Drink (2 page)

However, by the middle of the third millennium BC, evidence begins to appear which shows that alcohol was very much more than mere sustenance to the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent. As its little agricultural settlements developed into villages, then towns, so their material culture became increasingly sophisticated. In Sumeria, at the confluence of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, in present-day Iraq, the decorative arts flowered and writing appeared. Both of these mediums were used to record the social roles played by alcoholic drinks.

In Uruk, the principal city of Sumeria and probably the largest in the world at the time, brewing was practiced on an epic scale. The Sumerians documented both the quantity and the type of beer, or
kash,
that they brewed. They distinguished eight styles made from barley, eight from wheat, and three more from mixed types of grains. They appointed a goddess, Ninkasi, to rule over the art of brewing and associated both the production and distribution of beer with women. The fragments of their laws that have survived, incised on clay tablets, tell us that they had regulated drinking places; their material culture shows us that they staged formal drinking sessions and associated alcohol with ceremony and rank. A banquet scene engraved on a lapis lazuli seal, recovered from a royal tomb in Ur, adjacent to Uruk, and dating circa 2500 BC, depicts two tiers of aristocratic tipplers, indulging in the preferred recreation of their caste. The centerpiece of the top tier shows a pair of seated figures in regal postures, sucking beer through straws perhaps a yard long from a vessel the size of, and faintly reminiscent in its shape to, a modern beer keg. In the lower level, equally patrician individuals raise conical cups to their mouths, and are waited on by a functionary carrying a spouted jug. The same tomb contained examples of drinking straws made of gold and silver, and a solid gold drinking set consisting of a fluted bowl, a jug, and a cup. Its occupant, Queen Puabi, also priestess of the moon god Nanna, was buried with her court as well as her drinking apparatus—eighty other bodies, dressed up to serve her in the afterlife, filled a death pit adjacent to her final resting place.

The artifacts, laws, and records of the Sumerians show that alcohol was abundant in their society, that access to it was regulated, and that it was a favorite of its elite and offered to its gods. The epic Sume-rianpoem
Gilgamesh
(c. 2000 BC), perhaps the oldest literary work in existence, which recounts the exploits of the eponymous king, a semi-legendary ruler of Uruk, further shows that the Sumerians were no strangers to drunkenness. After setting out its hero’s semidivine ancestry, the poem proceeds to the recruitment of the wild man Enkidu, whom Gilgamesh wishes to have as a companion-in-arms on an expedition to slay the resident demon of a distant cedar forest. The wild man is persuaded to join civilization by the charms of Shanhat the harlot, who proceeds to educate him in the ways of men:

Clearly alcohol was not just fodder in Sumeria—it was also, in the right quantities, a source of happiness.

Gilgamesh
provides further insights into Sumerian attitudes toward alcohol. Its characters drink water when about their daily or heroic tasks but resort to alcohol whenever they are celebrating. Intoxication, it implies, was also de rigueur at their new year festivities, which, according to other sources, were very drunken indeed. Their highlight was a ceremonial and public act of coitus between the king of Uruk and the high priestess of the temple of Ishtar, goddess of procreation. The union was symbolic as well as real, and the mythical coupling that it reenacted was believed to have resulted in Ninkasi, the beer goddess. A hymn to her, the so-called Prayer to Ninkasi (c. 1800 BC), which has survived from the period, gives a detailed picture of how
kash
was made in Sumeria. It was a complex process—the grain was converted into
bappir
bread before being fermented, and both grapes and honey were added to the brew. The resulting gruel was drunk unfiltered, hence the need for straws at banquets.

Similar styles of brew were common in ancient Egypt, whose writings and artifacts likewise provide a detailed record of what its inhabitants drank and hint at some of their reasons for doing so. The story of Egyptian drinking begins in the city of Hierakonpolis, whose ruins contain the remains of the world’s oldest brewery, dating to circa 3400 BC. It was capable of producing up to three hundred gallons per day of a Sumerian-style brew. Heirakonpolis was also the site of a thriving pottery industry whose principal products were beer jugs and cups, the shards of which litter the ruins of the city. The sheer abundance of such relics and the relative scale of the brewing operations imply that beer was a vital part of the diet of the people who lived there.

