A History of the World in 6 Glasses (3 page)

Under the Influence of Beer?

Since writing had not been invented at the time, there are no written records to attest to the social and ritual importance of beer in the Fertile Crescent during the new stone age, or Neolithic period, between 9000 BCE and 4000 BCE. But much can be inferred from later records of the way beer was used by the first literate civilizations, the Sumerians of Mesojpotamia and the ancient Egyptians. Indeed, so enduring are the cultural traditions associated with beer that some of them survive to this day.

From the start, it seems that beer had an important function as a social drink. Sumerian depictions of beer from the third millennium BCE generally show two people drinking through straws from a shared vessel. By the Sumerian period, however, it was possible to filter the grains, chaff, and other debris from beer, and the advent of pottery meant it could just as easily have been served in individual cups. That beer drinkers are, nonetheless, so widely depicted using straws suggests that it was a ritual that persisted even when straws were no longer necessary.

The most likely explanation for this preference is that, unlike food, beverages can genuinely be shared. When several people drink beer from the same vessel, they are all consuming the same liquid; when cutting up a piece of meat, in contrast, some parts are usually deemed to be more desirable than others. As a result, sharing a drink with someone is a universal symbol of hospitality and friendship. It signals that the person offering the drink can be trusted, by demonstrating that it is not poisoned or otherwise unsuitable for consumption. The earliest beer, brewed in a primitive vessel in an era that predated the use of individual cups, would have to have been shared. Although it is no longer customary to offer visitors a straw through which to drink from a communal vat of beer, today tea or coffee may be offered from a shared pot, or a glass of wine or spirits from a shared bottle. And when drinking alcohol in a social setting, the clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid. These are traditions with very ancient origins.

Just as ancient is the notion that drinks, and alcoholic drinks in particular, have supernatural properties. To Neolithic drinkers, beer's ability to intoxicate and induce a state of altered consciousness seemed magical. So, too, did the mysterious process of fermentation, which transformed ordinary gruel into beer. The obvious conclusion was that beer was a gift from the gods; accordingly, many cultures have myths that explain how the gods invented beer and then showed humankind how to make it. The Egyptians, for example, believed that beer was accidentally discovered by Osiris, the god of agriculture and king of the afterlife. One day he prepared a mixture of water and sprouted grain, but forgot about it and left it in the sun. He later returned to find the gruel had fermented, decided to drink it, and was so pleased with the result that he passed his knowledge on to humankind. (This tale seems to tally closely with the way beer was probably discovered in the stone age.) Other beer-drinking cultures tell similar stories.

Since beer was a gift from the gods, it was also the logical thing to present as a religious offering. Beer was certainly used in religious ceremonies, agricultural fertility rites, and funerals by the Sumerians and the Egyptians, so it seems likely that its religious use goes back farther still. Indeed, the religious significance of beer seems to be common to every beer-drinking culture, whether in the Americas, Africa, or Eurasia. The Incas offered their beer, called
chicha,
to the rising sun in a golden cup, and poured it on the ground or spat out their first mouthful as an offering to the gods of the Earth; the Aztecs offered their beer, called pulque, to Mayahuel, the goddess of fertility. In China, beers made from millet and rice were used in funerals and other ceremonies. The practice of raising a glass to wish someone good health, a happy marriage, or a safe passage into the afterlife, or to celebrate the successful completion of a project, is the modern echo of the ancient idea that alcohol has the power to invoke supernatural forces.

Beer and Farming, the Seeds of Modernity

Some anthropologists have even suggested that beer might have played a central role in the adoption of agriculture, one of the turning points of human history. Farming paved the way for the emergence of civilization by creating food surpluses, freeing some members of society from the need to produce food and enabling them to specialize in particular activities and crafts, and so setting humanity on the path to the modern world. This happened first in the Fertile Crescent, starting around 9000 BCE, as people began cultivating barley and wheat deliberately, rather than simply gathering wild grains for consumption and storage.

