Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  In time, the urban development along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers spilled over into the flood plain of the Karun River, to the east in what is now the Shiraz region of Iran and downriver from Godin Tepe. Another people speaking a different language—the proto-Elamites—had already established themselves here in the city-state of Susa. Their material culture could hardly be distinguished from that of their neighbors, and they shared the same writing system, with a similar repertoire of incised signs.

  Ginny told me that as many as forty-three tablets with logograms had been recovered from Late Uruk excavation levels at Godin Tepe, which signaled the presence of lowlanders, together with distinctive lowland architecture and imported pottery. The writing on the tablets and the other artifacts were insufficient by themselves to determine whether they were written in proto-Sumerian or proto-Elamite. Because of the direct route from the Susa plain up the Khorram River, the Godin excavators leaned toward the tablets’ being written in proto-Elamite.

  One tablet particularly caught my attention. It showed the sign for a pottery vessel (dug in ancient Sumerian) in the shape of a jar, with a narrow mouth and pointed base. The tablet also bore a group of three circles and a group of three vertical strokes. The circle denotes the numeral 10, and the vertical stroke represents 1. Altogether, then, thirty-three jars were recorded on the tablet. Further details were lacking. I thought our methods of chemical analysis might shed some light on what the vessels had contained.

  Whether they were proto-Sumerians or proto-Elamites, the goal of these early settlers in establishing a position in such a remote locale was to exploit the rich resources of the highlands. They sought metals such as gold and copper, semiprecious stones, timber for building, and a host of organic goods that were either unavailable in the lowlands or difficult to produce there. Lush mountain pastures nurtured sheep and goats that produced fine textile fibers and dairy products. Many plants—the domesticated Eurasian grapevine (Vitis vinifera ssp. vinifera) foremost among them—cannot tolerate the hot, dry climate of lowland Mesopotamia but flourish in upland regions.

  Godin Tepe was just one link in an extensive trading network that fueled development in the lowlands, but it exemplifies how the exchange of goods can be a conduit for even farther-reaching changes, often involving fermented beverages. With hindsight, I now see that Godin did not point only westward to the Mesopotamian city-states: it also had contacts eastward in Afghanistan, one of the principal sources of the intense blue mineral lapis lazuli. In fact, the site is located along the High Road or the Great Khorasan Road of the Assyrian and Persian empires, the route later followed by the famous Silk Road.

  The Great Khorasan Road is one of the few routes through the Zagros Mountains up to the high Iranian plateau and points east. It follows a tortuous path through deep ravines and across sheer mountainsides. High up on some of the cliffs, monarchs and generals recorded their successes for posterity. For example, at the imposing pinnacle of Behistun (“the god’s place or land”), Darius the Great carved a monumental inscription in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian cuneiform that gave thanks for his victories to the creator god of the Zoroastrian religion, Ahuramazda.

  Neolithic humans, and perhaps even Palaeolithic migrants, were likely the original trailblazers of the High Road. They may not have left written records, as their successors did, and the archaeological evidence of their way stations is very thin on the ground, but we can have little doubt that they traveled along this route, largely because there was no better one. Indeed, as I argue below, it is highly probable that during the Neolithic period such travelers, whether inadvertently or intentionally, transmitted ideas about how to domesticate plants and make fermented beverages. As these ideas gradually traversed the vast expanse of Central Asia, in both directions, they had profound effects on the cultures along the way.

  The evidence from Godin Tepe, although it dates to several thousand years later, fits with this earlier Neolithic scenario. Throughout the late fourth millennium B.C., the foreigners from the lowlands, who built and maintained the so-called Oval on the Citadel Mound, made the most of their upland circumstances. Ginny Badler’s initial surmise about the jars proved correct. The red deposits she had observed on the bases and side-walls of numerous jars from different areas of the settlement were residues of grape wine: our chemical analyses showed the presence of tartaric acid, the fingerprint compound for grapes in the Middle East.

