CHAPTER THREE:

RAISE A GLASS TO THE ANCESTORS

MESOPOTAMIA

‘I feel wonderful drinking beer in a blissful mood with joy in my heart and a happy liver.’ Who agrees with that tribute written by an unknown Sumerian poet around 5,000 years ago?

Sumer was an ancient culture in southern Mesopotamia—the land between the Tigris and Euphrates river systems that roughly corresponds with modern Iraq, Syria, Turkey and parts of Iran. This area of the world is called the Fertile Crescent, also known as the ‘cradle of civilisation’. Nomadic tribes started to settle in one place, build irrigation ditches, plant crops and watch them grow rather than eat wild food on the move. And what were they growing? Barley, emmer, and wheat for making beer and bread.

So far, the earliest chemically analysed evidence of beer was discovered as a deposit on a clay jug at an archaeological site called Godin Tepe in the Zagros mountains of Iran. It dates back to around 3500 BC. Godin Tepe was a trading post along the Great Khorasan Road along which goods and people travelled from east to west. Beer may have been brewed thousands of years prior to this discovery but the proof has not yet been found. This region is also where the oldest confirmation of wine was found in a Neolithic village called Hajji Firuz Tepe built between 5400 and 5000 BC. Wild grapes probably grew in the area. Chemical analysis of pottery revealed residue of wine to which resin from the terebinth tree (from where we get the word ‘turpentine’) had been added for its antimicrobial properties to prevent the wine from spoiling, and possibly for its medicinal ability to treat internal ailments.

Beer was a staple in Sumerian society and brewing was a respectable profession for women and men. Additionally women were usually the innkeepers. As well as being highly nutritious, beer was a social drink as illustrated by an image on a cylinder seal discovered at Tepe Gawa in Iraq dating to around 3850 BC. Two figures are depicted sipping from a huge jar through drinking straws. Communal drinking is a recurring motif on Mesopotamian seals including ones found in the tomb of Queen Pu-abi at Ur dating from around 2600 BC where guests at a banquet are enjoying shared crocks of beer and wine. Pu-abi’s vault also contained hundreds of gold and silver goblets and lapis lazuli drinking straws so all that lovely drink could be enjoyed in the after-life.

Beer was proof of enlightenment, so much so that in the Epic of Gilgamesh (the world’s earliest great work of literature, written in the eighteenth century BC) one of the characters, a naked wild man called Enkidu, is only fully human once he has consumed beer (and had a wash). Beer was enjoyed by everyone in Sumerian and later Babylonian society. Wine was popular too but just as in ancient Egypt it was restricted to the elite. It was imported at great expense from trading cultures such as the Phoenicians and the rarity value made wine the prestigious potation that Pushu-ken Public had no access to.

Beer was a sacred libation, a gift from the gods. One of the most important deities was Ninkasi, goddess of fertility, the harvest, seduction, and beer. She was the source of pleasure and her mortal acolytes drank in her name uttering ‘Ninkasira’ as a toast. If Sumerians were not the world’s original brewers, they were the earliest documented brewers because in this society written language developed. The first known recipe was written in cuneiform on clay tablets. It is a poem called ‘The Hymn to Ninkasi’ written about 1800 BC (see page 63) and includes instructions on how to make beer. In order to commune with the gods plentiful beer had to be consumed and sacrifice offered at the temple. Great public feasts where intoxication and loss of inhibitions was the aim created community bonds. To ensure supplies did not run out the temples housed breweries run by priestesses who also brewed the beer. In Sumer a range of beers described as red beer, dark beer, sweet dark beer, and golden beer were brewed. Hops were not known at that time so a variety of herbs, spices, fruits, and honey would have been added for flavour.

As the power of city state Babylon increased, Sumer gradually disappeared as a distinct culture. Beer remained the everyday drink for all and of such importance that regulations concerning its production and sale were included in the Code of Hammurabi written circa 1772 BC and named after the king. It is the oldest collection of written laws yet discovered and they are etched into a stone slab now on display in the Louvre museum, Paris. In comparison to Sumer’s happy-go-lucky society, Babylon was strict. Rules relating to beer and brewing classified twenty styles including wheat, black, emmer and red. When it came to women and beer in Babylonia, female brewers and tavern keepers were disdained, unlike their male counterparts who were highly esteemed. The Code of Hammurabi decreed that any female brewer or tavern keeper who adulterated her beer or overcharged was to be drowned in it, for spoiled beer she would be force-fed with it until death by asphyxiation. And if customers discussed politics or anything subversive then the landlady would be executed. Priestesses who even visited a tavern, never mind ordered a pint, were to be burned alive on a pyre.

Mesopotamia was a land of perpetual change where one-time powerful cultures did not endure and throughout the millennia attitudes altered and with them drinking habits. Islam has been the dominant religion of the region since the seventh century AD, and that means alcohol is forbidden. What would Ninkasi think?

