Excerpt from The Granite Monthly, 1904, Vol. 37: A New Hampshire Magazine Devoted to History, Biography, Literature, and State Progress It has been made in some form or other since the very earliest ages of which we have any reliable record; for we find that the Egyptians made a decoction of barley which was used as a beverage more than five thousand years ago, according to the estimates of the most eminent Egyptologists of the present day. It played a most important part in their mythology and is mentioned in the Book of the Dead, which is the record of the ah cient Egyptian kings, and which book is at the least five thousand years old. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.