Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  The true facts of ancient winemaking in Iran, to the extent that we know them, are no less intriguing. Our biomolecular archaeological research on specific jar types has shown that the domesticated grapevine had been progressively cultivated southward along the spine of the Zagros Mountains. This scenario is supported by a pollen core from Zerabar Lake, near Godin Tepe, that shows that grape did not exist in the area before 5000 B.C. By the late fourth millennium B.C., Susa, one of the early capitals of the Elamites in the Karun River plain, served as a central market or entrepôt for wine shipments from the highlands to the east, such as Godin Tepe, to the lowland city-states of Mesopotamia. The Susan residents were smart enough not to trade away all their wine, reserving some to be drunk or offered to the gods and some to be used in specialty oils and perfumes.

  The Susan king very likely initiated and funded the first forays into the mountains of Shiraz to the southeast, 1,800 meters above sea level. This region was the home of the Bacchic poets, including Omar Khayyam, and long before that to the Persian kings, who built their palaces at Ecbatana and, most magnificently, at Persepolis with its soaring columns and sculptured reliefs lining the grand stairway that led to the audience chamber (the Apadana).

  In 1974, when my wife and I traveled to Iraq, we hoped to have a firsthand look at these sites. We were told that we could cross the border by ferry at a point along the Shatt-al-Arab, the waterway south of Basra that lies between Iran and Iraq and connects the Tigris and the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. We sped through the lush jungle, which was a welcome relief from Basra’s searing August heat, only to be told that the ferry service had been canceled. We returned to Basra, where we could see the massive spires of flame, like a Zoroastrian fire temple, shooting up from Iranian oilfields a few kilometers away, across the Euphrates. The cool, high plateaus of Shiraz beckoned, but we had already had our share of harrowing travel experiences, punctuated by brushes with the Iraqi secret police. Reluctantly, we set aside our plans for seeing Persepolis and instead made the fifteen-hour trip across the Syrian Desert to Amman the next day.

  Other travelers’ accounts and archaeological findings can help us to imagine the Persian Achaemenid Empire and enter into its ancient wine culture. Cyrus the Great, who is credited with forging the empire after his defeat of the Medes and the city of Babylon in 539 B.C., hailed from Shiraz. He began as the ruler of a small kingdom in the region. Its capital was Anshan, known today as Tepe Malyan, an archaeological mound nestled in the oak-covered hills northwest of Shiraz. Excavations by the Penn Museum during the 1970s, under William Sumner, peeled back layers of occupation to reach the Banesh period of the late fourth millennium B.C. At approximately the same time that the Susan king’s troops and traders were trudging up the High Road (the protohistoric predecessor of the Silk Road) to Godin Tepe, wine was likely being enjoyed at Tepe Malyan, as implied by grapeseeds recovered in the excavation. Domesticated two-and six-rowed barley, as well as einkorn and emmer wheat, provided the inhabitants with the raw materials to slake their thirst with beer as well as wine.

  On current evidence, the grapevine did not originally grow in the uplands of Shiraz but had to be transplanted there from farther north. The Banesh period grapeseeds might therefore have made their way to the site in the unfiltered lees of an imported wine, or even as imported fresh fruit or raisins. The contents of a refuse pit, dated about five hundred years later (the Kaftari period of the mid-third millennium B.C.), however, suggest that the domesticated grapevine was already established, just in time to meet the needs of the growing population of lowland Mesopotamia. The pit was packed full of carbonized and uncarbonized grape pips, along with pieces of grapevine wood. Masses of grapeseeds are unusual in excavations; they generally represent the residue of crushed pomace, the grape pulp left after pressing the grapes to make wine. The mature wood remains are even more telling, as they point to vines growing locally. Presumably, these vines were close relatives of the original transplants and might someday shed light on the true genetic origins of the renowned Shiraz grape. We can conclude that by at least 2500 B.C. and probably much earlier, vineyards had been laid out around the capital and had begun to produce grapes and wine.