Of course, the switch from hunting and gathering to farming was a gradual transition over a few thousand years, as deliberately cultivated crops played an increasingly significant dietary role. Yet in the grand scheme of human history, it happened in an eyeblink. Humans had been hunter-gatherers ever since humankind diverged from the apes, around seven million years earlier; then they suddenly took up farming. Exactly why the switch to farming occurred, and occurred when it did, is still hotly debated, and there are dozens of theories. Perhaps the amount of food available to hunter-gatherers in the Fertile Crescent diminished, for example, either because of climatic changes, or because some species died out or were hunted to extinction. Another possibility is that a more sedentary (but still hunter-gatherer) lifestyle increased human fertility, allowing the population to grow and creating demand for new sources of food. Or perhaps once beer had been discovered, and its consumption had become socially and ritually important, there was a greater desire to ensure the availability of grain by deliberate farming, rather than relying on wild grains. Farming was, according to this view, adopted partly in order to maintain the supply of beer.

Tempting though it is to attribute the adoption of agriculture entirely to beer, it seems most likely that beer drinking was just one of many factors that helped to tip the balance away from hunting and gathering and toward farming and a sedentary lifestyle based on small settlements. Once this transition had begun, a ratchet effect took hold: The more farming was relied on as a means of food production by a particular community, and the more its population grew, the harder it was to go back to the old nomadic lifestyle based on hunting and gathering.

Beer drinking would also have assisted the transition to farming in a more subtle way. Because long-term storage of beer was difficult, and complete fermentation takes up to a week, most beer would have been drunk much sooner, while still fermenting. Such a beer would have had a relatively low alcohol content by modern standards but would have been rich in suspended yeast, which dramatically improved its protein and vitamin content. The high level of vitamin B, in particular, would have compensated for the decline in the consumption of meat, the usual source of that vitamin, as hunting gave way to farming.

Furthermore, since it was made using boiled water, beer was safer to drink than water, which quickly becomes contaminated with human waste in even the smallest settlements. Although the link between contaminated water and ill health was not understood until modern times, humans quickly learned to be wary of unfamiliar water supplies, and to drink where possible from clear-running streams away from human settlements. (Hunter-gatherers did not have to worry about contaminated water supplies, since they lived in small, mobile bands and left their human waste behind when they moved on.) In other words, beer helped to make up for the decline in food quality as people took up farming, provided a safe form of liquid nourishment, and gave groups of beer-drinking farmers a comparative nutritional advantage over non-beer drinkers.

Farming spread throughout the Fertile Crescent between 7000 BCE and 5000 BCE, as an increasing number of plants and animals (starting with sheep and goats) were domesticated, and new irrigation techniques made farming possible on the hot, dry lowlands of Mesopotamia and in the Nile Valley of Egypt. A typical farming village of the period consisted of huts built from clay and reed mats, and perhaps some rather grander houses built of sun-dried mud bricks. Beyond the village would have been fields where cereals, dates, and other crops were cultivated, with a few sheep and oxen tethered or penned nearby. Wild fowl, fish, and game, when available, supplemented the villagers' diet. It was a very different lifestyle from the hunting and gathering of just a few thousand years earlier. And the transition toward an even more complex society had begun. Settlements from this period often had a storehouse where valuable items were kept, including sacred objects and stores of surplus food. These storehouses were definitely communal, since they were far larger than would have been needed by any single family.

Keeping surplus food in the storehouse was one way to ward off future food shortages; ritual and religious activity, in which the gods were called upon to ensure a good harvest, was another. As these two activities became intertwined, deposits of surplus food came to be seen as offerings to the gods, and the storehouses became temples. To ensure all villagers were pulling their weight, contributions to the common storehouse were recorded using small clay tokens, found throughout the Fertile Crescent from as early as 8000 BCE. Such contributions were justified as religious offerings by administrator-priests who lived off the surplus food and directed communal activities, such as the construction of buildings and the maintenance of irrigation systems. Thus were sown the seeds of accountancy, writing, and bureaucracy.

