The WINE OF ANCIENT EGYPT (Irep en Kemet) research project studies the wine culture of Ancient Egypt. The aims are documenting the complete corpus of wine from Ancient Egypt, and analysing the relevant data including iconography, texts, artefacts and organic material from a multidisciplinary point of view. The research project also seeks to reveal the significance of the ancient Egyptian wine culture legacy in the Mediterranean region.

The project’s website promotes the study of wine in Ancient Egypt and the dissemination of archaeological knowledge regarding wine in Antiquity.

EGYWINE PROJECT 2016-2018

The ‘Ancient Egypt’s Wine Rebirth’ (2016-2018) EGYWINE Project, led by Dr. Maria Rosa Guasch-Jané, is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action post-doctoral grant at Mondes Pharaoniques laboratory of the Sorbonne University in Paris (France) and financially supported by the European Commission (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015).

EGYWINE Project addresses the viticulture origins, winemaking and preservation of the ancient Egyptian wines, and the diffusion of the Egyptian wine culture legacy to Europe. EGYWINE Project originality is to study, through pioneering techniques, how the Egyptian wines were made to understand the ancient traditional elaboration methods to progress on knowledge and heritage conservation.

Project Team

Dr. Maria Rosa Guasch-Jané is post-doctoral researcher Marie Sklodowska Curie of the EGYWINE project (H2020-MSCA-IF-2015) at the Mondes Pharaoniques laboratory (UMR 8167 ‘Orient et Méditerranée’) Sorbonne University in Paris.

EGYWINE Project members have highly specialized labs and are leaders of the below areas of study:

* Ancient Egypt: Professor Pierre Tallet, director of Mondes Pharaoniques lab (UMR8167 ‘Orient et Méditerranée’) at Sorbonne University in Paris.

* Paleogenomics: Professors Thierry Grange and Eva-Maria Geigl, directors of the ‘Epigenome and paleogenome’ laboratory of the Institut Jacques Monod (UMR7592), University Paris-Diderot/CNRS.

* Grapes and wine: Professor Jean-Michel Boursiquot, MontpellierSupAgro-INRA (UMR1334 ‘Amélioration Génétique et Adaptation des Plantes’).

* Ancient Egyptian ceramics: Dr. Sylvie Marchand, director of the ceramics lab of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO) in Cairo.

WEBSITE WINE OF ANCIENT EGYPT SINCE 2013

Design, creation and development of the website by Josep Socorregut Domènech of Sistemes de Gestió de Patrimoni (SGP). Website creation financially supported by Vinseum, the Museum of the wine cultures in Catalonia, and Perelada Fine Estates.

VITICULTURE AND WINEMAKING SCENES PROJECT 2011-2014

The ‘Study of viticulture and winemaking in Egyptian tombs’ (2011-2014) was a three-year research project directed by Dr. Maria Rosa Guasch Jané at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the University Nova in Lisbon (Portugal) and funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science.

The project aim was to document and investigate the viticulture and winemaking scenes in the Ancient Egyptian private tombs, a comprehensive study of all the images, including the texts associated to them. This research project has successfully produced a researchable, inclusive bibliographic database of wine, viticulture and winemaking in ancient Egypt, as well as a researchable scene-detail database of viticulture and winemaking scenes in the Egyptian private tombs throughout the ancient Egyptian history, in a total of 92 records. Furthermore, after a research in-depth in the Egyptological archives unpublished scenes have been unveiled.

A complete photographic survey was also achieved permitting the record and study of all the scenes and the possibility of knowing the condition of all the tombs in an exact time frame. The project’s second phase involves the creation of an online georeferenced map of Egypt, illustrating the ancient Egyptian tombs that include viticulture and winemaking scenes. This photographic, documentary and analytical study is an important tool for the future documentation and conservation of the archaeological heritage of Egypt.

Project Team

Maria Rosa Guasch-Jané (project director): BS in Pharmacy (1996) and Masters’ degree in Nutrition and Food Science (1998) by the University of Barcelona; Masters’ degree in Oriental Studies-Egyptology (2000) by the Autonomous University of Barcelona; PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences (UB, 2005) for the doctoral thesis entitled “Wine in ancient Egypt: a cultural and analytical study”.

Sofia Fonseca: BA in Archaeology (1997) at University de Coimbra (Portugal) and Masters’ Degree in Egyptology (2001) by the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Mahmoud Ibrahim: BA in Egyptology (1998) at Cairo University (Egypt) and Master’s degree in Egyptology and Linguistics (2006) at Basel University (Switzerland).