A belief in the sacredness of garlic can be traced back to the third millennium BC, when it was offered to the gods and painted on the walls of tombs. During both the era of Egypt's great pharaohs and the days of the earliest Chinese dynasties, garlic served as food, medicine and offering. It was found in the tomb of Tutankhamen and within the funerary complex of Saqqarah in the sacred animal cemetery (a vast necropolis in the region of Memphis), as well as in inscriptions in the pyramid of Giza.

Does garlic hold the secret of the great pyramids?
Egypt would not be Egypt without the great pyramids… but would the pyramids exist without garlic? That's the question you have to ask when you consider the importance of garlic to the land of the pharaohs. Almost 3000 years before Christ, foremen would make workers engaged in building the pyramids and the temples of Egypt's great pharaohs eat large quantities of garlic to give them more strength for their work, without having to increase their rations.

Herodotus (484-425 BC), when he arrived at the foot of the three famous pyramids was as awed as any tourist by the work involved in creating these magnificent structures. He learned that the hieroglyphs praised garlic's almighty power. This desire for life and strength after death pushed Kheops to sell his daughter into a bordello. "When he needed money," Herodotus wrote, "he had his daughter enter a house of ill-repute… she eventually made the sum that her father demanded. She wanted to have something made for herself and asked every man who came to her to give her a stone"… a way of amassing 1600 talents of silver - 40 tonnes - in order to buy the garlic, red onions and black radishes necessary to feed the slaves, an incentive that produced better results than the lash. And yet with each stone he put into place, the humble fellah gained a little piece of immortality. 100,000 workers worked on the site, putting up 200 stone blocks each day. They were relieved every three months.