The idea that beer provided some of the impetus for this dramatic shift in the nature of human activity, after millions of years of hunting and gathering, remains controversial. But the best evidence for the importance of beer in prehistoric times is its extraordinary significance to the people of the first great civilizations. For although the origins of this ancient drink inevitably remain shrouded in mystery and conjecture, there is no question that the daily lives of Egyptians and Mesopotamians, young and old, rich and poor, were steeped in beer.

2

Civilized Beer

Pleasure—it is beer. Discomfort—it is an expedition.
—
Mesopotamian proverb, c. 2000 BCE
The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer.
—
Egyptian proverb, c. 2200 BCE

T
HE WORLD'S FIRST cities arose in Mesopotamia, "the land between the streams," the name given to the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that roughly corresponds to modern Iraq. Most of the inhabitants of these cities were farmers, who lived within the city walls and walked out to tend their fields each morning. Administrators and craftsmen who did not work in the fields were the earliest humans to live entirely urban lives. Wheeled vehicles trundled through the matrix of city streets; people bought and sold goods in bustling marketplaces. Religious ceremonies and public holidays passed by in a reassuringly regular cycle. Even the proverbs of the time have a familiar world-weariness, as this example shows: "He who possesses much silver may be happy; he who possesses much barley may be happy; but he who has nothing at all can sleep."

Exactly why people chose to live in large cities rather than small villages remains unclear. It was probably the result of several overlapping factors: People may have wanted to be near important religious or trading centers, for example, and in the case of Mesopotamia, security may have been a significant motivation. The lack of natural boundaries—Mesopotamia is essentially a large open plain—meant the area was subject to repeated invasions and attacks. From around 4300 BCE villages began to band together, forming ever-larger towns and eventually cities, each of which sat at the center of its own system of fields and irrigation channels. By 3000 BCE the city of Uruk, the largest of its day, had a population of around fifty thousand and was surrounded by a circle of fields ten miles in radius. By 2000 BCE almost the entire population in southern Mesopotamia was living in a few dozen large city-states, including Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Eridu, and Nippur. Thereafter Egypt took the lead, and its cities, such as Memphis and Thebes, grew to become the ancient world's largest.

These two earliest examples of
civilization
—a word that simply means "living in cities"—were different in many ways. Political unification enabled Egyptian culture to endure almost unchanged for nearly three thousand years, for example, while Mesopotamia was the scene of constant political and military upheaval. But in one vital respect they were similar: Both cultures were made possible by an agricultural surplus, in particular an excess of grain. This surplus not only freed a small elite of administrators and craftsmen from the need to produce their own food but also funded vast public works such as canals, temples, and pyramids. As well as being the logical medium of exchange, grain was the basis of the national diet in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was a sort of edible money, and it was consumed in both solid and liquid forms, as bread and beer.

The Drink of the Civilized Man

The recorded history of beer, and indeed of everything else, begins in Sumer, a region in southern Mesopotamia where writing first began to emerge around 3400 BCE. That beer drinking was seen as a hallmark of civilization by the Mesopotamians is particularly apparent in a passage from the
Epic of Gilgamesh,
the world's first great literary work. Gilgamesh was a Sumerian king who ruled around 2700 BCE, and whose life story was subsequently embroidered into an elaborate myth by the Sumerians and their regional successors, the Akkadians and Babylonians. The story tells of Gilgamesrrs adventures with his friend Enkidu, who starts off as a wild man running naked in the wilderness but is introduced to the ways of civilization by a young woman. She takes Enkidu to a shepherds' village, the first rung on the ladder toward the high culture of the city, where

The possibility of drunkenness seems to have done nothing to undermine the equation of beer drinking with civilization. Most references to drunkenness in Mesopotamian literature are playful and humorous: Enkidu's initiation as a human, indeed, involved getting drunk and singing. Similarly, Sumerian myths depict the gods as very fallible, human characters who enjoy eating and drinking, and often drink too much. Their capricious behavior was blamed for the precarious and unpredictable nature of Sumerian life, in which harvests could fail and marauding armies could appear on the horizon at any moment. Sumerian religious ceremonies involved laying out a meal on a table in the temple before a divine image, followed by a banquet at which the consumption of food and drink by the priests and worshipers invoked the presence of the gods and the spirits of the dead.

