Nature and The Human Hand
We can trace alcoholic beverages made by humans to about 7000 BC, nine millennia ago, but it is almost certain that prehistoric humans consumed alcohol in fruits and berries many thousands of years earlier than that. When fruits and berries pass the point of optimum ripeness and sweetness and start to decay, wild yeasts begin to consume the sugars they naturally contain and to produce alcohol by a spontaneous process of fermentation. The alcohol thus produced in the flesh and juice of rotting fruits often reaches levels of 3 or 4 percent and sometimes goes higher than 5 percent, giving them an alcoholic strength similar to that of many modern beers.1 Any fruit or berry is capable of going through this kind of fermentation, as long as two conditions are satisfied. First, the fruit must have a reasonable sugar level, and one that will attract yeasts. Sugar levels rise as fruit ripens, making it sweeter, and ripe fruits typically have sugar concentrations of between 5 and 15 percent of their mass.2 Second, there must be ambient wild yeasts (on the skin of the fruit or in nearby trees and bushes) that can gain access to the sugars in the flesh of the fruit once its skin splits.
Various mammals, birds, and butterflies are known to eat decayed and fermented fruit and to experience varying degrees of intoxication. The Malaysian tree shrew, the poster animal for alcohol consumption, often feeds on fermented flower nectar, which can reach an alcohol level of almost 4 percent. This animal probably has an interesting perception of the world. Yet its agility as it leaps from tree to tree seems unimpaired by its alcohol intake, and there is no evidence that it engages in the risky behavior often associated with intoxication. Other creatures consume alcohol only periodically and opportunistically. A New Orleans newspaper reported in 1954 that thousands of migrating robins were getting drunk on the overripe berries on the bushes in city parks. A local birdwatcher noted that the blackbirds that followed could hold their alcohol better than the robins: “The blackbirds fall off into the grass and then wallow around to sober up. But the robins! I saw three big fat robins topple into the gutter and just lie there.”3
Videos of supposedly intoxicated animals have become popular viewing on the internet, and although many seem to be authentic examples, scientists are skeptical about widespread and long-standing reports of African elephants getting tipsy on the rotting fruit of the marula tree. The scenario is somewhat improbable because elephants prefer their marula fruit ripe, rather than overripe or rotting. But even more unlikely, an adult elephant would have to avoid water and eat marula fruit with a minimum alcohol level of 3 percent at more than 400 times its normal maximum food intake in order to achieve a blood-alcohol level that would make it perceptibly inebriated.4 Simply because of their body size, smaller creatures are more likely to feel the intoxicating effects of eating fermented fruit. In prehistoric times, primates and humans were almost certainly among them.
As long as 20 million years ago, our primate forebears lived primarily on a diet of fruit and berries: early human tooth structure was similar to that of modern apes, which gain almost all their calories from fruit, and the modern human genome is close to that of chimpanzees, which feed almost exclusively on plants, mostly fruit. Like other mammals and birds, humans might well have preferred fruit that was optimally ripe, when it was brightly colored and eye-catching, rather than when it was either underripe or beginning to rot. Yet they might also have gathered the more easily accessible overripe—and possibly fermenting—fruit from the ground where it had fallen and have thus consumed alcohol on an occasional or regular basis at the end of each ripening season. If they made the connection between eating overripe fruit or berries and feeling a pleasant sense of light-headedness, they might well have made it a regular practice and looked forward to each year’s vintage.
But although we are talking of the prehistory of alcohol, it is important to stress that before there was any beer or wine, there was water. Water is a requirement of life on earth, and humans need to consume water regularly to compensate for what they lose daily, mainly in the form of perspiration, urine, and feces. The volume of water humans need to rehydrate themselves varies according to the climate, their diet, and their patterns of physical activity, but water is always needed—about 2 liters a day for adults in modern Western societies. Until methods of delivering drinking water over long distances were devised, humans lived only where there was regular access to fresh water in the form of rivers, streams, lakes, springs, wells, or precipitation as rain or snow. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans relied on water, both for individual rehydration and to support the supplies of fruit, vegetables, berries, meat, fish, and other items in their diet, all of which not only required water but also contained water. If alcoholic beverages became part of the prehistoric diet, they must have made a negligible contribution to rehydration at first (and for tens of thousands of years), because nomadic populations would not have been able to produce significant volumes of alcohol while constantly on the move.
Everything changed in the Neolithic period (about 10,000 to 4000 BC), when humans began to build permanent settlements, cultivate cereals and other crops, and keep livestock. Domesticated varieties of many kinds of crops began to appear, including cereals that were suitable for making beer and grape varieties that were selected for wine production because they were easier to propagate and had a higher ratio of flesh to seeds than many wild grapes. In this period we find the earliest evidence of beer and wine, partly because Neolithic cultures also began to produce pottery; it is in clay pots and jars that archaeologists have found some of the oldest evidence of alcoholic drinks, in the form of seeds, grains, yeasts, acids, and other residues. These discoveries raise the question of whether evidence of wine and beer dating to pre-Neolithic times (further back than about 10,000 BC) will ever be found, simply because the vessels used to hold the liquids—perhaps made from wood or leather—have totally disintegrated.
