Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  The Gilgal figs were not unique. Kislev went back and looked at the archaeobotanical remains from another site he had worked on, Netif Hagdud, 1.5 kilometers west of Gilgal and of nearly the same date. The nearly five thousand fig drupelets found there showed the same lack of embryos in the fruit, indicating that they came from the same parthenocarpic variety. Figs were also recovered from contemporaneous Jericho and from Gesher, farther north in the valley.

  The conclusion that the fig was domesticated by ca. 9500 B.C., a thousand years before any cereal and far in advance of the grape, date, and a variety of nut and other fruit trees, can certainly be challenged. It is possible that the figs at these sites in the Jordan Valley were all taken from female fig trees, which also produce unfertilized, sweet fruit.

  Even if we reserve judgment on the domestication issue, the figs from Gilgal and other early Neolithic sites were clearly an important resource: they are well-formed and must have been intentionally dried by humans. When desiccated, figs are the most sugar-rich fruit in nature. Fifty percent of their dry weight consists of simple sugars. In liquid form, figs contain about 15 percent sugar, less than grapes and bananas. Such a sweet fruit would be a natural candidate for a fermented beverage. It is also conceivable that humans had already observed how easily a fig tree could be propagated from a cutting, an observation that was later put to good use in domesticating other plants.

  We do have good evidence from about six millennia later that figs played a role in fermented beverages of the Jordan Valley. Our chemical analyses showed that the resinated wine in a royal tomb at Abydos (see chapter 6), hundreds of miles away, had been made in the southern Levant and then exported to Egypt. One peculiarity of this wine remains unique: some of the jars contained a single fig. The fruit had been sliced up and perforated so that it could be suspended in the liquid by a string. Perhaps the fig was a sweetening or fermenting agent or a special flavoring. Cutting it into segments and suspending it on a string would bring more of the wine into contact with the fruit.

  It may be proposed, then, that the fig, the earliest known domesticated plant species in the world, was an ingredient of whatever Neolithic fermented beverage was being concocted at Jericho and nearby. This tradition, which was peculiar to the region and not documented elsewhere, was then perpetuated down to the time of the pharaoh Scorpion I, who was buried in the Abydos tomb around 3150 B.C.

  THE FULL BLOSSOMING OF A NEAR EASTERN DRINKING CULTURE

  From the Neolithic period onward, makers of fermented beverages became increasingly specialized as they moved away from mixed fermented beverages and focused on individual ingredients. Anatolia, within the Neolithic core area, has much to tell us about these developments.

  The repertoire of Anatolian wine vessels in pottery, gold, and silver boggles the imagination. At the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, we can see majestic jugs in the red lustrous style, with extremely long spouts, suggestive of birds’ beaks, that are sometimes counterbalanced by a raptor-like bird mounted on the handle of the vessel. The spouts of these jugs may be cut away or left open, and some are even stepped, so that as one tilted the jug, the beverage would have cascaded down the spout like a waterfall. Prodigious drinking horns in the shape of birds of prey, bulls, lions, hedgehogs, and other creatures would have satisfied the most ardent upper-class drinker. Waist-high “spindle bottles,” whose bodies narrow at the top and bottom, modeled on a smaller version for specialty wines, stand ready to be filled.

  We know from texts of the Hittites, who ruled the central Anatolian highlands during the mid- to late second millennium B.C., that most of these vessels once contained grape wine. The Hittites encircled their capital at Boazkale, ancient Hattusha, with vineyards. They offered up quantities of their wine to their gods, with a considerable amount left over for the living.

  Even as beverage making in Anatolia gravitated more and more toward winemaking, ancient traditions died hard. We read in the Hittite texts of olive oil, honey, and tree resins being added to wine. There is even a compound word for the two Sumerian pictograms of beer and wine, kaš-geštin, that translates literally as “beer-wine.”