Beer was just as important in ancient Egyptian culture, where references to it go back almost as far. It is mentioned in documents from the third dynasty, which began in 2650 BCE, and several varieties of beer are mentioned in "Pyramid Texts," the funerary texts found inscribed in pyramids from the end of the fifth dynasty, around 2350 BCE. (The Egyptians developed their own form of writing shortly after the Sumerians, to record both mundane transactions and kingly exploits, but whether it was an independent development or inspired by Sumerian writing remains unclear.) One survey of Egyptian literature found that beer, the Egyptian word for which was
hekt,
was mentioned more times than any other foodstuff. As in Mesopotamia, beer was thought to have ancient and mythological origins, and it appears in prayers, myths, and legends.

One Egyptian tale even credits beer with saving humankind from destruction. Ra, the sun god, learned that humankind was plotting against him, and dispatched the goddess Hathor to exact punishment. But such was her ferocity that Ra feared there would soon be nobody left to worship him, and he took pity on humankind. He prepared a vast amount of beer—seven thousand jars of it, in some versions of the story—dyed it red to resemble blood, and spread it over the fields, where it shone like a vast mirror. Hathor paused to admire her reflection and then stooped to drink some of the mixture. She became intoxicated, fell asleep, and forgot about her bloody mission. Humankind was saved, and Hathor became the goddess of beer and brewing. Versions of this story have been found inscribed in the tombs of Egyptian kings, including Tutankhamen, Seti I, and Ramses the Great.

In contrast to the Mesopotamians' relaxed attitude toward intoxication, however, a strong disapproval of drunkenness was expressed in the practice texts copied out by apprentice scribes in Egypt, many of which have survived in large quantities in rubbish mounds. One passage admonishes young scribes: "Beer, it scareth men from thee, it sendeth thy soul to perdition. Thou art like a broken steering-oar in a ship, that is obedient on neither side." Another example, from a collection of advice called "The Wisdom of Ani," gives a similar warning: "Take not upon thyself to drink a jug of beer. Thou speakest, and an unintelligible utterance issueth from thy mouth." Such scribal training texts, however, are unrepresentative of Egyptian values in general. They disapprove of almost everything except endless studying in order to pursue a career as a scribe. Other texts have titles such as "Do Not Be a Soldier, Priest or Baker," "Do Not Be a Hus­bandman," and "Do Not Be a Charioteer."

Mesopotamians and Egyptians alike saw beer as an ancient, god-given drink that underpinned their existence, formed part of their cultural and religious identity, and had great social importance. "To make a beer hall" and "to sit in the beer hall" were popular Egyptian expressions that meant "to have a good time" or "to carouse," while the Sumerian expression a "pouring of beer" referred to a banquet or celebratory feast, and formal visits by the king to high officials' homes to receive tribute were recorded as "when the king drank beer at the house of so-and-so." In both cultures, beer was a staple food stuff without which no meal was complete. It was consumed by everyone, rich and poor, men and women, adults and children, from the top of the social pyramid to the bottom. It was truly the defining drink of these first great civilizations.