So at least 9,000 years ago—but almost certainly much earlier—a human history of alcohol was added to the natural history of spontaneous fermentations in rotting fruits and berries. It began when the first winemaker or brewer crushed grapes or other fruit, or processed barley or another cereal, and let the liquid stand until it fermented. Fermentation was not explained as a biological process until the middle of the nineteenth century, when French scientist Louis Pasteur carried out his experiments with wine. Yet thousands of years earlier, someone, somewhere—northeastern China and western Asia are currently considered the most likely locations—seems to have made a historic observation: if the juice of fruit or berries (or a mixture of water and honey or processed cereal) were left for a short time in warm enough conditions, it began to bubble or froth. Once the bubbling subsided, the resulting beverage produced a pleasant feeling when consumed in small volumes and a sense of otherworldliness when those initial small volumes were followed by more.
The world has not been quite the same since. For some people, the discovery of alcohol and methods of producing it created new opportunities for health and pleasure: alcoholic beverages were found to be generally more nutritious than the produce they were made from; they were for centuries safer than the polluted water that was available for drinking in many parts of the world; they gave their consumers a feeling of well-being; and they were quickly associated with positive qualities like conviviality, fertility, and spirituality. In contrast, other people have found history since the advent of alcohol resembling one long hangover for humanity: alcohol has long been ascribed negative associations such as social disruption, violence, crime, sin, immorality, physical and mental illness, and death.
We will never know who gave birth to these contested histories by intentionally producing the first alcohol, and the further back we take the history of alcohol, the more speculative it becomes. It might well have begun with an unplanned yet observed fermentation. If the first alcohol was wine, the history of alcohol might have started when wild grapes collected by prehistoric humans for consumption as fresh fruit were placed for safekeeping in a wooden or leather container or in a bowl-shaped indentation in a rock. The grapes at the bottom of the pile would have been squashed by the weight of those on top, producing juice that fermented when it attracted the wild yeasts living on the skins of the grapes or in nearby trees or bushes. Or it might have started with another fruit, like pomegranates or haws (the fruit of the hawthorn tree). Or it might have begun with something entirely different, such as honey, treasured as a food because of its sweetness, that was liquefied and diluted by rain and then fermented into the alcoholic beverage that later became known as mead. (Honey needs to be diluted by about 30 percent water before it ferments.)
All these products, as well as many grains (such as barley and rice), were used in some of the earliest alcoholic beverages that have been identified by archaeologists. As long as the product possessed sugars, was liquefied, and was left long enough in warm enough conditions for wild yeasts to do their work, fermentation would take place and an alcohol-bearing liquid would result. This liquid might have had a low level of alcohol and its flavor and texture might have been quite unrecognizable to us as beer, wine, or other common alcohol, but it would have been an alcoholic beverage.
The next step in the story of the earliest alcohol takes us from this unintended fermentation to a process engineered by a human. After having one or two tastes of this fermented liquid and experiencing its pleasing effects, our accidental winemaker who had gathered and stored the grapes, the fruit, or the berries might have tried to replicate fermentation, even though he or she was completely unaware of the biological process involved. After piling grapes or other fruit into a container several times to produce the juice that turned into this pleasing beverage, he or she might have shortened the process by simply squashing all the fruit or berries—maybe by hand, maybe by foot—thus increasing the volume of wine produced.
Making beer would have been more complicated, as the cereals it is made from contain very little fermentable sugar. They do have sugars and starches, but these are almost completely insoluble and must be made soluble before yeasts can turn them into alcohol. (A beverage with traces of alcohol can be made from unprocessed grain, but it would not have had the impact on the drinker that made beer and wine so attractive.) The sugars in cereal can be converted if one chews the grains: an enzyme in human saliva is effective, and chewing grain and spitting it out was one way alcoholic beverages were made in various Caribbean, Latin American, and Pacific cultures before European contact. The more common process is to malt the grain (soak it in water until it germinates, then dry it) and mash it (soak it in warm water) to produce a liquid containing soluble sugars that can be fermented.
This is clearly a much more complex process than fermenting fruit, berries, or honey. Although beer might have been produced spontaneously—if grains successively fell from or were blown off the stalk, were rained on, then sprouted, were dried by the sun, were rained on again, and finally were fermented by wild yeasts—and was consumed, it is difficult to see how drinkers would have known how to replicate the process. Eventually, of course, the process was mastered, but the relative simplicity of fruit and honey fermentation argues for fruit- or berry-based wine, or perhaps mead, to have been made before beer.
