Middle East and North Africa
Where the archaeology is. Fired clay survives in dry climates and almost nothing else does, so the horizontal clay cylinder — Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi — is the best-evidenced ancient hive on earth and the rest of the world's hives are invisible.
19 practices · region
- Clay and pottery hivesHive system · Practised, decliningHorizontal cylinders of fired or unfired clay, stacked in rows and worked from the rear. The best-evidenced ancient hive on earth, for one reason: it is the only material that survives, so the archaeological record of hives is really the record of this design.
- Wall hivesHive system · Practised, decliningA cavity built into the wall of a house during construction, with a flight hole outside and an access panel indoors. Common across the Himalaya, parts of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and still occupied in older buildings.
- Cork hivesHive system · Practised, decliningCylinders of cork bark, used across the western Mediterranean wherever cork oak is worked. Excellent insulation, effectively free where the forestry already exists, and a good illustration of hive design following local material.
- Collective apiariesHive system · Practised, decliningPurpose-built shared structures holding hundreds of family-owned hives, with allocation, maintenance and guarding organised communally. Documented in the Maghreb, southern Arabia and central Europe, and among the most striking pieces of beekeeping architecture anywhere.
- Nile valley beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Practised, decliningStacked horizontal clay cylinders worked from the rear, moved along the river to follow flowering. Depicted from the third millennium BCE and still recognisable in twentieth-century Egyptian practice, which makes it one of the longest documented continuities in beekeeping.
- Southern Arabian log-hive beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceHollow-log and stone-cavity hives stacked in walls and moved between wadis to follow the sidr flowering, producing one of the most expensive honeys in world trade.
- Moving hives to follow floweringBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceCarrying colonies to successive flowerings — up a mountain, down a river, across a region — long before lorries. The direct ancestor of industrial migratory pollination, and a practice with a documented history in the Mediterranean, the Nile valley and Arabia.
- Honey and syrup sweets of the Middle East and North AfricaCultural use · Widespread living practiceA family of pastries and fried sweets finished with honey or sugar syrup across the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, Anatolia and the Maghreb — and an honest account of which of them actually use honey.
- Honey as hospitality and as a giftCultural use · Widespread living practiceHoney offered to guests, given to seal agreements and presented as a high-status gift, in several unconnected traditions — and the practical reasons a food ends up in that role.
- Honey in funerary practiceCultural use · HistoricalHoney poured as a libation to the dead, placed in graves and used in funerary meals across several ancient traditions — kept firmly apart from the much weaker claims about preserving bodies.
- Honey and wax as tax, rent and tributeCultural use · HistoricalStates and landlords took honey and beeswax as payment across several continents and many centuries — which tells us what the products were worth better than any price list.
- Honey in Jewish practiceRitual and ceremony · Widespread living practiceApple dipped in honey at the new year, honey and the sweetness of learning, and the questions of law that arise when honey is made by an insect that may not be eaten.
- Honey in Islamic traditionCultural use · Widespread living practiceA chapter of the Qur'an named for the bee, honey in the prophetic medical tradition, and the effect both have had on a modern trade in high-value regional honeys.
- Honey in ancient Egyptian religionRitual and ceremony · HistoricalHoney as a temple offering in a state that ran its own apiaries, the bee as a royal symbol, and the solar origin myth that is quoted far more confidently than its source supports.
- Lost-wax castingCultural use · Widespread living practiceModelling an object in wax, encasing it, melting the wax out and pouring metal into the space it leaves. One of the oldest metalworking techniques, still in use, and responsible for a large share of the world's surviving ancient bronze sculpture.
- Encaustic paintingCultural use · RevivedPigment bound in hot beeswax and worked onto a surface. The technique behind the Fayum mummy portraits, which look startlingly present two thousand years on because wax does not yellow or crack the way oil does.
- Honey drinks without alcoholCultural use · Widespread living practiceHoney with water, with vinegar, with herbs, with milk or with citrus — a family of preparations that sat on the boundary between refreshment and medicine, and mostly on the medicine side.
- Honey on wounds and burnsCultural use · Widespread living practiceThe longest continuously documented medical use of any hive product, running from Egyptian medical papyri to modern licensed dressings — and the one where the gap between tradition and evidence is narrowest but still real.
- Migratory beekeepingBeekeeping tradition · Widespread living practiceLoading colonies onto vehicles and moving them to a crop or a honey flow. An old idea — the Nile and the Mediterranean did it by boat — running today at continental scale on lorries.