Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  Until the excavations in Turkmenistan, there was no way to decide between the different possibilities. Descriptions in literary sources lacked enough detail to identify the ingredients of the drink. A mushroom might be ruled out by the Avesta’s stating that the relevant plant was green, tall, and aromatic, but that still left a lot of room for doubt.

  In the Yasna, the primary Avesta liturgical text, haoma is prepared by the priest pounding the plant in a stone mortar, sieving it through bull’s hair, dissolving it in water, and adding other, unknown ingredients. When the drink reached India, it was further adapted to use the plants of tropical and temperate regions of the subcontinent.

  The most detailed description of how haoma entered into Zoroastrian religious thought is found in a very late text, the Book of Arda Wiraz, which dates to the ninth century A.D., with some elements possibly belonging to the early part of the millennium. Following the humiliating defeat of the nation by Alexander, Arda Wiraz, the hero of the tale, is commissioned by a grand council of priests and believers to make a journey to heaven to find out whether they are performing the correct rituals. Pious Arda Wiraz consumes three golden cups of a wine laced with an unidentified hallucinogen and is transported to another world. He meets a beautiful woman, crosses a bridge into heaven, and is ushered into the presence of the supreme god, Ahura Mazda. After seeing the souls of the blessed at peace, Arda Wiraz glimpses what awaits those who do not follow the central tenets of the faith: good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. Like Dante descending into Purgatory and the circles of Hell, Arda Wiraz crosses over the river of tears (the equivalent of the Greek River Styx) and sees the sinners in all their agony and despair, suffering eternal punishments to match their transgressions in life. He awakens from his dream after seven days with the assurance from Ahura Mazda that the Zoroastrian faith is the only true faith.

  The haoma in this tale, strikingly, is administered in wine. By the time this work appeared, however, the influence of both Islam and Buddhism had engendered severe prohibitionist movements in these regions; so by retaining this detail, the Book of Arda Wiraz could be harking back to a much earlier tradition. From a chemical standpoint, the advantage of using an alcoholic beverage is that it dissolves the plant alkaloids.

  When I first considered wine as the most likely vehicle for haoma, it was under the assumption that the Margiana sites were within the sphere of the wine culture that is so well attested in the Fergana Valley, even deeper in Central Asia. Then I received word from Gabriele Rossi-Osmida, of the Ligabue Study and Research Center in Venice, that three grape pips had been recovered at Gonur South. New excavations by Rossi-Osmida in the Adji Kui oasis, to the north of Merv, have even revealed a third- to second-millennium B.C. series of basins containing more grapeseeds, which might have served as a winemaking facility. As I write this in early 2008, Rossi-Osmida is in the field with a cadre of archaeobotanical specialists in hopes of firming up the picture both here and at Sarianidi’s contemporaneous sites.

  The archaeological and botanical evidence from the Turkmenistan excavations provides new clues for identifying haoma, at least in prehistoric Central Asia. If we accept Sarianidi’s premise that a special beverage was being prepared in the white rooms and concur with the reading that wine and a hallucinogen were mixed together in the Arda Wiraz story, then the evidence of ephedra, hemp, and poppy pollen in the pottery vessels and tubes begins to make sense. To be sure, hemp and poppy could have been used for other purposes, such as textile production and ornamentation, and for culinary and fuel needs (e.g., cooking with poppyseed oil). Yet these two plants, as well as ephedra, have been well known since antiquity as medicinal and narcotic agents in Central Asia and China.

  With more archaeological and chemical investigation, we should eventually be able to re-create the ancient haoma/soma or Central Asian grog, which was probably much stronger than modern versions. If Sarianidi’s hypothesis holds up, we might envision a kind of brave new world in the Margiana oases, similar to Aldous Huxley’s utopia in Brave New World, whose inhabitants regularly consume Soma (with “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects”). The potency of such a mixed drink can be appreciated by examining the psychoactive effects of each additive in turn.

  Ephedra’s main active alkaloid, ephedrine, a chemical analogue of noradrenalin, stimulates the sympathetic nervous system and induces a mild euphoria. In small amounts, it produces an amphetamine-like high; in larger amounts, it can induce hallucinations and even cardiac arrest. Modern recreational users of herbal ecstasy, made from ephedra, attest to its psychoactive potency. Marijuana contains tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is related to anandamide, an endogenous neurotransmitter; it is also euphoric and sometimes stimulates the imagination. The milky latex of poppyseed capsules, which is called opium when congealed, provides a highly concentrated amalgam of some forty powerful mind-altering alkaloids, including codeine, morphine, papaverine, and narcotine. The leaves, which can be smoked, have lesser amounts of these substances.