The human history of alcoholic beverages might have begun by these various accidental fermentations. Or perhaps not, because such scenarios, suggesting that the first deliberate production of alcohol followed upon the observation of unintended fermentations, are entirely speculative. We can no more know the circumstances in which the first beer, mead, or wine was made than we can know who first baked bread or first boiled an egg. Yet there has been some compelling need to explain the inexplicable, and many cultures have produced stories that set out the origins of alcoholic drinks. Some attribute the advent of wine and beer to gods rather than humans. A song (dating to about 1800 BC) to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, describes how beer is made and the pleasures of drinking it. In Egypt, Osiris, the god of the underworld and also the source of all life on earth, was credited with bestowing wine and beer on humans. In Greece, wine was associated with Dionysus, and in Rome, with Bacchus. Jews and Christians, on the other hand, traced wine to a mortal, Noah, who was said to have planted vines on the slopes of Mount Ararat, where his animal-laden ark came to rest once the Great Flood had subsided: “Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard,” says the Old Testament.5 In the Babylonian version of the flood story, in contrast, wine and beer were provided to the workers building the boat before the flood occurred.
Although Noah seemed to know intuitively (or by divine revelation or guidance) how to make wine from his grapes, other accounts stress the accidental character of the first fermentation. One narrative sets it in the court of the Persian king Jamsheed, who was so fond of fresh grapes that he kept jars of them in order to have supplies out of season. When he found one lot no longer sweet because, unknown to him, the grapes had fermented, he had the jar labeled “poison.” Soon after, a woman from the royal harem, suffering from a terrible headache, drank some of this “poison” in order to kill herself and end her misery. Overcome by the alcohol, she fell asleep, and when she woke and (counterintuitively) found her headache gone, she told the king of the magical cure. He promptly ensured that more of his grapes were allowed to ferment.6
In contrast, a Chinese account suggests that the first product to be fermented was rice, and that it occurred “when discarded rice was fermented and it accumulated a rich fragrance after a long period of time in an empty trunk.” But an eleventh-century Chinese treatise on wine takes a more pragmatic view: “As for who was the first one who invented wine, I can only say that it was a certain wise person.”7
Accounts like these often point us to some of the enduring cultural associations of wine—such as its religious and medicinal properties—but they do not bring us much closer to an understanding of the historical origins of alcohol more generally. For that, we look to archaeologists, some of whom have turned the quest for the earliest alcohol into a small industry. They search for evidence of alcohol, generally in the form of remains of the fruit, berries, or cereals used or the chemical residues of liquids that had been absorbed into the interior walls of pottery jars and vats. The residues of grape wine generally take the form of grape seeds, tartaric acid (which occurs naturally in grapes and some other fruit), yeasts, and malvidin, a pigment that black grapes share with few other fruits. Although unfermented grape juice and even fresh grapes might leave the same evidence as wine, grape juice would almost certainly have quickly fermented in the warm climatic conditions that prevailed in China and the Middle East, where most of this sort of evidence has been collected. Other evidence of alcoholic beverages that can last for thousands of years includes calcium oxalate (or “beerstone,” which often accumulates in vessels that have been used for brewing); grains of cereals used in brewing (such as rice, barley, millet, and emmer); wax from honey; and tree resin, which was often used to seal the inside of pottery jars and to preserve the alcoholic beverages they held.
The findings that make up the earliest known history of alcohol—from about 7000 BC to the beginning of the Christian era, a little more than 2,000 years ago—produce a continually changing narrative. Archaeologists, historians, linguists, chemists, and other scholars regularly report finding evidence they claim to be the earliest example of this or that aspect of alcohol. The earliest evidence of any form of alcoholic beverage has been found in northern China, while the earliest known wine production facility is claimed for Armenia. There is evidence that of one of the earliest commercial breweries was located in Peru8 and a suggestion that the first evidence of distilling alcohol is to be found in the regions now occupied by Pakistan and northern India.9 The earliest known alcohol in liquid form, preserved in airtight bronze vessels and dating back an astonishing 4,000 years, was found in central China. Many of these findings have shifted some attention from the Middle East, which was long assumed to be the birthplace of beer, wine, and distillation—and which gave us the Arabic origin of our word “alcohol”—even though there is an important concentration of evidence of ancient alcohol in that region.
Yet although we should expect to see the history of ancient alcohol continually revised, as researchers develop new analytical techniques and investigate new sites, there is probably a practical limit to the historical depth of our knowledge. As most of the evidence of the earliest alcoholic beverages takes the form of residue in pottery jars, we should not expect to find evidence before the widespread use of pottery in the Neolithic period. Before clay was used to make vessels for holding liquids, alcoholic beverages would have been stored in containers made from wood or leather, or perhaps from textiles, all materials that have long rotted away and taken their all-important residues with them.