  Now that foreign expeditions have been allowed back into Iran, new evidence for the transplantation of the domesticated Eurasian grapevine south through the Zagros Mountains to Shiraz has begun to emerge. Unfortunately excavation has not been resumed at Tepe Malyan. Not far away, in the vicinity of Parsagadae, where Cyrus was buried in a monumental tomb, salvage excavation has been spurred on in the Bolahi Valley, where sites are threatened by the rising waters behind the new Sivand Dam. Archaeologists uncovered and located numerous treading vats for stomping grapes in wine production. Most of the installations date to the later Sassanian period (A.D. 224–651), but further exploration should reveal more about the beginnings of winemaking in the area, still festooned with vineyards, and its peak under the Achaemenids.

  A glimpse into the early history of Shiraz winemaking is provided by its cylinder seals, which record so much of everyday and royal life in the Near East. One of the earliest known portrayals of a “symposium” (in the original sense of a drinking party) appears on a Kaftari seal. It shows male and female notables or gods, wearing flounced or woven caps and other attire, under an arbor thick with grape clusters. They hold up small cups, which surely must be filled with wine. A nearly identical scene is represented two thousand years later, shortly preceding the rise of Cyrus and the Achaemenids, on an Assyrian relief from Assurbanipal’s palace at Nineveh (modern Mosul). While the king reclines on an ornate couch, in what later became the preferred posture of attendees at the classical Greek symposion and Roman convivium, his queen sits demurely before him on a straight-backed throne. As in the Kaftari seal, both figures hold up wine cups under a bountiful grapevine, with a harpist playing in the background.

  This motif of the king raising his wine cup recurs over thousands of years in Near Eastern art. It symbolized the success of a monarch’s reign and continuing thanks to his gods. It also appears on a first-century A.D. Sogdian couch, which shows a well-fed patriarch and his wife, wearing rounded and flat caps respectively, like those on the much earlier Kaftari seal. With cups in hand, they enjoy a repast of cakes, entertained by a full orchestra and somersaulting dancers.

  During the Persian empire, wine-drinking was taken to new heights in the exercise of statecraft. Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century B.C., reported that “it is also their [the Persians’] general practice to deliberate on weighty affairs when they are drunk; and in the morning when they are sober, the decision which they came to the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made; and if it is then approved of, they act on it; if not, they set it aside.” Elsewhere, Herodotus recounts the reverse procedure—deliberate first while sober, then while drunk, to see whether the same decision is reached. Tacitus made the same observation about the bawdy German “barbarians” in the first century A.D. Alcohol, he commented, broke down the inhibitions of the assembled bodies, freeing up usually cautious politicians and producing a bonhomie that led to innovative solutions. Of course, the drinking often got out of hand, hence the need to reconsider the matter with greater clarity of mind when sober.

  The Epic of Kings (Persian Shahnameh), composed by the renowned Persian poet Ferdousi in the tenth century A.D., recalled this long-standing tradition of deciding matters of war and peace. Like Greek symposiasts or modern statesmen, the “King of Kings” and the heroes of legend discussed weighty matters after dinner, while a cupbearer circulated through the assembly, bearing wine.

  We can gain some idea of the quantities of wine drunk by the royal family and their retinue from the Persepolis Fortification Tablets, which were found in a tower of the main platform. Over decades, thousands of texts in the Elamite language recorded that the usual allotment for each member of the royal family was five liters of wine a day. High officials, the royal guard (the Ten
Thousand Immortals), and palace functionaries received progressively smaller amounts, but still enough to keep them happy. Excavations of the army barracks yielded enough large pottery jars, pitchers, and drinking bowls to confirm consumption on a staggering scale.

  For special occasions, the ruler of the world’s largest empire engaged in even more ostentatious drinking of wine. The biblical book of Esther (1:7–10) tells of a week-long feast in Susa where the king, Ahasuerus (probably Xerxes I), serves up “royal wine in abundance” in golden vessels of all kinds. The women indulged in a similar feast, hosted by the queen, Vashti. The merriment continued until the seventh day, when the queen defied the king, and the evil Hamath began to plot his intrigue against Mordechai and the Jews.