  Combining these plant alkaloids in an alcoholic beverage, which has its own effect on the human nervous system, greatly increases the possibilities for hallucinatory experiences, perhaps culminating in narcosis.

  HORSE NOMADS OF THE NORTH

  Where did the inhabitants of Gonur South, Togolok, and Adji Kui come from, and how might their predilection for a hallucinatory beverage have affected peoples farther east along the prehistoric Silk Road?

  There is quite possibly a very early precedent for the use of ephedra as a hallucinatory agent in the Middle East. A group of intriguing Neanderthal burials, dating back to 40,000–80,000 B.P., were excavated by Ralph Solecki at Shanidar Cave in the northern Zagros Mountains, only about seventy-five kilometers west of Hajji Firuz (see chapter 3). Solecki astounded the archaeological community when he announced that one of the skeletons (Shanidar I, nicknamed Nandy), a forty- to fifty-year-old male who was blind in one eye and had physical disabilities, showed signs of having been empathetically cared for; otherwise, how could this handicapped individual have survived to a relatively advanced age?

  Another skeleton, of a thirty- to forty-five-year-old male (Shanidar IV), known as the “flower burial,” was adorned with a host of plants with known medicinal value. Besides ephedra, the pollen of yarrow (Achillea spp.), grape hyacinth (Muscari), hollyhock (Althea), ragwort or groundsel (Senecio), and Saint Barnaby’s thistle (Centaurea) were found near the body. Yarrow immediately struck me as highly suggestive of a ritual involving psychoactive plants. It was an ingredient in gruit, a bittering agent in medieval beer making (which also included bog myrtle, wild rosemary, and a variety of other herbs), which was eventually banned in northern Europe—partly because of its aphrodisiac effects—and replaced by hops. Indeed, all of the plants found in the flower burial have known medicinal value as diuretics, stimulants, astringents, or anti-inflammatory agents. It seemed possible that the individual had received some sort of shamanistic send-off into the afterlife or might even have been the community’s shaman or healer.

  Some scholars disagreed. They argued that the pollen could have been blown into the cave or deposited there by an animal. It seems unlikely, however, that a gust of wind could have propelled clumps of mixed pollen through the entrance of the cave, much less whole flowers, whose presence is indicated by intact clusters in the shape of anthers. A scale from a butterfly wing showed that this insect had been accidentally incorporated into the array of flowers and herbs. If an animal, such as one of the rodents that were burrowing around elsewhere in the cave, were responsible for bringing together this odd assortment of materials, then it must have had a keen instinct in selecting only medicinal plants.

  A colleague of mine at Penn, Victor Mair, also stirred the scholarly world when he “uncovered” extremely well-preserved mummies in an all-butforgotten gallery of the museum at Ürümchi, a town in the mountains north of the Tarim Basin. They dated to about 1000 B.C., and thus were contemporary with the
later Togolok palaces or temples. The mummies had been excavated from tombs at Cherchen, on the southeastern side of the Tarim Basin and one of the important way stations along the popular southern route of the Silk Road, bypassing the desert. Males and females wore brightly colored plain and plaited woolen clothes, and rounded and peaked caps of felt and yarn, like those depicted on the Kaftari seal and the Sogdian couch. One man was buried with ten different caps. Such caps became the trademark of the Phrygians, an eastern European people who settled in central Anatolia in the early first millennium B.C., where they enjoyed their own brand of grog (see chapter 5).

  Victor was astonished to discover that the facial features of the Ürümchi mummies were vastly different from those of any present-day people of Mongolian origin. The full beards on the men, the high aquiline noses, and tall stature were distinctively Caucasian features. Victor went on to enlist many specialists—geneticists, linguists, and archaeologists—in the task of discovering who these people were and where they originated.

