivered to workers and their households, and it is this kind of evidence that allows a picture of daily economic life to be reconstructed in detail. Wilson's article sets out how the system functioned and why bread and beer were so central to it.
For readers new to the subject, the value of a piece like this lies in the way it connects grand monuments to the practicalities of feeding the people who built them. The pyramids and temples that dominate popular images of ancient Egypt were raised by workforces that had to be housed, fed and rewarded, and the economics of bread and beer help explain how that was managed across centuries.
Anyone whose curiosity about ancient Egyptian daily life extends to the writing that recorded it can begin learning to read hieroglyphs with the Hierolyte app, which introduces the signs used across inscriptions and administrative documents alike. The full feature is available to read on The Past.