It is not surprising, then, that the earliest evidence of an alcoholic beverage was found in a dozen pottery jars from the early Neolithic village (about 7000–5600 BC) of Jiahu, in Henan province of northern China. Judging by the residue, the beverage in question was wine made from a combination of rice, honey, and fruit—probably grapes or haws because both have high levels of tartaric acid. The rice might have been exposed to a fungus that made its sugars suitable for fermentation. As for the honey, it might have been added last to sweeten the beverage, but it might also have been added before fermentation to attract wild yeasts to the unfermented liquid; although grapes and haw berries can play host to yeasts, rice does not.10
There is no way of knowing the social context in which this beverage might have been drunk, but later evidence of Chinese wine was found in a large number of bronze vessels, suggesting that alcohol in ancient China was particularly associated with the wealthy. Dating from about 1900 BC (4,000 years ago), these vessels had not only held fermented beverages, but some still contained liquid after thousands of years; they were initially well sealed and later corrosion made them perfectly airtight. One vessel gave up 26 liters (equivalent to about three dozen standard wine bottles) of what was described as a liquid with “a fragrant aroma,” but the sensory evidence was short-lived because the compounds that convey aromas and flavors volatilized within seconds of being exposed to air.11
In China, as in contemporary Egypt, wine was buried with the high-ranking dead for consumption in the afterlife. There were also ceremonies in which people drank wine to achieve a mind-altered state that would enable them to communicate with their ancestors.12 More evidence of the funerary purposes of wine-drinking emerges from the later Shang dynasty (1750–1100 BC). Excavations of thousands of tombs show that wine vessels were often buried with the dead, not only with the powerful (70 percent of the bronze vessels buried with the queen of King Wu-ting are wine containers) but even with some of the poor.13 In the Chou dynasty (1100–221 BC), there is less evidence of wine being used for funerary purposes but a strong emphasis on drinking at festive occasions, if not on an everyday basis. Poems describe drinking “sweet wine” at parties after hunting for boar and rhinoceros, and the number of different names for wine—or the number of names for different wines—proliferated. Although the earliest evidence of alcohol in China suggests that it was made from rice, honey, and fruit, later references to production commonly refer to cereals (wheat and millet), and the process—malting, cooking, and fermenting grain—indicates that it was beer rather than wine that was being produced.
Our present knowledge suggests that China has had the longest continuous evidence of alcohol production, starting with the residues of a 9,000-year-old fermented beverage made from several products and continuing unbroken to the burgeoning Chinese wine industry of the early twenty-first century. Yet there is also widespread evidence of early alcohol production (although beginning three or four thousand years after the earliest known alcohol in China) in western Asia, in regions occupied by modern Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia. In some of these areas, alcohol has had a discontinuous history because of the Islamic prohibition of alcohol in the seventh century and the alcohol policies enacted by successive Muslim administrations. At the present time, for example, alcohol consumption is forbidden in Iran and by citizens in Saudi Arabia (some allowance is made for foreigners), while Turkey has a significant wine industry.
The earliest western Asian evidence of alcohol dates from 5400 to 5000 BC (about 7,000 years ago) in Hajji Firuz, a community in the Zagros Mountains, which run along the frontier between modern Iraq and Iran. Telltale residues in the pottery vessels found there indicate both beer and wine. Beer can be deduced by the presence of oxalate ion, a common residue from brewing, on the inside of a jar and the presence of some carbonized barley at the same location. Wine, on the other hand, left grape seeds, tartaric acid, and tree resin inside pottery jars. While it is possible that the jars contained unfermented grape juice rather than wine, in the warm conditions of the region, the sugar-rich juice would almost certainly have attracted yeasts and quickly started fermenting. The traces of resin also support the conclusion that the jars held wine, as tree resin was widely used in wine as a preservative—a practice that continues today (but for flavoring, not conservation purposes) in resinated wines of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Greek retsina. The beverages these jars contained were thus made from single products, rather than from several fermented fruits and cereals, as in the earliest Chinese finding, although they might well have been mixed with other beverages or additives before they were consumed.
The total volume of the Hajji Firuz wine jars was 54 liters (the equivalent of 72 standard bottles of wine). This would not have gone far, given that wine had to last a year (until the next vintage), although we do not know if the community had access to a little or a lot more wine than these six jars represent. The fact that the wine jars were found close to jewelry and other luxury artifacts suggests that the wine was owned by a well-off household.14 More earthenware wine vessels containing tartaric acid from wine, this time dating from 3500 to 3000 BC, were found in Godin Tepe, a trading post and military center to the south of Hajji Firuz. These jars held between 30 and 60 liters each, and the vertical patterns of the internal staining showed that, after being sealed with clay stoppers, the jars had been stored on their sides, just like modern bottles with cork closures. In the same community, archaeologists also found a large basin that might have been used for fermenting grape juice and a funnel that might have been used in winemaking.
However, an earlier and much more complete winemaking facility, dating from 4100 to 4000 BC, was found near the village of Areni, in the Little Caucasus Mountains of southern Armenia, not far from the Zagros range where Hajji Firuz and Godin Tepe were located. It consists of a shallow basin in which grapes would have been crushed (probably by foot), with a hole allowing the juice to flow into an underground vat, where it fermented. These vessels, along with cups and bowls, showed evidence of malvidin, and grape seeds, pressed grapes, and dried grapevines at the site further support the belief that this was a winemaking facility. The scale of production suggests that by this time, 6,000 years ago, grapes suitable for wine might well have been domesticated.15
As we can see, two regions in Asia—an area of northeastern China and a relatively small area of western Asia bounded by the Caucasus Mountains, eastern Turkey, eastern Iraq, and northwestern Iran—have surrendered the very earliest signs of alcohol. This is not to say that alcohol was not produced as early in other places, for societies in most parts of the world fermented some of their local resources into alcohol. The Nahua of Central America fermented the juice of a variety of agave, and many African societies fermented the sap of palm trees. Apart from the anomaly of most of North America, where there is no evidence of native peoples making alcohol despite the availability of suitable raw materials, the cultures that did not acquire the knowledge and technique of making alcohol lived in environments—such as the Arctic and the Australian desert—where no suitable fruit or cereals grew.