ANCIENT EGYPT

‘The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer’. No, not a slogan for a modern brewery but an Egyptian inscription that dates back to 2200 BC.

Excavation of a site near Hierakonpolis suggests that beer was brewed in Egypt from at least 3400 BC. Brewing skills were most likely learned from history’s first known brewers—the Sumerians (modern Iraq/Iran). As in Sumer ancient Egyptians understood beer to have divine origins and it featured in prayers and myths.

Beer was central to life in Egypt where it was regarded as food and consumed on a daily basis by adults and children. The hieroglyph for ‘meal’ is a compound of those for bread and beer. Add some dried fish and onions and you have the standard diet of countless people along the river Nile. Analysis of Egyptian texts discovered that the word for beer, hekt, was mentioned more often than any other foodstuff. Much is known about Egyptian culture because they were super-documentarians and left behind evidence of everyday life in hieroglyphs, murals, and tombs. Visitors to New York’s Metropolitan Museum can look at effects from the tomb of a senior bureaucrat called Meketre who died in 1975 BC. Miniature carved wooden figures including bakers, cooks, carpenters and brewers represent Egyptians at work. In the mini-brewery two women grind flour, a man kneads it into dough, another figure treads the doughy mash with water in a tall vat, and then it is poured into crocks to ferment. After fermentation, it is transferred into round jugs sealed with clay stoppers. This is a hand-made model that demonstrates today how vital beer was almost 4,000 years ago.

Beer permeated every aspect of society as currency, medicine, religious observance. Some wages were paid in grain to make bread and beer. Beer was not just essential for the living, it was also required by the dead; a stash of beer was placed in tombs to be consumed in the after-life. Before sealing the mummified body into a vault, a ritual known as ‘Opening the Mouth’ was enacted where beer was poured into the mouth of the deceased to send them off to eternity.

Brewing was a state monopoly with strict rules to ensure supply and quality. Possibly the best job in the land was that of the royal chief beer inspector. Beer was made from barley and emmer with added ingredients for flavour such as dates, honey, spices. A variety of beer was brewed with varying strengths, colours, purposes or occasions for drinking and bestowed with poetic names such as ‘beer of the protector’, ‘friends’ beer’, ‘beer of truth’. All strata of society from slaves to the pharaoh were entitled by law to a daily ration of beer—the higher the status the more they received.

As beer was used in religious worship many temples operated breweries and pubs in the service of the gods. Intoxication in everyday life was usually condemned but religious holidays were joyous occasions that incorporated much drinking. An inscription from the fourth century BC tomb of Petosiris reads ‘Drink till drunk while enjoying the feast day!’ Affluent Egyptians would be accompanied by two slaves and a hammock in order to be carried home when they were legless.

People of wealth lived it up at banquets whereas the lower classes frequented inns and beer halls where singing, dancing, and gambling accompanied the liberal consumption of drinks into the late hours. Both sexes were free to interact with each other, although respectable women would not be seen in such places—if they wanted a tipple they did it at home.

If beer was the drink of one and all in ancient Egypt, wine was reserved for the ruling classes. Wild grapes had never grown in Egypt so until a royal winemaking industry started in the Nile Delta around 3000 BC wine was imported from the Levant where domesticated vines grew. Wine could be made from locally grown fruits such as dates and pomegranates, and sap from palm trees, flavoured with herbs and spices but grape wine had all the status and it played a major ceremonial role, particularly in the temple. A royal sealer of wine was appointed to guarantee honest labelling of wine amphorae. As with modern wine labels, those in ancient Egypt recorded the name of the estate, location, type of wine, date of vintage, vintner’s name, and quality. Amongst the most-celebrated vineyards were Phoenix Estate, Star of Horus on the Height of Heaven, and the Preserver of Kemet. By 2200 BC wine was the essential oblation at major religious festivals including one called heb-sed to ensure the health of the pharaoh and the fruitfulness of the earth. This demanded prodigious drinking and offerings to the gods and could last for weeks.

If wine was good enough for the living, it certainly was for the dead. The deceased could rest for eternity knowing that only the best vino had been stored in their tombs. Residue on five of the twenty-six wine amphorae discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun (1323 BC) was analysed and found to be the highest-quality Shedeh (red wine), the most precious drink of the time in Egypt. In case the departed needed a reminder of what fun beer and wine was, murals depicting scenes of drinking were painted on tomb walls. In the grave of Peheri dating from circa 1425 BC a high-status woman presents an empty cup to her servant and says: ‘Give me eighteen measures of wine. Behold I should love to drink to drunkenness.’

Beer continued to be consumed by almost everyone, rich and poor, but after the country came under Greek rule from 332 BC, contemporary written references to beer became rare. Nevertheless its reputation as being one of the major beer cultures of antiquity is sealed because if you ask people where in the world beer was first consumed, a majority will answer Egypt.