  We began with two jars of unusual design from room 20, each about sixty centimeters tall and thirty liters in capacity. Their narrow mouths and tall necks, which contrast sharply with the shapes of other jars at the site, were well designed for holding and pouring liquids. Although their piriform or pearlike shape occurs elsewhere in Mesopotamia, the application of notched clay coils as rope designs, in the form of two inverted U shapes on opposite sides of each vessel, was unique to Godin. This design seemed meaningless until Ginny suggested that it might have demonstrated how an actual strand of rope could be used to support the jar on its side. Some simple experiments quickly confirmed this as a possibility. With the jars lying on their sides, clay stoppers, found near the jars and having the same diameter as the jar mouths, would have been kept moist by the contents, thus preventing them from drying out, shrinking, and letting in air that would spoil the wine. It also explained why the red deposits were found only on one side of the vessels. In other words, lacking cork, the ancient beverage makers had found a way of preventing “wine disease,” the inevitable conversion of wine to vinegar in the presence of oxygen, and improvised the world’s first wine rack.

  We can imaginatively re-create the ancient scene. Several wine jars were stoppered and stored on their sides in a cellar or dark recess of the Oval. After a year or two, the harsh young wine mellowed, and the solid lees of tartrate crystals and yeast settled out. Then the day arrived when a royal courier or dignitary arrived from the lowlands or a special ceremony was called for, and the jars were brought out. They were set upright, so that some of the lees ran down the sidewalls and collected on the bottoms of the vessels. The mouths of the vessels were carefully chipped away and then lopped off to prevent the stopper and associated debris from falling into the precious liquid. This method of “uncorking” a wine amphora is well attested 1,500 years later in New Kingdom Egypt. It is still used by port aficionados, who clamp the glass bottle neck with hot tongs and then apply a wet towel; the sudden change in temperature produces a smooth break.

  One of the wine jars showed evidence of an even more refined unstoppering technique. A small hole was drilled through its sidewall about ten centimeters above the base, opposite the reddish residue on the other side. This would have enabled the wine to be decanted from the jar without disturbing the solids that had accumulated at the bottom. At some stage, however, the drinkers must have become impatient, because the neck of this jar, like that of its partner, had also been cleanly severed from its body. The party or ceremony had begun.

  The protohistoric drinking fest, however, appears to have gone too far, because one of the outstanding finds of the excavation, a unique and stunning necklace of more than two hundred black and white stone beads, was lost and buried with the jars. Any excesses of the commandant’s wife, who might have been wearing the jewelry, would have gone unseen, as the small room had a curtain wall that shielded it from the courtyard and prying eyes.

  The finds from room 18, adjacent to this “party chamber,” were equally evocative. This room, the focal point of the citadel, had a large fireplace on its back wall for providing heat during the cold winter months. Two windows looked out onto the courtyard. The room had been left in disarray: carbonized lentils and barley grain littered the floor, and almost two thousand stone spheres, perhaps used as sling stones to defend the Oval, were piled up in a corner. The focus of our biomolecular archaeological research was a number of very large jars, up to sixty liters in volume. When full, these jars would have been too heavy to move, and their contents must have been ladled out.


  Room 18 might well have been the central distribution facility for goods needed by the foreign contingent of merchants, soldiers, and administrators. Rations and supplies—a replacement weapon, a clay tablet to write on, barley for bread and beer, or a fine wine for that special occasion—might have been parceled out from here through the two windows.

  Directly across the courtyard from rooms 18 and 20, a very large funnel, about a half meter in diameter, and a circular “lid” of somewhat smaller dimensions were excavated in room 2. The funnel strongly suggested that the resinated wine in the jars was produced on site. Similarly large funnels are known from well-attested winemaking installations of the Iron Age and later, and they have also been excavated at other upland Late Uruk sites in eastern Turkey and northern Syria, where the wild Eurasian grape grows today.