That said, it has proved impossible, in many of these cases, to determine how far back alcohol production went. Although alcoholic fermentation might have been practiced first in Africa or the Americas, the greatest certainty lies with the Chinese and western Asian evidence that dates back to the period between 7000 and 3000 BC, some 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. The regions involved lie many thousands of kilometers apart, but they were connected by the Silk Road and by other trade networks for thousands of years before that. It is possible, then, that knowledge of fermentation was developed in one region and transferred to the other. Alternatively, each region might have started to practice fermentation independently, or the process of making alcohol might have been discovered in a third, as yet unidentified, region of Asia and then transferred to other parts of the continent.
Brewing and winemaking, the processes that produced the two most common alcoholic beverages in the ancient world, seem to have followed different paths of diffusion and development. The transfer of winemaking knowledge and technology seems fairly linear, as it moved from western Asia to the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt, and from there to Crete, Greece, and southern Italy, before reaching the rest of Europe about 2,000 years ago. Winemaking knowledge seems to have reached the Etruscans of northern Italy by a different route, as they were producing wine at the same time as the Greeks, and it is possible that the Phoenicians transferred the same knowledge directly to Spain.
Brewing, in contrast, was being practiced at a number of locations at about the same time. In addition to the early evidence of millet beer in China and barley beer in Godin Tepe, which dates from 3500 to 3000 BC, there are signs of brewing in Upper Egypt (3500–3400 BC) and in Scotland (about 3000 BC), where honey and herbs were added to the beverage.16 This wide but contemporaneous dispersal suggests that brewing was discovered by a number of cultures independently; but the evidence is scattered and uneven, and drawing firm conclusions from it is risky.17
Much more reliable evidence of the production of alcohol and of cultures of alcohol consumption emerges from about 3000 BC onward. There is detailed pictorial evidence of wine production in Egypt by 3000–2500 BC, and an Egyptian census from 1000 BC lists 513 vineyards owned by temples. Most were located in the Nile Delta, but there were also scattered vineyards at oases farther south. Everywhere, grapevines tended to share space with other plants and trees (which provided habitat for the yeasts needed for fermentation), as in a two-and-a-half-acre block that belonged to a high official of Saqqara in 2550 BC: “200 cubits long and 200 cubits wide . . . very plentiful trees and vines were set out, a great quantity of wine was made there.”18
The grapes in Egyptian vineyards were grown on trellises or up trees, and when they were ripe, they were picked and taken in baskets to be crushed by foot in large vats. Wall paintings show four to six men treading the grapes, each holding on to straps hanging from overhead poles so as not to slip on the skins and fall into the juice. Sometimes the workers trod grapes to a cadence set by women singing songs, such as one dedicated to the goddess of the harvest: “May she remain with us in this work. . . . May our lord drink [the wine] as one who is repeatedly favoured by his king.” Wine is invariably shown as red or a dark color in Egyptian wall paintings, which suggests (unless it is an artistic device) that black grapes were used and that there was skin contact before or during fermentation, because red wine gets its color from pigments in the skins of dark grapes.
Fermentation might have begun in the crushing vat, but it continued and ended in the large clay jars used to store wine. Once each jar was full, it was sealed with a pottery cap and made airtight with a lump of Nile clay. Small holes were made near the top of the jar to enable the carbon dioxide (along with alcohol, a product of fermentation) to escape while the fermentation was in progress, so that the jars did not crack or explode under pressure of the gas. The holes were later closed to protect the wine from air, which would oxidize and spoil the wine. Finally a clay seal—a forerunner of the modern wine label—was fixed to the cap. It was etched with information that might include the vineyard the wine came from, the name of the winemaker, the year of vintage, and even the quality or style of the wine. One such seal on a jar in the tomb of King Tutankhamun reads, “Year 4. Sweet wine of the house-of-Aton—Life, Prosperity, Health!—of the Western River. Chief winemaker Aperershop.” Seals on jars in other locations read variously, “Wine for merry-making,” “Very good wine,” “Wine for offerings,” and even “Wine for taxes.”19 It is not clear whether wine used to pay taxes in kind was superior or mediocre in quality; perhaps its quality determined its value as a tax payment in kind.