  In time, other mummies, dating back to about 2000 B.C., when Gonur South was established, were brought to light and studied. They revealed more fascinating details. Nearly every mummy from the broader Loulan area, where two of the Silk Road routes met on the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, had a bundle of ephedra twigs tied into the edges of the shroud. In life, this small stock of stimulant might have kept a person alert in the demanding desert environment, as coca, khat, tobacco, and coffee punctuate everyday life elsewhere. In death, perhaps it aided the journey into the afterlife.

  Victor also pointed out that a series of pottery figurines, which were excavated at key sites extending from Turkmenistan to the Yellow River basin of China, closely resembled the mummies, with many of the same Caucasoid features. They wore high pointed caps and feathered headdresses. Some of the examples dated as far back as 4000 B.C.

  An early influx of Indo-European loan words into Chinese gave additional clues to who these people were and where they came from. Victor claimed that the Old Chinese word *myag (the asterisk indicates a hypothetical reconstructed form) derived from the Persian word maguš, denoting a Zoroastrian priest. It also gives us our English words magic and magician, a figure who is often depicted wearing a high conical hat similar to those of the Central Asian mummies and figurines. A class of Zoroastrian priests in Shiraz were known as magi, and three of their number might be those referred to in the New Testament as journeying from the east to see the infant Jesus in the stable in Bethlehem, according to biblical tradition.

  Other words in Chinese also derive from Persian roots, including the terms for chariot and mead, while silk was adopted from Chinese in the reverse direction. Even the name for the strategic entrepôt of Dunhuang contains the Persian element for fire and supports the idea that languages, technologies, and fermented beverages moved both ways across Central Asia. The capstone to this argument was that a now-extinct branch of the Indo-European language family, Tokharian, once prevailed at sites along the northern Silk Road around the Tarim Basin, extending up into the Mongolian and Siberian steppes.

  Another line of early evidence for Indo-European penetration into Central Asia is the proof of domestication of the horse, as attested by horse sacrifices in which the animal was buried with its owner. The earliest ones, dating to 4500–3500 B.C., are found to the west in central Ukraine, but their frequency increases in later periods. Horse sacrifices were practiced to the east in Kazakhstan by at least 2000 B.C., at the same time that other Indo-European groups were moving into Iran and south to India. Spoked-wheel carts, which were much easier for horses to pull than solid wood ones, also appear in Central Asia at this time.

  The domestication of the horse gave a huge advantage to peoples living on the grasslands, where agriculture was difficult. On horseback, they could herd sheep and cattle much more effectively. They could live off the secondary products of their animals—milk products, wool, and hair—and carry their possessions on carts drawn by horses or cattle.

  The raw materials for a good fermented beverage—fruit, cereal, and honey—were hard to come by on the grasslands. As ever, humans improvised by making a drink (Turkish kιmιz; Kazakh koumiss) from mare’s milk, which has a higher sugar (lactose) content than goat’s or cow’s milk and consequently yields a higher alcohol content (up to 2.5 percent). In fact, they probably would not have drunk the milk unfermented, because many Central and East Asian peoples lack the enzymes needed to digest lactose.

  A high mortality rate for young foals during the second and first millennium B.C., based on zooarchaeological studies, suggests that the nomadic herdsmen were concerned about producing enough koumiss for their needs. Lactation begins when an animal gives birth, and the offspring is then separated from the mother so that humans can collect most of the milk. In Central Asia today, the milking season traditionally runs between May and October, and a typical mare can produce 1,200 liters of milk. When the cold winter arrived, ancient peoples, struggling in the harsh conditions, might well have decided to slaughter the foals, especially by the age of two and a half, when they had put on most of their adult weight, rather than try to keep them alive and use up valuable resources.

  A rare discovery of burial mounds frozen into the permafrost layer of the high Altai Mountains at Pazyryk, about eight hundred kilometers north of Cherchen, provides insight into the life of the horse nomads of the northern tundra. A Russian archaeologist, Sergei Rudenko, was called in to excavate burial mounds (kurgans in Russian) of fifth-century B.C. Pazyryk nomads, which had been partly looted in antiquity. Like the slightly earlier tumuli at Gordion in central Turkey (see chapter 5), the burial chambers of the five Pazyryk tumuli were made of carefully faced and assembled logs and then covered over with artificial mounds of earth. With hot water, Rudenko freed up and excavated an amazing group of burial goods that had been preserved in the ice. There were intricately carved wooden tables and drinking vessels, multicolored woolen and felted tapestries and rugs, gold and silver ornaments adorning headdresses and belts, a harp and drums, leather pouches and cut-outs of a raptor and deer, a complete chariot with spoked wheels, and accompanying horse burials. Embroidered silk and a mirror came from China. Some of the mummified dead were buried in wooden coffins, like the royal personage interred in the Midas tumulus at Gordion, and some bore tattoos of fantastic griffins, winged leopards, and raptors.