  Besides being useful in transferring liquids from one container to another, funnels serve admirably as strainers. Lining the funnel with a coarsely woven cloth (which would long since have disintegrated) or simply filling it with a mass of vegetal fibers or hair would have strained out debris from the unrefined grape juice, or must. Grapes might also have been heaped directly into the funnel, and the lid, weighing about a kilogram, used to press out the juice and drain it into a jar.

  Sherds of two or possibly three jars with the inverted-U rope appliqué patterns were also recovered from the room, but none had any visible reddish residues on them. It could be that they were empties, waiting to be filled.

  The possibility that room 2 served as a winemaking facility was plausible but lacked hard evidence. No grape pips, which are often well preserved, were reported from the room (although the soil had not been screened or floated for archaeobotanical materials), and the funnel might have been used to transfer a liquid other than wine. The “lid” might have been just that—a cover for a wide-mouthed vessel. Only half of room 2 had been excavated when work was brought to a halt by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. A rectangular bin—perhaps a treading platform?—had begun to emerge, but any further clues about its function must await renewed excavations.

  If one went in search of an early wine production center to supply the emergent city-states of lowland Mesopotamia, Godin Tepe would fit the bill. The site is centrally located along a historically important trade route through the Zagros Mountains. Today, luxuriant grapevines cover the area. Perhaps the same was true during the Late Uruk period. The possible winemaking facility in room 2 might have been today’s equivalent of an upper-class boutique winery. Larger-scale production would have taken place at facilities closer to the vineyards, which remain to be discovered and excavated. The experimental and entrepreneurial spirit of the period, so clear from the extensive trade, urbanism, and irrigation agriculture and horticulture of the lowlands, might well have found expression in highland winemaking. A Godin cuvée might have been the ancient world’s answer to a Ridge Cabernet Sauvignon, which Paul Draper makes from grapes growing on the edge of the San Andreas fault in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

  A SECOND BEVERAGE LURKING IN THE REMAINS

  There is a further twist to the tale of ancient fermented beverages at Godin Tepe. Any self-respecting lowland proto-Sumerian or proto-Elamite living at Godin would have wanted beer as well as wine. We know from later texts that beer was the drink of the masses in lowland Mesopotamia. Even the upper class would normally have drunk beer, with many varieties to choose from, including light, dark and amber beers, sweet beers, and specially filtered beers.

  On the assumption that beer was made and consumed at the site, Ginny went back through the mass of late fourth-millennium B.C. sherds from room 18, the all-purpose general store in the reconstruction of the site. From the jigsaw puzzle of broken vessels, she was able to isolate and reconstruct an excellent candidate for an ancient beer bottle or jug, the common archaeological designation for a jar with handles. The wide mouth of this fifty-liter jug (see plate 5a) set it apart from the wine jars, which had long necks and narrow mouths that could be stoppered. It did have a realistic applied-rope design, like the wine vessels and many others of the period, but this one was of an unusual, still-unexplained type. The artificial rope encircles the top of the vessel and passes through two handles (now missing) placed close together on one side of the jug. Midway between the handles, the rope’s realism was accentuated by being tied off as a knot, with loose ends hanging down. Intriguingly, a small hole had been punched below the knot before the vessel was fired.

  The interior of this jug was even more strange. It was covered with incised, criss-crossing grooves. Vessels are often decorated with incisions on the outside, but rarely on the inside; usually they are just left rough or somewhat smoothed off. A vessel with interior grooves reminded Ginny of the proto-Sumerian sign for beer: kaş. It was written by starting with dug—the jar sign on the Godin tablet that so piqued my curiosity—and then adding horizontal, vertical, and oblique markings inside the jar pictograph. Could it be that the jug with the curious interior incisions was related to the beer sign, or, in other words, that kaş was a pictorial representation of the curious jug with interior grooves? If so, was the jug originally used to prepare, store, or serve beer?

  A yellowish resinous-looking material filling the grooves of the jug turned out to be the linchpin for the argument that the lowlanders at Godin also drank beer. Ginny had first noted the residue as she sorted through the sherds in room 18. Now our laboratory turned to the task of identifying what it was and how it got there.