Wine was drunk only by the elites in Egypt, as it was in many ancient cultures. The scarcity of wine probably gave it cultural value everywhere because it was made only once a year, unlike beer, which could be made continually, year-round, in small batches using stored-up grain. Moreover, suitable grapes—grapes with a high flesh-to-seeds ratio that yielded plenty of juice—ripened successfully in fewer regions than cereals could be cultivated. Made in few places and produced in small volumes that had to last for a whole year until the following vintage, wine was far less likely than beer to be readily available, and its scarcity must have made it more expensive, even when it did not have to be transported to consumers in places where grapes did not grow. These two related qualities, scarcity and cost, contributed to the social cachet of wine and perhaps to its eventual associations with religion and spirituality. Unlike beer, wine was sometimes traded over long distances (down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, for example), and it was drunk by the elites and used in festivities and ceremonies. Thus wine was more likely to enter the historical record, with the result that we know more about ancient wine than about ancient beer, even though beer was far more commonly consumed.
The Code of Hammurabi, issued in Babylon about 1770 BC and one of the earliest known codifications of law, regulated the price and strength of beer. Although these laws refer to “wine-shops,” it is clear that, for the most part, these establishments sold beer. There is an implication here and elsewhere that public drinking places in Mesopotamia were generally run by women and were often associated with prostitution.20 This is an early expression of themes that run through the longer-term history of alcohol: the production of alcoholic beverages by women and the association of alcohol with sexuality.
Not only did beer become relatively plentiful in the ancient world, but (unlike most modern beers) it was remarkably nutritious. The malting process raised the caloric value of the base cereal, giving beer more calories than bread made with an equivalent amount of grain. In addition, beer was rich in carbohydrates, vitamins, and proteins. It also gave its drinker a pleasant feeling. Although we cannot know for certain the alcohol level in ancient beer, it was probably high enough to make an impact but not so high that drinking a liter or two a day—making it excellent for hydration—would prevent anyone from getting on efficiently and safely with daily life. It was probably tasty, even though it was not filtered, and would have been cloudy, with bits of husk and stalks floating on its surface. But ancient alcohol producers and consumers were no purists. Not only did they co-ferment various fruits, berries, cereals, and honey, but when they did make straight beer, they regularly flavored it with coriander, juniper, and other additives. In Egypt, beer was made from barley, although wheat, millet, and rye were occasionally used. It was provided to workers and slaves (such as those constructing the pyramids) as part of their salary and was also attributed medicinal properties, especially as a laxative and purgative.21
Beer, then, was a smart drink from almost every perspective—health, nutrition, hydration, and pleasure—and it soon became the universal drink, despite the common belief that the masses drank only beer and the elites drank only wine. In fact, everyone who drank alcohol drank beer, but whereas the wealthy supplemented their beer with wine, the bulk of the population did not. Wall paintings from Egypt in the second century BC show scenes of banquets where members of the royal family and their entourage are drinking two beverages. One, probably beer, was drunk from large jars through straws or tubes, probably to prevent the drinkers from ingesting the husks and stalks that floated on the surface. The other beverage, probably wine, was sipped from cups.22 These different modes of drinking suggest that beer was consumed in greater volumes than wine, even though both beverages were consumed on these occasions.
One reason why wine was monopolized by the wealthy and powerful in ancient societies was simple cost. It cost more to produce, and its relative scarcity raised the price further. In Mesopotamia the price of wine was inflated by the need to ship it to the towns where the elites were concentrated. Although beer was readily produced from barley grown on the plains near southern cities such as Babylon, Ur, and Lagash, wine was produced in the mountains to the northeast and then shipped downstream along the Tigris and Euphrates. This is the first known example of a long-distance wine trade, but its extent was limited by small production and its high cost structure. Wine and other goods were easily sent to market on the south-flowing rivers, but the purpose-built wine barges were broken up after each trip because they could not return north against the current. The end price of goods thus included the capital cost of the barge. But wine was clearly a lucrative trade for merchants, for in 1750 BC a merchant of Babylon named Belânu showed frustration at the absence of wine from a shipment of goods that had arrived on the Euphrates. He wrote to his agent, “The boats have arrived here at the end of their journey at Sippar [50 kilometers north of Babylon], but why have you not bought and sent me some good wine? Send me some and bring it to me in person within ten days!”23
Given the price of wine, only people such as the ruler of Lagash could purchase it in big volumes. It was reported in 2340 BC that he had established a wine cellar, “into which wine is brought in great vases from the mountains.” These vases were the forerunners of amphoras, the clay jars later used by Greek and Roman merchants to ship millions of liters of wine throughout the Mediterranean and Europe. The mass of the population drank only beer, and the place of beer in the diet of Mesopotamians is denoted by the description of basic daily fare as “bread and beer.” The hymn to Ninkasi celebrated the brew that exhilarates the drinker, “makes the liver happy and fills the heart with joy.”24
Beer and wine were similarly consumed in Egypt, where grapes were far more difficult to cultivate than cereals. At first, wine was imported from the east. Hundreds of wine jars found in the burial chamber of one of the Egyptian kings, Scorpion I (about 3150 BC), contain deposits and resin identical to those found at Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains, and the jars themselves were made from clay that seems to have come from the area now occupied by Israel and Palestine. This suggests the existence of a complex wine industry where jars were imported, filled with wine, then re-exported farther afield.
