Hilary Wilson on… Milk

This article is from Ancient Egypt issue 142

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Hathor, one of the oldest and most beloved of Egyptian deities, wore a crown of cow’s horns supporting the solar disc, marking her ancient association with the animal which, in many cultures, epitomises motherhood. The cow form of Hathor was recognised both as the protector of mothers and infants, especially during pregnancy and childbirth, and as a funerary deity, who eased the passage of rebirth into the afterlife. The child Horus was said to have been nursed by the Hathor cow while in hiding in the marshes of Chemmis. According to one version of the myth, when Horus was severely injured in his battle with Seth, it was Hathor who healed his damaged eye by salving it with milk. In the royal context, the goddess was the nurturer of the king, her milk conferring on him divine life and sovereignty as the true inheritor of the Horus throne. Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri and Ramesses II at Abydos are both shown suckling the Hathor cow, an image most vividly realised in the painted sandstone statue found in the vaulted Hathor chapel of Thutmose III, now in Cairo.

Milk is mentioned in the Pyramid Texts among the foods required to sustain the spirit of the deceased king, or as offerings to accompany specific prayers. PT337 addresses Osiris, who is invoked as the Celestial Bull, saying that, when he ascends to the sky, he will be lamented and mourned by his harem of milch-cows and nursing cows. Thutmose III’s endowments at Thebes included cows to provide milk for the sacred offerings, and his coronation decree listed the vessels of precious metals that he had ordered to be filled with milk as gifts to the gods. Milk, being considered pure perhaps because of its whiteness, is often mentioned together with water and incense in purification rituals. Milk was sprinkled on the ground before the sacred bark in a festival parade, and before the funeral sled bearing the coffin to the tomb.

The semi-wild Egyptian cattle were the most prestigious of all livestock animals, valued more for their meat than their milk. Tomb and temple offering-tables were traditionally laden with joints of beef and whole bull or ox carcasses, but breeding cows were not slaughtered for meat until they were beyond reproductive age. Among the scenes of animal herding and butchery from the Old and Middle Kingdoms are vignettes of cows giving birth, nursing their calves, and being milked, as on the sarcophagus of Ashayet, a lesser wife of Mentuhotep II. Many tomb images show that milch-cows were routinely hobbled or restrained by ropes to enable the dairyman to do his work, and to prevent the animal kicking over the pottery milking bowl, while others suggest that the presence of her calf was enough to render a cow more docile. On the sarcophagus of Kawit, another of Mentuhotep’s lesser wives, as a dairyman collects her milk in a small leather flask, a cow appears to shed a tear at her calf’s deprivation. Evidence from other African cattle-herding communities suggests that – depending on the season, the quality of pasturage, and the age of the suckling calf – the available milk yield of an ancient Egyptian cow would vary over a single lactation and would have been quite modest by modern standards, with a likely average of one litre per day.

Cow’s milk was clearly a significant element of the diet for those who could afford to keep cattle, but evidence for the wider consumption of milk from other animals is more circumstantial. Scenes of goats grazing in the scrublands fringing the cultivation include images of nannies giving birth and suckling kids, but none of goats being milked, though the flasks or leather sacks carried by goatherds have been interpreted as milking vessels or churning bags. An inscription in the Tomb of Beha at Elkab describes the feeding of children with the milk of cows, goats, and she-asses. Medical texts list milk as a component of many medicinal recipes, most often as a vehicle for more active or unpalatable ingredients, but the type of milk is rarely specified. Jar dockets and delivery notes at Deir el-Medina used generic terms interpreted as ‘milk’ and ‘curds’, the latter being given as rewards or bonuses for the royal workmen in celebration of the Festival of Amenhotep I.

The Egyptian climate is hardly conducive to the keeping of fresh milk or the making of butter and hard cheese, but there is evidence for the use of milk in cooking. Sinuhe, the protagonist of the classic Middle Kingdom story, is offered water and ‘cooked milk’ by a desert chieftain and later, in exile in Retenu, he claims to have enjoyed a rich diet including ‘milk used in every kind of cooking’. Bata, the younger man in the Ramesside Tale of the Two Brothers, lived with the cattle he tended and brought milk daily to his older brother. At Saqqara in the mid-20th century, the contents of alabaster jars from the First Dynasty tomb of Hor-Aha were identified as an acid-coagulated cheese, and pottery vessels found in the Second Dynasty Tomb 3477 were said to have contained some kind of curd or fermented milk. Before the development of modern scientific methods, the identification of such fatty residues was partly based on comparisons with traditional Coptic and Arab products, like samna, a form of clarified butter oil, or mish, a salty, fermented curd cheese. No ancient Egyptian word for cheese has been definitively identified, but the ancient origins of the Greek halloumi could be suggested by the modern cheese known in Egyptian Arabic as haloum, a word derived from the Coptic halom.

More recently, the contents of a jar from the tomb of Ptahmose, a Nineteenth Dynasty Mayor of Memphis, were subjected to detailed protein analysis. The whiteish mass wrapped in fabric was revealed as a semi-solid cheese formed by a kefir-like fermentation from a mixture of milk from cows, goats, and sheep. The analysis also showed worrying levels of organic contamination from human sources, and the presence of bacteria that could cause brucellosis, so it was perhaps not such a healthy contribution to the Egyptian diet.

All images: Hilary Wilson, unless otherwise stated