Egyptian Beer for the Living, the Dead ... and the Gods

by: Horst Dornbusch on 02-28-2005

Next time you are in New York City, make it a point to visit the Metropolitan Museum and have a BeerAdvocate moment. In a museum!? Yes, go to the Egyptian section and snoop around the many tombs and mummies and search for the neat stuff retrieved from the tomb of Meketre. This fellow was a high administrator, a sort of chancellor and prime minister of the warrior King Mentuhotep II of the 11th dynasty. Mentuhotep II ruled the land of the Nile for half a century, from roughly 2050 to 2000 B.C. For a depiction of the king's likeness, see this image and this one.

When Meketre died (around 1975 B.C.), he was mummified and put to rest in a tomb in western Thebes, opposite present-day Luxor. Fortunate for us, his contemporaries placed a large collection of miniature carved wooden figures in his tomb. These toy figures represented Egyptians at work. There was a carpentry shop, an abattoir, a granary, a kitchen, a couple of river boats, and ... a brewery. Because the inner chamber of Meketre's tomb was untouched when it was discovered by Herbert E. Winlock on March 17, 1920, the workshop models give us an intimate three-dimensional view of how Egyptians lived.

The Egyptians did not invent beer. Rather they had learned the art of brewing from the world's first known brewers, the Sumerians, Babylonian, and Assyrians further to the East in what is now Iraq. The Egyptians, however, left us with the best documentation of ancient brewing practices. Most of the many depictions of Egyptian brewing that have come down to us are murals in vaults, pyramids, and sacrificial chambers. These attest to the importance and high esteem in which the art of beer-making was held in Egyptian society. Yet the find in Meketre's tomb probably ranks among the best preserved and most instructive.

The brewery model in the Metropolitan Museum apparently dates from around 2009 to 1998 B.C. A card at the exhibition in the Museum explains what is going on in the brewery: "The overseer with a baton sits inside the door. In the brewery two women grind flour, which another man works into dough. After a second man treads the dough into mash in a tall vat, it is put into tall crocks to ferment. After fermentation, it is poured off into round jugs with black clay stoppers." See the Museum's website for more.

In ancient Egypt, beer was a regular part of the daily life of every Egyptian, from the highest to the lowest. It was the coinage of power and social cohesion, connected to both the gods and the state. In Egyptian culture, all power derived from the sun. The falcon-headed god of the sun, Re, was regarded as the source of all life and sustenance. He was also considered the inventor of beer. Re and his wife Nut, the goddess of the stars, were the progenitors of the pharaohs and of all the lesser gods in the beyond. Their favorite daughter was Hathor, a pretty and alluring creature, with whom Re, her father, fell madly in love. Incest was not a taboo in Egypt and it was customary for a pharaoh's children to marry each other. Re called Hathor his "eye," and she used to please him by disrobing in from of him. When Hathor drank beer, she turned into the goddess of love, lust, joy, singing, dancing, and laughter. Together, Re and his daughter Hathor had a son, Ihi, who became the god of music.

Hathor was a friend of the dead whom she accompanied on their journey to the beyond. Her sacred tree was the sycamore under whose shady canopy lovers would meet to share a crock of beer. Her brew was an aphrodisiac, often flavored with mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), a plant with a parsnip-like brown root, whose bark contains an alkaloid that has a narcotic effect.

In Egypt, Beer is a Meal with Heavenly Connections
In Egypt, beer was regarded as food. In fact, the old Egyptian hieroglyph for "meal" was a compound of those for "bread" and "beer". This "bread-beer meal" plus a few onions and some dried fish was the standard diet of the common people along the Nile at the time. Beer came in eight different types in Egypt. Most were made from barley, some from emmer, and many were flavored with ginger or honey. The best beers were brewed to a color as red as human blood. The Egyptians distinguished between the different beers by their alcoholic strength and dominant flavor.

None other than the god of the dead, Osiris, was hailed as the guardian of beer, because to him grain - both emmer and barley - were sacred. The Egyptians believed that grain had sprung spontaneously from Osiris' mummy, as a gift to mankind and as a symbol of life after death. This was sufficient justification for the god-like pharaohs to turn brewing into a state monopoly and strictly license brewing rights to entrepreneurs and priests. Many temples eventually opened their own breweries and pubs, all in the service of the gods. The port of Pelusium at the mouth of the Nile became a large brewing center, and trading in beer became big business.