ANCIENT GREECE

Wine drinkers of the world thank the ancient Greeks and a culture so desirable to the Romans that they emulated it. A combination of colonisation and trade by Greece and later Rome spread viticulture far and wide. Yes the Romans were consumed with oeno-passion but they were copying the oh-so sophisticated Greeks with their oinos (wine).

To the Hellenes, wine was not just an agreeable potation it was also currency, medicine, and an offering to the deities. Oaths and contracts sealed with wine had greater magnitude than ones sealed with water. Wine bound society together at public feasts, was an emblem of superior intellect, and a sign of civilisation that separated the Greeks from the dreadful non-wine drinking barbaroi in the rest of the world. Dionysus, the god of wine, had bestowed the precious gift upon the deserving Hellenes when he presented a goat herder with vines and explained how to cultivate them and make wine. Greeks drank wine resinated with gum from the terebinth tree. This was a preservative that slowed oxidation and prevented wine turning to vinegar. Seawater, spices, and honey were also often added for flavour.

Greece may have learned viticulture through trade with Egypt and Canaan (the Levant). Wine reached the Hellenic peninsula around 2000 BC. Beer was already known to the people of that area and so was mead. Those two drinks combined with wine made a widely consumed grog called kykeon. Elaborately decorated chalices, stirrup jars, and spouted drinking horns have been found which prove that it was popular enough to warrant the expense of special drinking vessels. A gold cup from a sixteenth-century BC royal grave suggests that higher status people drank kykeon too.

Wine drinking by the elite in social, secular and sacred rituals elevated its position. When philosophers, playwrights and poets started to rhapsodise about wine it became fixed as the aspirational drink that cultured people consumed and in most wine-drinking societies from then on that was and still is the case.

Greeks had conflicting attitudes to beer. Some considered it to be a foul-smelling, wind-causing beverage of the ‘other’ (i.e. foreigners) and was only to be consumed when wine was not available; whilst others thought it was a divine gift, nutritious and healthful. Sophocles believed that the most wholesome diet consisted of bread, meats, vegetables, and beer (zythos).

Social wine drinking was undertaken according to strict rules. Tradition in Athens dictated that three libations were poured to honour the deities, fallen heroes, and Zeus (father of the gods). Men gathered at formal drinking parties called symposia—from the Greek word sympotein meaning drinking party—in a room called the andron (the male quarters of the household) where guests reclined on sofas. Women were forbidden to attend these gatherings. Symposia were banquets followed by ritual wine drinking. The group would decide beforehand how many kraters (vessels the size of garden urns) of wine were to be consumed. Wine was poured into decorated drinking bowls and water added from a hydria – Greeks always watered their wine, only barbarians and drunkards would want it neat. Music, singing, poetry was the entertainment and then the men got down to the serious business of conversation, debate, showing off, joke telling, carousing, and drinking games such as kottabus which involved flicking droplets of wine at a floating target with the intention of sinking it. Plato suggested that youths should attend symposia to learn the rituals of drinking wine so they could understand the effects of intoxication and learn discipline in drinking.

Early Greeks had a reputation for drinking in moderation but people did let go and get drunk especially during adoration of the gods. It was believed they would not listen unless worshippers were on the lash. Being intoxicated was no social faux pas as drinking wine was a civilised activity that helped people to relax, inspired wisdom, and enhanced the art of oratory which was highly valued. People who chose sobriety were considered to be outside of social norms. This is often still the case today—‘oh, go on, just have one’ being a refrain familiar to people who choose not to drink. Drinking is a social activity and generally people want everyone in the group to be in the same altered state.

Women in ancient Greece were discouraged, although not forbidden, from drinking. Wine was believed to make them violent. Women had to be secret drinkers and discreetly visit taverns (kapelion) rather than do it at home where the key to the drinks cabinet was held by the house slave. The exception was during the worship of the gods when it was essential to lose inhibitions. Many females embraced the cult of Dionysus which was a good excuse to drink lots of wine in the veneration of one of the most important deities—a son of Zeus. Dionysus (who was renamed Bacchus by the Romans) was known as the liberator who led his followers into states of ecstasy. No wonder he was such a popular deity.

ANCIENT ROME

What beer was to ancient Egypt, wine was to the Romans—an essential for life. Beer was consumed but normally only when wine was not available. Initially wine was restricted to the elite and people drank modestly but eventually it became ubiquitous in all strata of Roman society of drinking age (thirty years and older) no matter what the person’s status. Even slaves drank wine, although it was low quality and had only a passing acquaintance with grape juice. Wine was the egalitarian beverage—if you were a man. For women it was unacceptable, and in the early years of the Roman era even forbidden, to drink wine. Women who fancied a drinkie had to be clandestine. Consequently the stereotype of the female tippler appeared regularly in jokes and comedy plays as someone out of control and indulging in vice. Later in the Roman age women could drink and even attend a convivium. These were based on the Greek symposium but the Roman version was more ostentatious and concerned with having a knees-up rather than the formal drinking party of their Hellenic counterparts where females were excluded and the amount of wine was rationed.