  Our investigation followed the procedures I have already described for the Jiahu grog. My colleague Rudolph (Rudy) H. Michel and I began by searching the literature to learn of any compounds that would unequivocally identify the contents of the vessel as barley beer. Fortunately for us, one particular compound settles out from the liquid during the processing and storing of barley beer. Calcium oxalate, known as beerstone by brewers, is the simplest of organic acid salts, combined with ionic calcium. It’s a very bitter, potentially poisonous compound, so it is a good thing to eliminate it from the brew. The pores in the pottery helped do this by removing the calcium oxalate from the brew at the same time that it helped to preserve the compound for our extraction and analysis thousands of years later.

  Beerstone can be identified down to the one part per million level using a standard chemical spot test developed by Fritz Feigl. When this test was applied to the ancient residue from the grooves of the Godin Tepe jug, it gave a positive result for oxalate.

  The “onerous” task of getting a sample from modern beer for comparison was left to Rudy, who made a trip to the Dock Street Brewery in Philadelphia. Dock Street was one of the first microbreweries to open its doors since the demise of the hundreds of breweries that once made Philadelphia renowned as the greatest brewing city in the Western Hemisphere. The symbolism of the moment was not lost on Rudy when a sample of beerstone from inside a brewing vat was scraped out and presented to him. This sample gave the same test result as the ancient residue.

  As a final confirmation, we tested a residue from a New Kingdom Egyptian vessel in the Royal Ontario Museum, which had a high probability of originally containing barley beer. The jar, with its flared rim and rounded base, is referred to as a beerbottle by Egyptologists. It was decorated with lotus petals and mandrake fruit in Egyptian Blue pigment. Based on tomb paintings and reliefs, researchers believe it was used in a special bread-and-beer ritual. Again, it gave a positive result for oxalate.

  From these findings, it was safe to say that the unusual jug in room 18 at Godin Tepe once contained barley beer. We could now draw out even more important implications from the evidence. Because carbonized six-row barley of the domesticated species (Hordeum hexastichum) was strewn on the floor of the same room and elsewhere in the Oval, it was probably locally grown. It would have been sown and tended in fields around the town, gleaned, the chaff winnowed, and the grain milled with basalt mortars and pestles.

  The barley then had to be malted by sprouting (although it might i
nstead have been chewed—see chapter 2). In this process, diastase enzymes become active and convert the grain starches to sugars. The water is drawn off before the sprout grows into a new plant, and the grains are parched and sometimes roasted to make malt. The chemical activity is suspended until water is added back to the malt to make a mash. At this stage, the practical advantages and relative ease of making a fruit wine or honey mead, instead of a cereal beer, emerge. Not only does beer making require the added step of converting the starch into sugar, but grains do not host naturally occurring yeast and thus cannot be directly fermented. To start the fermentation process, the ancient beverage maker had two choices: either wait for naturally occurring yeast to inoculate the brew, as is still done in making Chinese rice wines and Belgian lambic beers, or, more predictably, introduce Saccharomyces cerevisiae directly by adding fruit or honey.

  The transformation of barley into beer is driven mainly by saccharification and fermentation. Microbreweries today operate in much the same way, if we ignore the stainless-steel vats and thermostatic controls. The ancient process is wonderfully described in a Mesopotamian hymn to the Sumerian goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, dating back to at least 1800 B.C. As the earliest beer “recipe” on record, it contains some untranslatable terms and is highly poetic. For example, the violent fermentation is described thus: “The waves rise, the waves fall . . . [like] the onrush of the Tigris and Euphrates.” More practically, however, it observes that malt is prepared by covering the grain with water. The wort (the sugary solution that remains after the spent malt grains are filtered from the mash) is inoculated with both honey and wine, perhaps to assure that enough S. cerevisiae is available to start the fermentation. The poem also mentions enticingly that other “sweet aromatics” are part of the mixture. The phrase is ambiguous but might refer to dates or even a more bitter additive, such as radish or skirret, an anise-flavored herb.