Beer in Egyptian society beer was the sacrificial drink of choice in the temples of Hathor. During a five-week long feast in her honor, the priestesses and temple maidens gave banquets for the worshippers, during which they performed erotic dances. Each dancer, dressed only in a string around her waist, as unclad as Hathor had shown herself to her father, would move her hips enticingly before the guests. Hollow pearls, filled with pebbles and suspended from the dancer's waist band, would amplify the arousing rhythm of the erotic spectacle. As the alcohol took over, Hathor's beer would put the imbibers in direct contact with the world beyond. It created the link between the heavens and the earth and allowed the temple visitors to partake in the mystery of life and death. Fittingly, the dead, too, were supplied with crocks of beer in their catacombs so that they would not be thirsty on their trip to the realm where Hathor and Osiris were waiting for them ... with a crock of beer, of course.

It was common etiquette for a worshipper to drink until intoxicated. A wealthy Egyptian rarely would leave home without being accompanied by two slaves and a hammock. So if he got too inebriated to walk home after a night in a tavern or at a beer banquet, he could sleep off his delirium in a prone position while being carried home.

Egyptians used beer as a currency to pay slaves, tradesmen, priests, and public officials alike, which means that every Egyptian was entitled to a certain amount of daily beer. This quantity was strictly regulated, even at the highest level. A queen was entitled to 10 loaves of bread and two crocks of beer a day. This allotment must have been of tremendous importance, because it was usually guaranteed to her by her pharaoh-husband as part of her marriage contract. A princess also got 10 loaves, but she had to wash them down with only one crock of free beer a day. An officer of the guard, on the other hand, who might be called upon to defend both the queen and the princess, fared better than either: He got 20 loaves and two crocks. Even the daily ration of the slaves who built the pyramids, as well as the pay of all low-level officials, included two to three loaves of bred and two crocks of brew, and it was not up to the master's whim whether or not a slave got his beer: The nectar of the gods was even a slave's entitlement.

Beer and Taxes
Beer became so popular in ancient Egypt that no ruler dared to put a tax on it ¾ that is, until the middle of the last century B.C., after the pharaohs had long disappeared and Egypt had become a Greek province. Every government in the world nowadays has an alcohol tax ... but it was a voluptuous and ruthless Greek Queen of the Nile, Cleopatra (69-30 B.C.) ¾ member of the Ptolemy clan and seductress of Roman generals ¾ who first came up with the idea.

Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt in 332 B.C. and founded Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile the same year. In 321 B.C., two years after Alexander's death in Babylon, one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter, took over Egypt as the Greek governor. Soter, however, was not content with being just a remote administrator of a Greek province. He had more ambitious plans. He soon established his own dynasty in Egypt, as the legal successors to the indigenous pharaohs. In 304 B.C., he made Alexandria his capital, from where the Ptolemy clan was to rule the land of the Nile, not as a Greek colony but in its own right, for almost three centuries, until Egypt fell to the Romans in a melodramatic final act in 30 B.C.

In the meantime, in the wake of Alexander's almost perpetual warfare, Greece was left exhausted and gradually lost its grip over the conquests Alexander had made. Maintaining preeminence in the Mediterranean world gradually became harder for Greece for another reason: Rome was emerging as a serious rival. This meant that the Ptolemy clan, happily ensconced in Alexandria, could not necessarily count on Greek might to keep them in power in Egypt. To ensure the survival of their clan, therefore, the Ptolemy clan became, one can argue, more "Egyptified" than Egypt became Hellenized. In most respects, the Ptolemy clan dropped its Greek ways and adopted the indigenous mores of their new land. The clan even adopted the old pharaoh custom of incestuous progeniture by marrying brothers to sisters.

Brewing in Egypt was still going strong when the Greeks arrived there. The Greeks were no beer drinkers. They favored wine. However, the strength of the Egyptian brew industry as well as the Ptolemy clan's assimilation to Egyptian customs, are probably the key reasons why beer survived the Greek conquest along the Nile. It is true that wine was known and consumed in Egypt, but it was mostly an upper-crust beverage. Beer, on the other hand, remained the people's drink. Its production continued unabated under Greek rule and, by all accounts, the beer must have tasted pretty good. As we learn from the Bibliotheca historica, a 40-volume history of the world, written by the Sicilian (and obviously wine drinking) historian Diodorus Siculus (circa 90-21 B.C.): "They make a drink from barley in Egypt, which is called zytum, and it compares not unfavorably in pleasantness of color and taste to wine."