Wine culture came to the Romans from the Greeks and the Etruscans (who lived in the area around Tuscany and western Umbria) and they embraced it with gusto. To the Romans, wine equalled civilisation. Wine was initially imported from Greece and its territories in what is now southern Italy and Sicily as Romans were not skilled in viticulture. But demand escalated with the spread of Roman power, not least because legionnaires in an increasingly large army required a daily wine ration to maintain morale. The empire could no longer rely on imports—a home-grown wine industry was required. Triumph over Carthage in the Punic Wars (264–146 BC) gave the Romans access to extensive written works on viticulture from ransacked libraries. They were translated by Marcus Porcius Cato into a work called De Agri Cultura (On Agriculture) which is the earliest surviving work of Latin prose. With this knowledge the Romans began to classify grape varieties, identify diseases, research soil-type preferences, and introduce irrigation and fertilisation techniques. He wrote that slaves should have one gallon of wine per week as their ration. This was not for pleasure but for the sake of maintaining their strength and dietary health. If illness prevented a slave from working, Cato advised halving the rations to conserve wine for the healthy slaves.

Eventually the Romans were the world’s experts in viticulture and planted vines in lands they occupied including France, Portugal, Germany, and Spain. Wine was highly sought after and such a luxury item to Gauls (Celtic inhabitants of Western Europe) and so prized that the elite would exchange one slave for a jar of wine. Once the Gauls had embraced wine, the Romans considered them to be civilised.

Like the Greeks whom they emulated in all things oeno (wine passion), Romans poured water, sometimes seawater, into their wine before consuming it. They also added herbs and spices to make conditum, honey to make mulsum, and resins such as frankincense and myrrh to preserve the wine. Mulsum was handed out to the masses at public events as bribes to solicit political support.

The Roman equivalent of the pub was the taberna which served red wine, occasionally beer, food and a luxury—hot water considered to have medicinal properties that restored bodily equilibrium. Typically tabernae consisted of one large room with a counter behind which wine amphorae were stored. Music, singing, dancing, competitive drinking bouts, saucy behaviour and gambling were normal conduct in tabernae. Dice and four-sided knuckle bones were thrown to gamble with, and bets were laid on cockfights. Just as in a British pub, a taberna served an important social function where community bonds were built in a neutral setting when people of different classes could hob-nob. They were largely male domains as it was not socially acceptable for respectable women to frequent such establishments. Women who did were either lower class, or prostitutes.

White wine was reserved for the elite and the most esteemed was Falernian which improved after years of maturation. It was reputed to be high enough in alcohol (around 15 per cent ABV) for Pliny the Elder to note that ‘it is the only wine that takes light when a flame is applied to it’. It was also the wine (vintage 121 BC) served at a banquet in 60 BC to honour Julius Caesar for his conquests in Spain. The least desirable wine was lora made by soaking in water the skins, pips and stalks of grapes that had already been pressed twice and then fermenting it. Lora was an unappetising coarse and bitter tannic draft consumed by slaves and the poor. Slightly above lora in quality was posca—a low alcohol mixture of sour wine and water. This was the usual wine for soldiers’ rations and approximately one litre a day was codified in the Corpus Juris Civilis. Woe betide the powers that be if they failed to ensure a wine ration for men who maintained the security of the empire.

Pompeii was one of the most important centres for wine in the Roman Empire both in producing and trading. Amphorae bearing the emblems of Pompeii have been found as far north as Toulouse in France and as far west as Spain. Surrounding the town were some of the best vineyards in the world. Most wine consumed in the city of Rome came from that region. Pompeii was also a lively social centre with approximately 200 tabernae and thermopolia (snack bars) all selling wine from amphorae stored on racks and decanted into carafes. When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 not only was it a human tragedy but vineyards and wine warehouses were wrecked. This led to severe shortages and a dramatic price rise so that only the wealthy could afford wine. Panic set in and vines were planted anywhere suitable, including in what had previously been grain fields. It was not long before there was a scarcity of grain and a glut of grapes. This wine lake spurred Emperor Domitian to release an edict to ban the planting of new vineyards in Italy and the removal of half the vines in the provinces. But the genie was out of the wine bottle and viticulture had become embedded in the countries of the empire and the psyche of the peoples of lived there. Wine was part of their identity.

Next time the question ‘What did the Romans do for us?’ is asked, one of the answers is sitting in that bottle of Viognier on the shelf. The influence of Rome is still apparent in today’s wine industry.