  At the capital city, any mixed beverage served to the king or enjoyed by his retinue would have been prepared with the utmost care. As exemplified by the Inandik Vase in the Ankara museum, what superficially appears to be a trick vessel had a much more serious purpose. This vase, which sits in regal splendor in the center of the Old Hittite gallery, was outfitted with a hollow ring encircling its mouth into which a liquid could be poured through a large opening on one side. The liquid flowed through the ring and into the interior through bulls’ heads whose muzzles were perforated with holes. The vessel has never been sampled and analyzed, but we can surmise from Hittite texts that wine—possibly a raisined variety or an herbal blend, for which the Hittites were renowned and which was used medicinally—was mixed with other ingredients, perhaps some honey, another fruit, or even beer.

  What is unique about the Inandik Vase is that the making of the beverage and its ceremonial use are graphically portrayed in four exterior painted panels, which proceed from bottom to top. The lowest panel depicts a vessel like the vase itself being stirred by a man with a long stick, as would be necessary in the making of a mixed beverage. The horizontal metope above shows a figure who can be identified as the king, in standard Near Eastern attire, sitting on a throne resembling a camp stool and being served the beverage in a cup by an attendant, who pours from a beak-spouted jug. Above that is a panel showing musicians, probable sword dancers, and other celebrants in procession. They are headed toward a temple model and an altar, behind which the king and queen sit together on a couch. Although the latter scene has been broken away, it has been convincingly reconstructed as depicting the king pushing back the veil of his spouse. This is the prelude to the topmost panel, in which the king and queen, or sacred prostitute, perform the symbolic sexual act or sacred marriage (referred to as hieros gamos in Greek), in which the fertility of all of nature and the well-being of the king and his realm are secured. Musicians again accompany this dramatic reenactment with flutes, harps and cymbals, and dancers leap into the air.

  The Inandik Vase, the apotheosis of the Hittite potters’ art and expertise, vividly shows how beverage-making had become a carefully controlled royal industry by the second millennium B.C. and how fermented beverages were integrated into religion and the arts. Mixed beverages were never fully displaced by specialization, as the traveler to modern Turkey quickly discovers. Families come out to greet you in the countryside and might even invite you to their house or tent to taste baqa, a concoction of fermented figs and dates. More often, you are offered a refreshing glass of ayran, a nonalcoholic fermented yogurt beverage. As was the trend during the Hittite period, however, unadulterated wine is the overwhelming favorite in Anatolia today. In the past decade, a boutique wine industry, based on native varieties such as the superb red Öküzgözü (“eye of the ox”), has rekindled the vitality of the ancient industry.

  In the lowlands of Mesopotamia, where cereals could be grown in bulk by irrigation agriculture, barley and wheat beers were perfected over the millennia. I have already mentioned the range of ancient “microbrews,” which varied in body, taste, and sweetness. An even sweeter beverage came to prominence in the first millennium B.C.: date beer or, more accurately, date wine. Date palms grew in profusion in the lower Tigris-Euphrates Valley, and with twice the sugar content of grapes, their fruit could be fermented to give an alcohol content as high as 15 percent.

  All levels of Mesopotamian society, from peasant to king, reveled in these drinks. They helped forge communal ties as people gathered around large-mouthed jars, such as the one we analyzed from Godin Tepe, and drank together through straws. Special jars, sporting two to seven spouts equally spaced around the rim, were made for these occasions. The popularity of communal beer drinking, particularly in the third millennium B.C., is attested by the distribution range of these multispouted j
ars, found in sites from Lower Mesopotamia, up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, throughout Turkey, and across the sea in the Aegean islands.

  The most extravagant examples of drinking tubes are those recovered by the Penn and British Museum excavations at the Early Dynastic cemetery of Ur, dating to ca. 2600–2500 B.C. The tomb of Queen Puabi had multiple sets of “straws” made from gold, silver, and lapis lazuli. A silver jar, which probably originally held her daily six-liter consignment of beer, was also found in her burial chamber. Common men and women, some of whom went to their deaths when Puabi was buried, did not have it so good. They received only one liter of beer per day in return for contributing to the construction of the early city-state.

  Wine belonged to a different social order in lowland Mesopotamia, at least in the south, where grapes could be grown only by irrigation and had to be protected from the intense sun. Only royalty could afford to indulge in this luxury, and, beginning around 3000 B.C., the lower Zagros Mountains in Shiraz were planted with the vine to supply the lowlands. If a king wanted to get his wine from one of the more northerly wineries, shipping it by boat or mule incurred substantial additional charges. The equivalent of a bottle of a California Two-Buck Chuck, coming from Armenia or eastern Turkey down the Euphrates, can be calculated from economic dockets to have cost three to five times as much in Lower Mesopotamia in the early second millennium B.C.