With the rise of Rome, in the last two centuries B.C., the Greek Ptolemy clan's hold on fertile Egypt and its wealth could not remain unchallenged. The inevitable show-down over Egypt started indirectly, with a few seemingly unrelated events in Rome and Alexandria. It was around 50 B.C., when Rome's most powerful generals, Gaius Julius Caesar and Cneius Pompey, Caesar's son-in-law (married to Caesar's daughter Julia), were locked in a mortal fight for control of the Roman Empire. At the same time, back in Alexandria, the Ptolemean queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, was busy in a struggle of her own for the throne, which was coveted by Ptolemy XIII, her brother and husband (yes, he was both, in old pharaohnic fashion!). Cleopatra had married him after her first husband, Ptolemy XII, also a brother of hers, had accidentally drowned.

In the eventful year of 47 B.C., the Roman and the Egyptian internal power struggles became hopelessly intertwined in a cataclysmic international affair, when Cleopatra obtained Caesar's political help, became his mistress, triumphed over her brother, and moved to Rome ¾ pregnant with Caesar's son, whom she bore in Rome that year and called Caesarion.

A year later, it was Caesar's turn to settle his score with Pompey. He defeated his rival (and daughter's husband) at the Battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly, after which Pompey, improbably, fled to Cleopatra's Alexandria! There, Cleopatra showed her gratitude to her Roman lover for having saved her throne. She made short shrift of Pompey by having him murdered as he stepped ashore. To clean things up, she then had her husband/brother murdered as well. This paved the way for her undisputed rule in Egypt, under Roman protection. It also ensured, so she hoped, that her son Caesarion would some day succeed her to the throne, as Ptolemy XIV.

But the plans of mice and ... queens! By 44 B.C., the seemingly invincible Julius Caesar, ruler of the Roman universe, found himself dead as a doornail from a bad case of assassination by his erstwhile buddy Brutus. Following Caesar's untimely demise, the rivalries in Rome flared up again ¾ this time between Marc Anthony, Caesar's immediate successor, and Octavius, Caesar's grandnephew and designated heir. Cleopatra was now in a genuine quandary: With her Roman lover and protector gone, her own hold on power in the balance, and her son's prospects as future King of the Nile in jeopardy, she needed a new benefactor ¾ but, fatefully, at that moment her luck ran out. She bet her political future, and her body, on the wrong horse.

The impervious Octavius, soon to be called Emperor Augustus, quickly ousted his challenger, Marc Anthony, and firmly took over the reigns in Rome. Marc Anthony, not reading the signs of the time, thought he was not finished yet. Remembering the good services Cleopatra had once rendered unto Caesar, he headed for Egypt and took up residence in Cleopatra's palace in Alexandria. There, although a married man, he soon became Caesar's successor, not in the hall of Roman power as he had hoped, but in the chambers of the queen's passions. He became Cleopatra's new and acknowledged lover and her unacknowledged hope for the continuance of the Ptolemy dynasty. Using her army by land, her navy by sea, and her body by night, our darling Cleo now alternately fought against Rome and made love to its erstwhile commander-in-chief. Satisfying her steamy lust for power and the powerful ¾ after she had given Caesar a son ¾ she now gave Caesar's aspiring successor to the job of ruler of Rome, the adulterous Marc Anthony, a pair of twins.

While she parted her sheets for her desires, she also drained her kingdom of its wealth to finance her wars. When her coffers would yield no more, she resorted to the ultimate insult: She slapped a tax on beer, the people's drink ¾ ostensibly to curb public drunkenness, but in reality to build more naval galleys! Thus, the licentious queen is credited with the dubious achievement of having invented not only the alcohol tax, but also its most perennial and insincere excuse. To beer lovers, her beer tax and not her affairs (of state and passion) are her most enduring legacy. Darling Cleo's invention set a trend that has survived the rise and fall of many a civilization. It has known no national boundaries, no cultural barriers, no limits of time. The beer tax is still with us today, in just about any country of the globe. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

For the beer-tax crime, however, it seems that fate was quick to mete out just retribution. The now powerful Octavius went after the lusty lovers and decimated their forces in the Battle of Actium, in 30 B.C. For the beer-tax Queen of the Nile and her Roman beau, the jig was finally up. They committed suicide together, and Octavius put Caesarion, Caesar's and Cleopatra's putative, now 17-year old, son to death.

