An ancient Egyptian verse:
When I embrace her
and her arms are open,
I feel like a man in incense land
who is immersed in scent.
When I kiss her
and her lips are open
I rejoice
without even having drunk beer.
An Egyptian papyrus of the nineteenth Dynasty says: ‘Beer robs you of all human respect, it affects your mind, and here you are like a broken rudder, good for nothing.’
There is also an Egyptian fragment of limestone with a drawing on it depicting a king with five-o’clock shadow; In a tomb at Elkab, there is a picture of a high-born woman at a party saying ‘Give me eighteen jugs of wine — I want to get drunk, my insides are as dry as straw’. A painting from Khety’s Tomb, c.2100 BC, even shows guests being carried away from a banquet after drinking too much wine.
In a newly-discovered letter from the Roman fort of Vindolanda, in northern England, a commander of a cavalry section wrote to his prefect: ‘The lads have no beer — please send some’.
The British Museum has a Babylonian baked-clay plaque of around 1800 BC that shows a man having sex with a woman from behind, while she bends over to drink beer through a straw. Ancient documents from the period include examples of erotic poetry in which strong connections are made between alcohol and sexual activity! (26)
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