  Despite the growing cachet of wine in royal circles, cereal and date beers never lost their allure. Sometimes dates and grapes were mixed together (according to the Greek writer Polyaenus of the second century A.D. in his Stratagems). The Sumerian word for banquet translates as “the place of beer and bread.” Kings boast of lavish feasts, of drinking beer in the temple of the high god, and consorting with Inanna (Akkadian Ishtar), the goddess of love. In the sacred marriage ceremony, the king stood in the role of Dumuzi, the deified king of Uruk, one of the Lower Mesopotamian city-states. The celebration was most famously carried out in the goddess’s temple at Uruk (the Eanna) for several days at the beginning of the New Year, probably in April or May.

  Figure 13. (a, above) Mesopotamian barley beer was drunk through straws. In the earliest known depiction of a popular motif, on a clay seal from Tepe Gawra, Iraq, ca. 3850 B.C., two thirsty individuals are thought to be imbibing beer through drinking tubes in this fashion from a gargantuan jar (see also figures 24a–b and plates 4 and 10). Drawing courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; National Museum of Iraq, no. 25408, length 2.9 cm. (b, opposite) Drinking at banquets is a recurring theme on Mesopotamian cylinder seals, as exemplified by this impression of a lapis lazuli cylinder seal (length 4.4 cm) from Queen Puabi’s tomb in the Royal Cemetery at Ur (British Museum 121545), dated to ca. 2600–2500 B.C. In the upper panel, a couple share a pot of beer. In the lower panel, a wine aficionado, who has already drained one goblet, is being offered a refill from a droop-spouted jar. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

  A particularly vivid account of the high status of beer in Near Eastern societies is recorded by the fifth-century B.C. Greek historian Xenophon in his Anabasis. After the mercenaries known as the Ten Thousand retreated from Persia on the death of Cyrus the Younger in 401 B.C., they traveled through the threatening terrain of central and eastern Anatolia, where the Tigris and Euphrates begin. Their succor came in the form of a barley “wine,” drunk from large jars with straws in a remote village. Barley wine, then as today, likely refers to an unmixed, extremely potent beer made only from barley, so strong in fact that the soldiers had to water it down. It is no wonder that a story took hold in Greece that Dionysos, the wine god, became so angry with the Babylonians that he kept grape wine from them and forced them to drink only beer (according to the third-century A.D. traveler and historian Sextus Julius Africanus in his Cestus).

  Wine and beer both played central symbolic roles in the sacred-marriage reenactment, which was intended to encourage the fertility of the land and assure the prosperity of the king and his people. In one version of the myth, Dumuzi is holed up in an underworld brewery with his boon companions, a group of sagacious beer-makers. Although this might not sound like such a bad place to be under the circumstances, Dumuzi is rescued by his sister, the wine goddess Geshtinanna (her name includes the Sumerian element geštin, signifying “grape,” “vineyard,” or “wine”). The literal translation of Geshtinanna is “leafy grapevine,” and she was popularly referred to by the epithet Ama-Geshtinna (“root of the grapevine” or “mother of all grapevines”). The outcome of Geshtinanna’s efforts is to resurrect Dumuzi to new life on earth. She also eventually finds fulfillment in the world above.

  We can plausibly equate Dumuzi with the spring barley and his sister, Geshtinanna, with the fall vintage, as their escape from the underworld took several months. In the real-life reenactment in the temple, the sacral union was probably helped along by the consumption of both types of fermented beverages, or perhaps a mixture, as suggested by the imagery on the Inandik Vase.