With this convoluted plot, the line of the Ptolemies and of Greek rule over Egypt came to an end. As the might of Rome settled upon its new colony, the fertile flood lands of the Nile were being converted primarily into a granary for the new mother country. The Romans had no taste for beer, so the grain that was once transformed into the brews of the Nile was now transformed into the breads of the Tiber. As a result, quality brewing in the Old World, long the domain of the people of the Middle East, was sent on a path of decline.

Egypt remained under Roman influence until the so-called Arabic conquest, which was completed by 642 A.D., at which point Egypt became an integral part of the Moslem world. Egyptian brewing, or what was left of it, fell victim to the abstemious zeal of this new religion. As the wave of Islam engulfed the Middle East, the Koran became law, and the Koran says that holy warriors shall practice sobriety. Thus, the brewers of the Nile were forced to exit history for good ¾ ousted by war, taxes and temperance. Only a few mute miniature figures, discovered in the tomb of a 4,000-year old corpse and now on display some 4,000 miles from the Nile, speak volumes of these brewers' former greatness.

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Dictionary Translates Ancient Egypt Life

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. Those elaborate pictographs were the elite script for recording the lives and triumphs of pharaohs in their tombs and on the monumental stones along the Nile. But almost from the beginning, people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs.

These were the words of love and family, the law and commerce, private letters and texts on science, religion and literature. For at least 1,000 years, roughly from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500, both the language and the distinctive cursive script were known as Demotic Egyptian, a name given it by the Greeks to mean the tongue of the demos, or the common people.

Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphs, enabling European scholars to decipher the royal language in the early 19th century and thus read the top-down version of a great civilization’s long history.

Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words. Egyptologists expect that the dictionary’s definitions and examples of how words were used in ancient texts will expedite translations of Demotic documents, more of which are unpublished than any other stage of early Egyptian writing.

A workshop for specialists in Demotic research was held at the university last month as the dictionary section for the letter S, the last of 25 chapters to be finished, is being posted on the Oriental Institute’s Web site, where the dictionary is available free. Eventually a printed edition will be produced, mainly for research libraries, the university said.

Janet H. Johnson, an Egyptologist at the university’s Oriental Institute who has devoted much of her career to editing the Chicago Demotic Dictionary, called it “an indispensable tool for reconstructing the social, political and cultural life of ancient Egypt during a fascinating period,” when the land was usually dominated by foreigners — first Persians, then Greeks and finally Romans.

“It’s really huge what a dictionary does for understanding an ancient society,” said Gil Stein, director of the institute. “This will lead to mastering texts from the Egyptians themselves, not their rulers, at a time the country was becoming absorbed increasingly into the Greco-Roman world.”

Although Egyptians abandoned Demotic more than 1,500 years ago, taking up Coptic and eventually Arabic, Dr. Johnson said the dictionary showed that the old language was not entirely dead. It lives on in words like “adobe,” which came from “tby,” the Demotic for brick. The term passed into Arabic (with the definite article “al” in front of the noun) and was introduced into Moorish Spain. From there adobe became a fixture in the Spanish language and architecture.

Ebony, the name of the dark wood that was traded down the Nile from Nubia, present-day Sudan, also has Demotic origins. The word for a man from Nubia passed through Demotic by way of Hebrew and Greek as the name Phineas, reminding Dr. Johnson of Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days.” The Demotic word meaning water lily, Susan, reached Europe through the Hebrew bible.

For the Oriental Institute, this is the culmination of a second long-running dictionary project in little more than a year. The final installment of the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects was completed last year after 90 years of scholarly labor.

The Demotic dictionary, begun in 1975, supplements and updates a more modest glossary of Demotic words published in German in 1954 by Wolja Erichsen, a Danish scholar.

The new Demotic-English work includes new words not in that glossary, as well as new uses of previously known words and more extensive examples of compound words, idiomatic expressions, place names, reference to deities and words borrowed from other languages. Completed chapters have been posted online from time to time in recent years.