While the common people of Heirakonpolis drank beer, its rulers were distinguished by a taste for wine, which was an imported luxury and an emblem of power. The tomb of King Scorpion, who ruled the city in the same age that its brewery was constructed, held seven hundred or so wine jars, made from various types of clay and embellished with different designs, most of which can be traced to what is now Israel and Palestine. The presence of so many jars, so far from their places of origin, confirms that the art of winemaking had spread throughout the Fertile Crescent and that the wine trade was a stimulus to civilization in the Middle East.

By the time that Egypt entered its dynastic era (c. 3100 BC), beer, known as
hqt,
had been established as the beverage for workers, whereas wine, or
irp,
was the drink of the elite. Beer, in keeping with its plebeian associations, was treated principally as a kind of food. Egyptian tomb paintings and clay models depicting its manufacture feature bare-breasted peasant women up to their elbows in their brews; papyrus scrolls bearing financial accounts state that the laborers who built the pyramids of the Giza Plateau were provided with a daily ration of one and a third gallons. A modern re-creation of Egyptian beer, brewed in accordance with written and pictorial evidence, weighed in at 5 percent ABV—the strength of the average contemporary pint, implying that, by the standards of the present day, the pyramids were built by an army of drunks. However, while the Egyptians have left us plenty of practical information about their brewing, they were almost silent on the matter of intoxication. The very few descriptions as to the effect of ten or more pints of beer every day are positive, if enigmatic: “The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer.”

We can, however, be certain that the average Egyptian became intoxicated on certain ceremonial occasions. These included the annual bash celebrating the Drunkenness of Hathor, goddess of fertility, motherhood, and the Milky Way. The Egyptians considered the swath of stars under her special protection to be a river across the sky, and hence Hathor was associated with the yearly inundation of the Nile. She also possessed some of the attributes of Sekhmet, a destroyer goddess of the old kingdom of Upper Egypt, and the drunkenness festival celebrated both the beginning of the annual flood and the mythical occasion on which Sekhmet was diverted from the extermination of humanity by her fellow gods, who provided her with beer disguised to look like blood. After drinking seven thousand jars, she lapsed into a drooling slumber, and while she slept, the gods who had opposed her consolidated their hold on creation. In celebration of their ingenuity, a special red-colored beer was drunk at the festival, in sufficient quantities to induce similar stupors.

The annual rise of the Nile was also associated with Osiris, god of the dead, of life, of vegetable regeneration, and of wine. In the dynastic era, Egypt had become a producer as well as an importer of
irp
. It remained an elite beverage, hence its protection by the most important deity in the Egyptian pantheon. After a fashion, Osiris and wine were made for one another. According to legend, he had died and been reborn, and the vine was a natural example of renewal—every winter it withered back to its roots, every spring it put forth new shoots. The end and resurrection of Osiris were celebrated over the Oag festival, immediately preceding that of the Drunkenness of Hathor. For the duration of its festivities Osiris was known as “the lord of
irp
through the inundation,” and the hieroglyphics that constitute the event’s name show three wine jars on a table, with a fourth being offered by a human hand. In the latter stages of the dynastic era, the worship of Osiris, and consumption of wine, became even more closely intertwined. His devotees, after prayers and rituals, would eat bread and drink wine in the belief that these were the transubstantiated flesh and blood of their divinity.

Wine, as befits its status as a luxury with divine associations, was manufactured with much more sophisticated methods, and with a great deal more care, than any other agricultural product. The Egyptians dedicated many slaves, and much land, toward perfecting its quality. Their fascination with wine marks the appearance of a new bond between mankind and a type of alcoholic beverage. Not only was it food, and liquid inspiration, it also was capable of stimulating the taste buds in a manner that no other edible substances could. Whereas a loaf of bread was more or less the same all over Egypt, the
irp
from neighboring vineyards might taste radically different, and the Egyptians set about classifying these variations.