  Figure 14. Nomads of the Siberian steppes were buried with their hallucinogenic smoking and drinking appurtenances under mounds (kurgans) at Pazyryk (Russia), ca. 400 B.C. (a, above) As in life, so also in death, an individual crawled into his private felt-covered pup tent, supported by a frame of six rods, stoked up a high-footed cauldron or long-handled censer with marijuana (hemp) seeds, and inhaled the fumes in the sauna-like atmosphere. (b and c, right) One’s thirst could later be quenched using a horn-handled cup to draw a drink from a large jar, here decorated with affixed leather roosters. From S. I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M. W. Thompson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). Photographs courtesy Sergei I. Rudenko and Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

  Rudenko reported another finding in all the burial chambers, which links the steppe nomads with their more sedentary neighbors in the oases of Turkmenistan and at Cherchen. A group of six rods was found in each tomb—two groups for a double burial—which had originally been fitted together to form a teepeelike frame covered with leather or felt. A high-footed cauldron, filled with pebbles and carbonized hemp seeds, sat in the middle of the tent. Birch bark was wound around the cauldron handles and the rods to disperse the heat.

  What was the purpose of the tents and the hemp-filled cauldrons? The answer is provided by Herodotus in his History (4.75.1–2). He describes a peculiar custom among a steppe people, the Scythians, who lived farther to the west. Rather than bathe, they climbed under a tent made of felt, threw hemp onto hot stones, and immersed themselves in the intoxicating fumes until they “howled lik
e wolves” in a hallucinogenic version of a Scandinavian sauna.

  Presumably some liquid refreshment was needed after this sweltering indulgence. Tall, narrow-mouthed jars stood in each tomb, but whether they held koumiss, wine, water, or a milky sort of vodka (distillation was likely unknown), as Rudenko conjectured, is uncertain. The Scythians in the western part of their territory knew about wine from their contacts with the Greeks and perhaps much earlier through peoples to their south in the Caucasus and Iran. As their domain expanded eastward to include Turkmenistan and the oases of Central Asia, they would also have been in touch with other Indo-Europeans there and in the fertile mountain valleys and oases bordering the Tarim Basin, where the domesticated grape thrived. They even enjoyed the occasional beer, according to classical writers.

  Today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, which encompasses the Tarim Basin and the Tien Shan, has been acclaimed for its table-grape production. It has recently been planted with French varieties, which thrive in the desert climate when properly irrigated. I was treated to a 2002 oak-aged Cabernet Sauvignon made by Suntime Winery in the so-called West Region, one of the rapidly expanding government-owned operations. A French wine merchant, who is now importing bulk Chinese wine into Europe, made the contact, and before long, a bottle arrived by DHL courier on my doorstep from Central Asia. For the Chinese equivalent of a Two-Buck Chuck, however, I was asked to pay customs duties of one hundred dollars. I stood my ground, especially because the wine was only mediocre, and eventually the shipping costs were waived.

  Much earlier settlers of the region, coming from the exuberant wine cultures of the Near East, must have recognized the potential of this area for wine grapes and transplanted the Eurasian grape there. Between the second and fourth centuries A.D. this was certainly the case: many “ghost towns,” surrounded by abandoned vineyards, dot the southern Silk Road. Now largely covered over by drifting sands from the Taklamakan Desert, they stand as a silent reminder of a once-flourishing industry. Winemaking might have been established even earlier, as a nomadic way of life, powered by horses and other livestock, expanded out on to the Pontic and Caspian steppes by 2000 B.C. Rudenko points out that the dead in the Pazyryk tombs probably belonged to the Yuezhi people, the same group who were humiliated by their king’s skull being converted into a wine cup. Even if nomads could not tend vineyards and make wine while on the move, they came in contact with settled communities and could procure wine. They would have had access to some of the ingredients likely used in ancient haoma/soma. At Pazyryk, the preferred beverage thus appears to have combined a marijuana high with an alcoholic buzz.