“What the Chicago Demotic Dictionary does is what the Oxford English Dictionary does,” said James P. Allen, an Egyptologist at Brown University. “It gives many samples of what words mean and the range and nuances of their meanings.”

Dr. Allen said the Demotic dictionary had already served as a major research source in writing his history of the Egyptian language, to be published next year by Cambridge University Press. “I could not have done what I did without the dictionary,” he said. “Or at least not as well.”

Demotic is a hard script to read, he said, like shorthand to the uninitiated. The words have no vowels, only consonants. The difference between Demotic and early Egyptian in the age of the great pyramids (2613-2494 B.C.) is greater than between the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf and modern English. But by computer-processed reproductions of the cursive script in photographs and facsimiles, the dictionary shows the way people wrote the language.

The translation effort can have its rewards, including a new understanding of what Dr. Allen called an X-rated Demotic story well known to scholars. The hero in the story goes into a cave to steal a magic book. A mummy there warns it will bring him disaster. Soon he is entranced by a woman who invites him to her house for sex, but she keeps putting off the consummation with endless demands and frustrating conditions.

On the subject of sex, Demotic scholars said the lusty Cleopatra, the last of the pharaohs and presumably the only one fluent in the common speech, probably spoke only Greek in her boudoir. That was the language of the ruling class for several centuries.

Dr. Johnson, who specializes in research on the somewhat more equal role of women in Egyptian society, said Demotic contracts on papyrus scrolls detailed a husband’s acknowledgment of the money his wife brought into the marriage and the promise to provide her with a set amount of food and money for clothing each year of their marriage. Other documents showed that women could own property and had the right to divorce their husbands.

Another Chicago researcher, Brian Muhs, noted that many Demotic documents dealt with taxes, the government often leasing their collection to the highest bidder, who was required to pay the amount of the bid regardless of how much tax was collected. Individuals seemed to keep their tax receipts for years, along with other financial records, sometimes written on pottery shards.

Since the Chicago Demotic Dictionary should lead to the publication of more texts and more new words, Friedhelm Hoffmann, an Egyptologist at the University of Munich, said that may prompt a need for updated editions — something on the order of CDD 2.0.

Web site for the University of Chicago "Egypt Project"(Demotic)

The intend of this BLOG is to spread the knowledge of the Demotic Discovery and all Copyrights are intact no infringement intended

Garments in the Pharaonic world

Garments in the Pharaonic world

Clothing materials

    The Egyptian climate with its hot summers and mild winters favored light clothing made from plant fibers, predominantly linen and in Roman times occasionally cotton, an import from India Wool was used to a lesser extent, and seldom by Egyptians proper.

Small amounts of silk were traded to the eastern Mediterranean possibly as early as the second half of the second millennium BCE and traces of silk have been found in Egyptian tombs.

Animal skins, above all leopard skins, were sometimes worn by priests and by pharaohs in their role as first servants of the god. Such outfits were found in Tutankhamen's tomb and were depicted quite frequently on the walls of tombs. At times kings and queens wore decorative ceremonial clothing adorned with feathers.

Production

The manufacture of clothes was apparently mostly women's work. It was generally done at home, but there were workshops run by noblemen or other men of means.

The most important textile was linen. It was produced from flax, the quality ranging from the finest woven linen, the byssus for royalty, to the coarse cloth peasants wore. People who were buried in mastabas or pyramids would not be satisfied with anything less than the best quality linen, jdm.j, after death as well.

Pepi I had a vision that his ka would ...be taken to this heaven... to the noble ones of the god, to those whom the god loves, who lean on their Dam-sceptres, the guardians of Upper Egypt, who clothe themselves with jdm.jt-linen, who live on figs, who drink of the wine, who anoint themselves with the best oil... and if a person was lucky he would be ...given as a boon of the king: royal linen, a garment, //////////, aAt-linen, fine and good [linen], /////// [without] end

Articles of dress

They wear tunics made of linen with fringes hanging about the legs, called "calasiris", and loose white woolen cloaks over these.

Ornaments used with dresses

Tutankhamen's tomb yielded many pieces of clothing: tunics, shirts, kilts, aprons and sashes, socks, head-dresses, caps, scarves, gauntlets and gloves, some of them with fine linen linings, others with separate index and middle fingers and a hole for the thumb. Underwear in the form of a triangular loincloth was also found.