A large number of amphorae of their ancient vintages have survived in the graves of pharaohs and other potentates, where they were placed to refresh the dead in the afterlife, and as offerings to Osiris. Most were marked with a description of their contents—where, when, and by whom they had been made. An early example from the burial chamber of King Zoser, the first Egyptian ruler to be entombed in a pyramid, announced that its wine came from the “vineyard of the red house of the king’s house in the town of Senpu in the western nomes.” As the dynastic era progressed, labeling became more sophisticated, and included reflections on the merit of the wine as well as its provenance. Good
irp
was described as
nfr,
very good as
nfr nfr,
and very very good as
nfr nfr nfr.
Moreover, instead of spoiling over time like other ingredients of the pharaonic diet, the flavors of
nfr
, or better
irp
, were believed to improve with age, and some of the wines discovered alongside the mummified remains of their owners have labels declaring them to be several decades old at the time of their interment. Given that the average life expectancy at the time was only forty, such senior vintages most likely were buried after their creators.

The analysis of the residues in various graveside amphorae has enabled us to augment the information provided by the ancient labels and to determine what color of wine each one contained. Recent tests carried out on amphorae from the tomb of King Tutankhamen (d. 1322 BC) confirm that he drank both reds and whites, from different estates within his dominions. The boy king was buried with twenty-six wine jars, containing vintages up to thirty-six years old, produced by fifteen different winemakers. One such, labeled “Year 5. Wine of the House-of-Tutankhamen Ruler-of-the-Southern-On, l.p.h.[in] the Western River. By the chief vintner Khaa,” proved to have contained a red, whereas “Year 5. Sweet wine of the Estate of Aton of the Western River. Chief vintner Nakht” was white. The different colors were stacked at opposite cardinal points of the tomb, suggesting a further level of discrimination, whose meaning has been lost. The grave goods also included King Tut’s favorite wine-cup—an alabaster chalice.

The systematic preparation of alcoholic drinks was surprisingly quick to spread from the Middle East to northern Europe. In the same centurythat King Scorpion was accumulating jars of Levantine wine for his afterlife, the inhabitants of a distant island surrounded by a cold sea were making merry on truly psychoactive brews. The cultivation of cereals had reached Germany by 5000 BC and Britain a few centuries later. Crops originating in the Fertile Crescent had appeared in the Orkney Islands in the far north of Scotland by about 3800 BC, where they were used to make beer. It is not known if the Scottish discovered fermentation independently, or whether the process traveled alongside the Middle Eastern cereals they employed in their brews.

The settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkneys, whose stone dwellings have been preserved by virtue of having been buried beneath a sand dune for many thousands of years, provides much in the way of circumstantial evidence about the drinking habits of its Neolithic population. Pottery jars with a capacity of up to thirty gallons have been found in several dwellings, and the analysis of a greenish slime in the bottom of one such vessel confirms that it held an alcoholic beverage made from barley and oats, which had been flavored with meadowsweet and spiced up with deadly nightshade, henbane, and hemlock. These last additives are hallucinogenic, and lethal in the right quantities. Henbane induces blurred vision, dilated pupils, rapid heartbeat, dizziness, nausea, euphoria, and hallucinations in very small doses; hemlock is best know as a neurotoxin that paralyzes before it kills; and deadly nightshade, three juicy berries of which can be fatal, speeds the pulse and gives its consumer the sensations of flight. Clearly, the inhabitants of Skara Brae were drinking for effect rather than to satisfy their hunger or their thirsts.

Other Neolithic sites throughout the British Isles also provide evidence of both alcohol and drunkenness. At Durrington Walls, for instance, a settlement adjacent to Stonehenge, many hearths have been uncovered that are distinguished by the quantity of animal bones and smashed pottery vessels they contain—clearly visitors to the sacred complex feasted long and drank deep. Indeed, it is likely that a culture of intoxication existed in Britain and much of Europe prior to the introduction of cereal crops and beer. Paleobotanical remains, and the entoptic phenomena depicted in cave paintings dating to more than thirty thousand years ago, show that its inhabitants consumed cannabis and opium poppies for pleasure. It is easy to understand how alcohol was welcomed as a new method of generating an altered state of consciousness.