Wine was not only consumed as part of the elites’ diet in ancient Egypt; it was also employed in ceremonies, often being poured as a libation as prayers were said. Beer, oil, honey, and water were also used in libations, but wine tended to have more religious or spiritual associations throughout the ancient world. Planting vines might have been perceived as a religious obligation, as the pharaoh Ramses III suggested when he addressed the god Amon-Ra: “I made for thee wine-gardens on the Southern oasis, and Northern oasis likewise without number.” Ramses claimed to have presented 59,588 jars of wine to gods in his lifetime.25 And if the lifetime was important, so was the afterlife, for supplies of wine were buried with eminent Egyptians, as vessels of alcohol were with the dead in China. When Tutankhamun died at the age of nineteen (at or below the legal drinking age in most countries today), three dozen jars of wine were buried with him, most from the fourth, fifth, and ninth years of his reign. Although the pharaohs drank beer while they were living, beer would not have been buried with them, not because it was unworthy, but because it was known not to last more than a week or two.
It is worth noting that until the wine-rich heydays of the Greeks and Romans, there is no evidence of a negative attitude toward beer. The Greeks and Romans thought beer was utterly inferior to wine. Wine, they said, was a manly and civilized beverage; beer, which made men effeminate and was fit only for barbarians, was to be avoided by peoples who aspired to greatness and civilization. These views (explored in more detail in the next chapter) contributed to a belief, which still has some currency, that wine possesses intrinsic civilizing qualities and is culturally superior to beer. A lot of nonsense has been written about wine’s being a sign of “civilization,” a statement predicated on the assumption that the life of the elites was civilized and the life of the masses was worth little in any cultural sense. It ignores the reality that in most ancient societies, until Greece and Rome came into their own, the elites themselves must have drunk far more beer than wine. If they produced longer-lasting artifacts and ideas than the masses, they did it with the aid of beer, at least as much as of wine.
So far was beer from being considered an inferior beverage that Mesopotamia’s classic piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, identified beer-drinking as essential to being human, as the process of humanizing Enkidu, the wild man, shows: “Enkidu does not know of eating food; of beer to drink he has not been taught. The prostitute opened her mouth. She said to Enkidu, ‘eat the food Enkidu, it is the luster of life. Drink the beer as is done in this land.’ Enkidu ate the food until he was sated; of the beer he drank seven cups. His soul became free and cheerful, his heart rejoiced, his face glowed. He rubbed . . . his hairy body. He anointed himself with oil. He became human.”26
Both beer and wine were served at the funeral banquet of a person thought to have been King Midas, in about 700 BC.27 Evidence of the banquet was found in a five-by-six-meter burial room deep in a human-built earthen mound that looks, from the outside, like a natural hillock. It is located in Gordion, now in central Turkey but formerly the capital of the Phrygian empire over which Midas ruled. The burial chamber contained the skeleton of a sixty- to sixty-five-year-old male laid out on dyed textiles in a log coffin surrounded by 150 bronze vessels. More than 100 drinking bowls littered the chamber, and there were also three 150-liter vats, which probably held the beverage that was poured into bronze jugs and from there into individual bowls. (There were also some larger, two-handled bowls, perhaps for the thirstier guests.) The crowd of mourners implied by the number of pieces in this drinking set could not possibly have fitted into the burial chamber, so the wooden furniture and the bronze bowls, plates, and vats must have been placed around the body after the banquet (probably held outdoors) was over.
As for what was consumed at King Midas’s funeral banquet, both the food and drink were combinations of ingredients. The meal was a stew of goat or sheep meat that was marinated in oil, honey, and wine before being grilled, mixed with lentils and cereals, and flavored with herbs and spices. It was accompanied by a beverage that was no less complex: a mixture—“blend” is probably a more positive term—of grape wine, barley beer, and mead. If the three 150-liter vats were only half full, there would have been more than 200 liters of this beverage available for the 100 guests, which would have made for a convivial gathering.
Was the banquet of King Midas a kind of ancient wake, and did the eating and drinking have religious associations? There were strong links between wine and religion (stronger links than between beer and religion) in the ancient world and later, and several explanations have been advanced. One is that mild or more advanced intoxication gave drinkers a sense of light-headedness that felt like slipping from the mundane world and approaching the gods. Yet this would not necessarily differentiate wine from any other alcoholic beverage. What was different was the higher alcohol level of wine than, say, beer, so that consuming the same volume of wine would get the drinker closer to the gods more rapidly. Another explanation is that wine gained spiritual value from the apparent miracle of fermentation, when grape juice rose in temperature and bubbled without any external stimulus, such as fire. But again, this is common to all fermented beverages, although the roiling fermentation of wine might have been more impressive than the foaming of fermenting beer. A third suggestion is that the life cycle of the grapevine—which flourishes in spring, bears fruit during summer and autumn, then appears to die during the winter, only to sprout leaves and flowers again in the spring—appeared to ancient peoples like a recurring miracle of death and resurrection. But many other plants and trees—though not the cereals used for brewing—go through the same annual cycle. Perhaps the spiritual associations of wine reflected all these properties.