If royals had a garment for every body part and for any occasion–even though statues and reliefs often show them wearing only a SnD.wt, the so-called kilt, and a crown–most of their subjects had to make do with much less. Clothes were expensive and in the hot Egyptian climate people often wore as little as possible. If we are to believe the depictions, at parties servants and slave girls wore little more than skimpy panties and jewelry though one may assume that the reason for this undress was not a lack of funds. Working women mostly dressed in a short kind of kalasiris. Men doing physical labor wore a loin-cloth, wide galabiyeh - like robes or, if they were working in the water, nothing at all. Children usually ran around nude during the summer months, and wore wraps and cloaks in winter when temperatures might fall below 10°C.

The gods had to be dressed as well. This was the duty of a small number of priests allowed to enter the holiest of holies, where the god's statue was. Nesuhor, commander of the fortress at Elephantine under Apries, took care that the temple of Khnum had all the servants necessary to serve the needs of the god:

I appointed weavers, maidservants and launderers for the august wardrobe of the great god and his divine ennead.

  

Fashion

The clothes were generally made of linen and kept simple: a short loincloth resembling a kilt for men, a dress with straps for women. These basic garments with minor variations accounting for fashion, social status and wealth did not change fundamentally throughout Egypt's history.

Fancy Dress & Ornaments

Very little sewing was done. The cloth was wrapped round the body and held in place by a belt. Its colour was generally whitish, in contrast to the colorful clothes foreigners wore in Egyptian depictions, although dyed cloth was not unknown.

Everyday clothing was mostly undecorated, though pleating was known since the Old Kingdom, when some dresses of upper class Egyptians were pleated horizontally. In the New Kingdom the pleats were often vertical, but pleating could be quite intricate. A Middle Kingdom piece of clothing displays three different types of pleating: one part is pleated with pleats a few centimeters apart, another with very narrow pleats and a third part is chevron-patterned, with horizontal and vertical pleats crossing each other. How the pleating was done is not known, but it is generally supposed to have been very labor intensive.

The length of the kilts varied, being short during the Old Kingdom and reaching the calf in the Middle Kingdom, when it was often supplemented with a sleeveless shirt or a long robe.

Herodotus called the robes worn by both sexes in Egypt kalasiris. Material and cut varied over the centuries, though the cloth of choice was always linen.

The kalasiris women wore might cover one or both shoulders or be worn with shoulder straps. While the top could reach anywhere from below the breast up to the neck, the bottom hem generally touched the calves or even the ankles. Some had short others were sleeveless. The fit might be very tight or quite loose. They were often worn with a belt, which held together the folds of cloth. 

They were sewn from a rectangular piece of cloth twice the desired garment length. An opening for the head was cut at the centre of the cloth, which was then folded in half. The lower parts of the sides were stitched together leaving openings for the arms.

Women's dresses were at times ornamented with beads. They covered the breasts most of the time, though there were periods when fashion left them bare.

Circular capes date back as far as the Old Kingdom. They were generally made of linen and had an opening for the head cut at the centre. They were often dyed, painted or otherwise decorated and covered little more than the shoulders. Shawls were sometimes worn during the New Kingdom.

The ancient Egyptians knew how to use starch. They used it to stick sheets of papyrus together. According to Pliny they made starch by mixing some of the finest wheaten flour with boiling water. They also soaked linen bandages in starch, which became hard and stiff when dried. It would be tempting to assume that they achieved the pleats in their clothes by using starch, but there is no evidence for that.

  

Laundering

They wear linen garments, which they are especially careful to have always fresh washed.

Cleanliness was apparently next to godliness in ancient Egypt. And who was closer to the gods than the pharaohs themselves. Since earliest historic times the titles of "chief washer of the palace" and "washer to the pharaoh" are known, and keeping the royal clothes lily white was the duty of the "chief bleacher."

Men and women wore perfumed cone on the tops of their heads.
The cone was usually made of ox tallow and myrrh and
as time passed melted and released a pleasant scent.

Manually washing clothes was hard work. Soap was unknown to the ancient Egyptians, so lye, made of castor oil and saltpetre or some such substances, or detergents made of soapwort or asphodel were used. The laundry was beaten, rinsed and wrung by pairs of workers. By 1200 BCE there were fireproof boilers in the washhouses, and the hot water lightened the workload. 