  Iranian craftsmen throughout the empire, including metalsmiths, stoneworkers, pottery makers, and glass artisans, were among the most skilled in the Near East. They created fabulous wine vessels to grace the emperor’s table at feasts and celebrations. Stupendous drinking horns, holding three or four liters and meant to be emptied all at once without setting the vessel down, are especially captivating. The terminals are ornately decorated in three dimensions, usually with lions, rams, birds and bulls, but also with more fanciful sphinxes and griffins. Examples carved out of agate, such as one found in a Sogdian tomb near Xi’an in China (the Hejiacun Treasure), take advantage of the variegated color of the stone to accentuate different features of the animal. Tall ewers, beak-spouted jugs, and multisided cups often show dancing women, musicians, hunting scenes, and heroic tales. One beak-spouted jug type was called a bolboleh (derived from the Persian word for a songbird, bolbol) because it sang like a bird when wine flowed through its narrow mouth. Floral and geometric designs were also popular. The octagonal gold and silver cups in the Hejiacun Treasure, which show a different musician in each panel, might have been used by a Sogdian to dance the hutengwu or the huxuanwu for his or her Chinese admirers.

  THE EXOTIC DRUG WORLD OF CENTRAL ASIA

  Farther east in Iran along the Silk Road, skirting north of the great salt desert of the Dasht-i Kevir, we can imagine ourselves following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, and numerous other adventurers and brigands. The road passes Margiana (centered on the Merv oasis); Bactria, backing up to the Hindu Kush Mountains; Samarkand; and the Fergana Valley of Sogdiana. All these regions were incorporated into the Achaemenid empire and then consigned to Seleucus I after Alexander’s death.

  For decades, no archaeological evidence from the period before Cyrus and Alexander was found in Central Asia. This situation changed dramatically in the 1970s, when a charismatic and persistent excavator from the Institute of Archaeology in Moscow, Viktor Sarianidi, began to dig in Margiana, in modern Turkmenistan. Over several decades he opened up large-scale exposures at three sites in the well-watered Murgab river basin, near Merv: Gonur Depe, Togolok 1, and Togolok 21. What he found convinced even diehard skeptics that large settlements, based on irrigation agriculture and boasting monumental architecture, had been built in this seemingly remote locale by at least 2000 B.C. However, Sarianidi’s more provocative theories, including that of a proto-Zoroastrian cult—spurred on by a sacred beverage called haoma—have aroused spirited opposition from other scholars in the field.

  Sarianidi believes that he has uncovered proto-Zoroastrian fire temples at the three sites. Fire temples, sacred to Ahura Mazda, the “One Un-created Creator,” had become an integral part of the religion by the time of Herodotus, who describes its adherents as ascending mounds and lighting fires under the open sky to their god. Because Sarianidi’s temples precede Herodotus’s account, as well as other clear archaeological traces of fire temples, by more than 1,500 years, it is reasonable to insist that his theory meet a higher level of proof.

  Sarianidi’s primary evidence for the fire temples can be briefly sketched. At Gonur South, the largest Early Bronze Age settlement yet found in Margiana, he marshaled evidence from an elaborately laid-out building constructed in two phases, with multiple open-air courtyards, walls coated with a brilliantly white plaster in places. Clues to the function of the building came from pits filled with whitish ash in the courtyards, heavily carbonized censers scattered here and there, and rooms that showed signs of intensive burning. White ash was essential for purification rites in later Zoroastrianism. To be sure, the more mundane interpretation that the building was a palace or villa could not be ruled out: well-plastered walls are also the norm in such buildings, the ash pits could be simply that or remnants of cooking ovens, the braziers could have served as light fixtures, and the charred chambers could be the result of accidental fires. But Sarianidi had one more argument up his sleeve. In one of the plastered “white rooms” of the building, he found three large plaster-coated bowl or jar bases, one of which held a residue. Archaeobotanical and scanning electron microscopic analysis of the material by palynologists in Moscow revealed that the residue was permeated with the pollen of two mind-altering plants: ephedra (Ephedra spp.) and hemp or marijuana (Cannabis sativa), together with a large quantity of hemp flowers and seeds, ephedra stem fragments, and other plants (including Artemisia spp., a well-known additive in fermented beverages of China and southern Europe). Both ephedra and marijuana have been proposed as constituents in the Zoroastrian haoma.