  Our laboratory has analyzed vessels from the late fourth-millennium B.C. Eanna temple to Ishtar at the site of Uruk, including a jar with a drooping spout and a unique miniature jar, a type known only from Uruk. Both jars contained a resinated wine. The droop-spouted jar is depicted on numerous cylinder seals for serving a beverage that was drunk from a cup or goblet. It seems probable from these results and others from contemporaneous city-states that the beverage in the droop-spouted jars and drinking vessels was wine. On some cylinder seals, a scene showing wine drinking is juxtaposed with another showing beer drinking through straws from a large-mouthed jar. The miniature jar, which was found together with many other examples in a sherd layer under the temple, might have been used in a dedicatory ceremony for the temple.

  It appears that in the earliest stages of state formation in the Middle East, the rulers and upper classes increasingly demanded, and got, more specialized beverages. If the climate was unsuitable for establishing local vineyards, wine could be imported as a costly, prestige item, much as it is today when we serve that special bottle of Pétrus, a Super Tuscan Sassicaia, or Ridge Cabernet to our friends. Special brews, perhaps laced with a flavorful or mind-altering herb, served the same purpose. In imitation of this conspicuous consumption, one king after another adopted one kind or another of a fermented-beverage culture wherever we look in the Near East, from ancient Phoenicia and Palestine across the Great Syrian Desert to Iran or south to Egypt (see chapter 6).

  Special wine-drinking vessels, sometimes filled with a specialty beverage, were exchanged between Near Eastern rulers. Ceremonies that already stemmed from common Neolithic roots might be transferred, mutatis mutandis, from one culture to the next, and the appropriate beverage incorporated into the ritual. Anthropologists call this process elite emulation. Of course, any self-respecting ruler would try to guarantee that his tomb was well stocked with his or her favorite beverages to provide sustenance in the afterlife.

  THE BACCHIC POETS

  Even when Islam threatened to undermine the foundations of the ancient fermented-beverage traditions of the Middle East in the middle of the first millennium A.D., some hardy souls refused to capitulate. The Koran (5:90) is very explicit in its denunciation: “Wine and gambling and idols and divination by arrows are a defilement of the Devil, so avoid it.”

  How does one explain the host of Arabic and Persian writers and intellectuals, called the Bacchic poets, who developed a whole genre of love poetry (Arabic khamriyyāt) during the height of Arab supremacy in the Middle East, in the sixth to eighth centuries A.D. and continuing until the thirteenth century? These poems, which overflow with eroticism and excessive drinking, seem totally at odds with the tenets of traditional Islam.

  ‘Umar b. Abī Rabī‘a, one of the earliest poets in the Umayyad caliphate, who hailed from Mecca, wrote these torrid lines:

  I spent the night being fed wine that had been mixed with honey and excellent pure musk.

  I would kiss her and
as she reeled she would indulge me with the pleasure of her cool [lips].

  (Kennedy 1997: 23)

  Or consider these lines from the same poem:

  She gave me to taste her sweet [saliva] which I imagined to be honey mixed with cold limpid water.

  Or a wine aged in Babel, the color of a cock’s eye.

  (Kennedy 1997: 24)

  A contemporary of ‘Umar, al-A‘sā, is worth quoting at greater length:

  Have you not abstained [from love]? Nay, the passion [of love] has returned . . .

  I have drunk many a cup of wine, indulging in pleasure, and then another to cure the effects of the first . . .

  A [pure] red wine that shows up specks of dust in the bottom of the flask.

  We were watched by rose, jasmine and songstresses with their reed pipes.

  Our large drum was constantly played; which of these three [delights] am I then blamed for?

  You see the cymbals answering the [beat of] the drum.

  (Kennedy 1997: 253)

  The apotheosis of such celebrations of wine, women, and song comes in the great Ruba’iyyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, beautifully translated by Edward Fitzgerald:

  A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

  A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

  Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

  Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

  (Aminrazavi 2005: 331, stanza 12)

  With the Bacchic poets’ blunt affirmation of worldly pleasures, it is no wonder that they were both praised by hedonists and abjured by prohibitionists from their own time until now. One of the most famous eighth-century poets, Abu Nuwās, who transformed the earlier, nomadic tone of the love songs to the more formal khamriyyāt genre with the elegant atmosphere of the Persian court, was imprisoned by one caliph and told to write panegyrics rather than wine verses. Other poets were put to death. For American prohibitionists as recently as 1890, Omar Khayyam was the epitome of evil, referred to as “the bibulous old Persian.”