Many, above all the poorer people had no access to facilities and had to do their laundry under at times difficult conditions. Washing on the shore of the river or the bank of a canal, which had the advantage of not having to carry a lot of water in heavy earthen pots, but could sometime be dangerous:

The washer man launders at the riverbank in the vicinity of the crocodile. I shall go away, father, from the flowing water, said his son and his daughter, to a more satisfactory profession, one more distinguished than any other profession.

In the eyes of Kheti at least, washing women's clothing was not really work a man should be doing. He says disparagingly of the washer man:

He cleans the clothes of a woman in menstruation.

Mending

Before the advent of industrial production techniques, cheap overseas transportation and a Third World population with little choice but to work for peanuts, clothes made up a considerable part of one's living expenses. Even though the clothes of the Egyptians were lighter than those of Europeans and less critical to survival, they were careful not to ruin them, and when a garment got torn, it was probably the ancient Egyptian housewife who got her favorite needle out of her needle box, a knife and a piece of thread and settled down to mend it. Garments have been found which were mended a number of times and finally recycled and turned into something else.

Headdresses

If depictions are anything to go by, then ordinary Egyptians did not wear any headdress as a rule, similar to African peoples further south. The better off would put on wigs - perhaps just on special occasions. These grew to a remarkable size during the New Kingdom.

The pharaohs are always represented wearing crowns, but whether this is a pictorial convention or whether they did so in every day life cannot be verified.

Footwear

People living around the Mediterranean had little need for elaborate footwear, with exceptions like the Hittites in their Anatolian highlands who wore shoes with turned up toes, though in Egyptian reliefs Hittites are depicted unshod. The Egyptians went barefoot much of the time, but wore sandals on special occasions or when their feet were likely to get hurt. The sandals were tied with two thongs and, if they had a pointed tip this were often turned upwards. They were made of leather or rush woven or stitched together, and often had leather soles and straps.

The cheapest kind of sandals was affordable to all but the very poorest. Ipuwer in his Admonitions used the lack of sandals to describe the destitute that, in the topsy-turvy world of chaos he warned from, attained great wealth: He who could not afford sandals owns riches.

The kings wore at times very elaborately decorated sandals, and sometimes decorative gloves as well, but generally they were depicted barefoot, as were the gods.

Sandals made of gold have been found which cannot have been very comfortable to their wearers if they were worn at all. Among Tutankhamen's equipment there were 93 pieces of footwear. There were sandals made of wood with depictions of enemies on their soles, on which the king would tread with every step and another pair, which was fastened with buttons.

One of the changes in daily life, which occurred during the Middle and New Kingdoms, was the increasing use of sandals, above all where soldiers or travelers’ were concerned. In the story of The Two Brothers Anpu set out on a journey:

Then he took his staff and his sandals, as well as his clothes and his weapons, and he started to journey to the Valley of the Pine.

Sandals seem to have had an importance that mostly escapes us nowadays, symbolizing prosperity and authority. Thutmose III speaks of the countries he conquered, and possibly of the rest of the world as well, as all lands were under my sandals.

Among the oldest images of the dynastic period are depictions of the sandal-bearer of the pharaoh, and for the sixth dynasty official Weni this post was seemingly an important stage in a splendid career, mentioned twice in his autobiography.

Sandals were very closely and beautifully stitched up of rush, and usually soled with leather. A small bundle of rush was wound round by a rush thread, which at every turn pierced through the edge of a previous bundle. Thus these successive bundles were bound together edge to edge, and a flat surface built up. This was edged round in the same way. In basket making exactly the same principle was followed, with great neatness. The rush sandals soled with leather, leather sandals alone, and leather shoes, were all used. The shoes seem to have been just originating at that period; two or three examples are known, but all of them have the leather sandal strap between the toes, and joining to the sides of the heel, to retain the sole on the foot ; the upper leather being stitched on merely as a covering without its being intended to hold the shoe on the foot. These soles are compound, of three or four thicknesses.

Early Middle Kingdom shoes were little more than sandals with straps between the toes and joined to the sides at the heel with the upper leather just covering the foot without being fastened to the foot itself. During the New Kingdom there were times when some Egyptians seem to have taken to occasionally wearing shoes, as in a depiction of Queen Nutmose at Karnak. This may have come about as an influence of the Hittites, with whom they came into contact at this time.

More information about Pharaonic life on:

 http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/index.html