The Origins of Writing

The earliest written documents are Sumerian wage lists and tax receipts, in which the symbol for beer, a clay vessel with diagonal linear markings drawn inside it, is one of the most common words, along with the symbols for grain, textiles, and livestock. That is because writing was originally invented to record the collection and distribution of grain, beer, bread, and other goods. It arose as a natural extension of the Neolithic custom of using tokens to account for contributions to a communal storehouse. Indeed, Sumerian society was a logical continuation of Neolithic social structures but on a far larger scale, the culmination of thousands of years of increasing economic and cultural complexity. Just as the chieftain of a Neolithic village collected surplus food, the priests of the Sumerian cities collected surplus barley, wheat, sheep, and textiles. Officially, these goods were offerings to the gods, but in practice they were compulsory taxes that were consumed by the temple bureaucracy or traded for other goods and services. The priests could, for example, pay for the maintenance of irrigation systems and the construction of public buildings by handing out rations of bread and beer.

This elaborate system gave the temple direct control over much of the economy. Whether this resulted in a redistributive nirvana—a form of ancient socialism in which the state provided for everyone—or an exploitative regime of near-slavery is difficult to say. But it seems to have arisen in response to the unpredictable nature of the Mesopotamian environment. There was little rain, and the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates was erratic. So agriculture depended on the use of carefully maintained communal irrigation systems and, the Sumerians believed, on making the appropriate offerings to the local gods. Both these tasks were handled by the priesthood, and as villages grew into towns and then cities, more and more power was concentrated into their hands. The simple storehouses of the Neolithic period became elaborate temples, or ziggurats, built on raised, stepped platforms. Numerous rival city-states arose, each with its own resident god, and each ruled by an elite priesthood who maintained the agricultural economy and lived off the surplus it produced. Carvings depict them wearing beards, long kilts, and round headdresses, and drinking beer from large pots through long straws.

For all this to work, the priests and their subjects needed to be able to record what they had taken in and paid out. Tax receipts were initially kept in the form of tokens within clay "envelopes"—hollow shells of clay, called bullae, with several tokens rattling around inside. Tokens of different shapes were used to represent standard amounts of grain, textiles, or individual cattle. When goods were presented at the temple, the corresponding tokens were placed in a clay envelope, and the tax collector and taxpayer would both impress the envelope's wet clay with their personal signature seals to signify that the envelope's contents accurately reflected the tax paid. The envelope was then stored in the temple archive.

It soon became clear, however, that an easier way to achieve the same result was to use a tablet of wet clay, and to press the tokens into it to make different-shaped impressions signifying barley, cattle, and so on. The signature seals could then be applied to this tablet, which was baked in the sun to make the impressions permanent. Tokens were no longer needed; their impressions would do instead. Gradually, tokens were abandoned altogether in favor of pictograms scratched into the clay, derived from the shapes of the tokens or of the objects they represented. Some pictograms thus came to stand as direct representations of physical goods, while other combinations of indentations stood for abstract concepts such as numbers.

The oldest written documents, dating from around 3400 BCE from the city of Uruk, are small, flat tablets of clay that fit comfortably into the palm of one hand. They are commonly divided into columns and then subdivided into rectangles by straight lines. Each compartment contains a group of symbols, some made by pressing tokens into the clay, and others scratched using a stylus. Although these symbols are read from left to right and top to bottom, in all other respects this early script is utterly unlike modern writing and can only be read by specialists. But look closely, and the pictogram for beer—a jar on its side, with diagonal linear markings inside it—is easy to spot. It appears in wage lists, in administrative documents, and in word lists written by scribes in training, which include dozens of brewing terms. Many tablets consist of lists of names, next to each of which is the indication "beer and bread for one day"—a standard wage issued by the temple.

A modern analysis of Mesopotamian ration texts found that the standard issue of bread, beer, dates, and onions, sometimes supplemented with meat or fish and with additional vegetables such as chickpeas, lentils, turnips, and beans, provided a nutritious and balanced diet. Dates provided vitamin A, beer provided vitamin B, onions provided vitamin C, and the ration as a whole provided 3,500 to 4,000 calories, in line with modern recommendations for adult consumption. This suggests that state rations were not just occasional handouts, but were the primary source of food for many people.