  Togolok 1 and Togolok 21, which are close to Gonur South and dated several centuries later, had similarly plastered multiroom complexes around central courtyards. At Togolok 21, Sarianidi again identified circular structures as altars, covered with layers of ash and charcoal, and heavily burned chambers, and theorized that they belonged to fire temples. His Moscow palynologists analyzed the residues inside several very large jars that stood on a mudbrick platform inside a plastered chamber of the Togolok 21 complex. They recovered more ephedra pollen, leaves, and stems up to one centimeter in length, as well as the pollen of another mind-altering plant: poppy (Papaver somniferum), from which opium is derived. A bone tube, which had been carved with large eyes, was found on the floor of this white room; it also contained poppy pollen. The tube, which might have been used to suck up haoma or to snort a hallucinogen, reminds one of the Neolithic preoccupation with eyes in the Near East, such as those of the plaster-molded skulls found at Jericho and ‘Ain Ghazal.

  Sarianidi hypothesizes that the sacred beverage was prepared in the white rooms by macerating the plants in the large bowls, grating them, and then straining the juices through funnels filled with wool into the large jars or other, smaller jars mounted on pottery stands. The beverage was fermented in the jars and then poured as libations and served to ritual participants in the public courtyards. He further proposes that a cylinder seal from the Togolok 1 sanctuary illustrates the prehistoric ritual. Two monkey-headed humans, perhaps wearing masks, hold a pole that a dancer leaps over, while a musician beats out an accompaniment on a large drum. Dancing under the influence of mind-altering substances, as we have seen, was widely practiced in neighboring Sogdiana, and masked ceremonies in which humans assumed animal roles were common in shamanistic cults throughout Asia beginning in the Palaeolithic period.

  Sarianidi’s interpretation of the residues inside the bowls and jars and the decorated tube does not stand or fall with his theories of fire temples and proto-Zoroastrianism. Unless we totally dismiss the Moscow palynologists’ findings, we should take the presence of the ephedra and marijuana, including stems, leaves and seeds, at face value. (However, a reanalysis of the Gonur South sample by Dutch archaeobotanists found evidence only for millet.) Pollen might have been blown into narrow-mouthed pottery vessels from surrounding areas, but the larger-sized plant fragments are unlikely to have been blown or washed in. They are best explained as additives to some kind of beverage contained in the vessels. Moreover, because the same mind-altering additives are found in various combinations in many vessels spanning more than half a millennium at three major sites in the Murgab River valley, presumably this beverage was very important to people in the region.

  I
n light of these considerations, Sarianidi’s theory that the vessel and tube residues are related to the later Zoroastrian haoma is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem. A Central Asian mixed beverage or grog could well have been developed over millennia of human occupation in the well-watered oases. Such a potent beverage would likely have been endowed with religious overtones and incorporated into rituals. This traditional drink could then have been assimilated by Zoroastrianism, which became the state religion under the Achaemenid kings. Even earlier, about the same time that the monumental buildings near the Merv oasis were being constructed, it could have been carried to India by Indo-European invaders.

  Haoma (linguistically equated with soma in the Indic Rig Veda) is mentioned in the Iranian Avesta, the collection of Zoroastrian sacred texts, which were first written down in the sixth century B.C. and received their final redaction in the fourth century A.D. The formulation of haoma has challenged many interpreters, who have variously argued that it was made from the urine of a white bull calf, ginseng, Syrian rue (Peganum harmala), or the fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria), still a favorite hallucinogen among Siberian shamans (chapter 7). Most recently, ergot (Claviceps spp.), a fungus that grows on rye and other cereals, has been proposed as the principal ingredient. The alkaloid in this fungus, ergotamine, is closely related to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). In various episodes documented since the Middle Ages when ergot has been accidentally ingested on bread made from infected cereal, people have been known to hallucinate, experience burning sensations, and run madly through the streets as they succumbed to what was known as Saint Anthony’s fire.