The strong association of alcohol with feasting indicates its high status at these times; banquets, whether celebrating life events or death, were often important political events, used for purposes such as forming and cementing social alliances, creating social debt, and demonstrating social distinctions.28 All the alcoholic beverages in the ancient world had some religious connotations that might well have reflected the perceived wonder of fermentation and the feelings of other-worldliness that even mild alcoholic intoxication produces. If wine had stronger religious associations, which it did in many ancient cultures, it might well have been more because of its scarcity than of any intrinsic quality. It is not surprising that the social elites in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere stressed the godly associations of the beverage to which they had virtually sole access; it gave them a proximity to and an intimacy with the divine that was greater than any the masses had access to. Some cultures treated mead as divine, too—perhaps a measure of its scarcity, perhaps reflecting a widespread belief that bees were divine, perhaps because honey was the sweetest commodity known in the ancient world. Intense sweetness was a treasured quality, and Christians would later adapt this notion to the idea of the “sweetness” of Jesus.29
Alcohol occupied not only a religious position in ancient cultures; it was regularly employed as a medicine, either in its own right or as a medium for plants, herbs, and other produce that were believed to have therapeutic properties. Many of the Neolithic alcoholic beverages identified in China and the Middle East contained plant material that was not used for the production of the alcohol, and although it might well have been used to add flavor, it might also have been added because of its perceived medicinal value.
Ancient Egypt provides comprehensive information, even though most of the plants named in hieroglyphics have not been identified. Coriander is an exception, and a common remedy for stomach problems was beer infused with coriander, bryony (a flowering plant), flax, and dates. Grated and mixed with chaste-tree and an unidentified fruit, then infused into beer, strained and drunk, coriander was also prescribed as a cure for blood in the feces.30 In general, wine was considered a particularly good aid to digestion, and it was prescribed to increase the appetite, purge the body of worms, regulate the flow of urine, and act as an enema. It was often mixed with kyphi, a concoction of gum, resin, herbs, spices, and even the hair of asses, animal dung, and bird droppings. Alcohol dissolves solids more effectively than water, and its higher concentration in wine made it a very good medium for many medicines. Wine was also applied externally as a salve to reduce swelling, and recognition that alcohol was a disinfectant led to wine being applied to bandages to treat wounds.31
Wine was highly valued in Chinese medicine, too; the character for “medical treatment” contains the elements of the character for wine, indicating the close relationship between wine and medicine.32 The earliest Chinese medical and pharmaceutical works cite wine as an important drug and antiseptic and as a means of circulating medicines in the body. Among its specific uses, wine was employed as an antiseptic, an anesthetic, and a diuretic, and in the Taoist period it was an ingredient in longevity elixirs.33
For all these positive qualities attributed to alcoholic beverages, they were also recognized as having a darker side. There was, first of all, the matter of simple overconsumption. It is argued that heavy drinking became so widespread, at least in the royal court, that it brought about the collapse of the Shang dynasty in China (1750–1100 BC). In reaction, subsequent rulers not only warned against excessive drinking but made it punishable by death.34
The general tolerance and even encouragement of drinking during festivities is suggested by a scene from the Egyptian tomb of Nakhet, where a girl is shown offering her parents wine and saying, “To your health! Drink this good wine, celebrate a festive day with what your lord has given you.”35 Although light intoxication at celebrations, like drinking to achieve a spiritual light-headedness, might be tolerated, heavy drinking at festivals and other occasions sometimes got out of hand. One Egyptian sage, Ani, said of the drunk person, “When you speak, nonsense comes out of your mouth; if you fall down and break your limb, no one will come to your assistance.”36 Another sage advised, “Do not get drunk, lest you go mad.” Egyptian artists were not shy about showing the seedier side of alcohol-charged festivities, and wall drawings depict men and women vomiting and being carried unconscious from banquet rooms. There is no explicit suggestion of moral disapproval here, but some writings suggest that public intoxication was more frowned upon than excessive drinking in private.
What began to emerge in the ancient world is a theme that runs through the history of alcohol to the present: that moderate consumption was not only acceptable, but a good thing for reasons of health and pleasure. But drinking too much alcohol, either on specific occasions (what is now called binge-drinking) or as a regular pattern, was bad. It was detrimental to the drinker’s health and morals, harmful to those immediately affected by his or her behavior, and damaging to society more generally. It led to a debate, which continues today, about how to define the line between moderation and excess, and how to ensure that no one crossed the line. Historically, some commentators have identified the line by the unruly behavior of the drinker, but this meant that it was defined only after it had been crossed. Others have prescribed specific volumes of alcohol as moderate and safe, as modern public health policy-makers recommend a maximum of so many standard servings of alcohol a day. Attempts to prevent excessive drinking constitute an important strand in the history of regulation, as one society after another has variously tried to control the production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol. Some later societies attempted to prohibit alcohol entirely, and in those cases the distinction between moderate and excessive consumption was moot. The distinction might have been less of an issue in ancient societies where alcohol was produced and consumed in relatively small volumes, but it became much more important as alcohol production increased and alcoholic beverages became central to the daily diet, as they did in Ancient Greece and Rome.