Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  The names of the best-known modern Beqaa wineries, including Château Ksara, Château Musar, and Château Kefraya, reflect the debt that the revival of the industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owes to the French, after more than one thousand years of neglect under Islamic regimes. Bordeaux and Rhône varieties account for most of the six million liters of wine produced annually today. Some Lebanese vintners assert that the original Bybline vine, now called Merweh, is related to the French Semillon, and that the Obedieh vine was carried by the Crusaders back to Europe, where it became known as Chardonnay. Recent DNA analyses, showing that Chardonnay is the result of a cross of native French Pinot with Eastern European Gouais Blanc, disprove the latter claim, but it is still possible that a Lebanese varietal contributed to the genetic heritage of Gouais Blanc or Semillon. If we are ever to recover the true Bybline grape and its relatives, the approximately forty purportedly indigenous cultivars growing in modern Lebanon will need to be genetically fingerprinted.

  I have a strong inclination to initiate this research myself. One of my first experiences in archaeology in 1974, before the devastating fifteen-year civil war broke out in Lebanon, was as a pottery specialist for the Penn Museum’s last season of excavation at Sarepta (modern Sarafand). Located midway between Tyre and Sidon, Sarepta is one of the few excavated Phoenician city-states in the homeland. As we dug down through the succession of occupations and destructions, the modern version of the ancient struggle between nations and peoples was taking place overhead. Nearly every day, Israeli Phantom jets strafed the Palestinian camp only eight kilometers away, flying in low over the mountains, dropping their bombs, and then fading into the azure blue of the Mediterranean sky and sea. Sometimes rival planes tangled in dogfights, and we saw the loser disappear in a puff of smoke. A boat stood ready for our escape to Cyprus, but luckily we never had to use it.

  Our team stayed in the relatively posh facilities of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company. Each night at dinner we followed a strict “wine ceremony” devised by the expedition director, James Pritchard. He would first seat himself at the head of the table with an unmarried woman archaeologist to either side. The remaining assembled group of married men (wives were not allowed by the director, because of a bad experience on a previous excavation) and Jesuit priests then arrayed themselves according to status down the table. As a lowly graduate student, I sat at the far end. We were not allowed to drink until the mudir (Arabic for “director”) had raised his glass to his lips. He had bought up cases of Château Ksara wines, so all could partake of the delicious elixir. After all, excavation is hot, dusty work, and archaeologists need liquid refreshment at the end of the day. (Scotch after dinner was another ritual of Middle Eastern archaeology, not dictated by the mudir; we sipped and played bridge overlooking the Mediterranean.)

  My interest in the Phoenicians was especially aroused when amphora fragments, covered with an intense purplish coloration on their interiors, started turning up in the thirteenth-century B.C. levels of the excavation. At another site, such sherds might be taken for granted, the staining perhaps attributed to a manganese ore or a strange fungus. But when you find them at a Phoenician site in Lebanon, the homeland of this people, thoughts turn to the celebrated Tyrian purple dye, which was worth more than its weight in gold and the prerogative of priests and kings. Even the names Canaan and Phoenicia likely derive from roots meaning “red” or “purple,” underlining the importance of dyed textiles in these societies. According to Greek legend, repeated by later writers, the dye was discovered by the Tyrian high god and king Melqart, when he and the nymph Tyros went for a stroll on the beach with their dog. The dog ran ahead and bit into one of the mollusk shells that must once have littered the shore. It came back with its muzzle dripping with a purple substance. The discovery was not lost on Melqart, who immediately dyed a gown with the dye and presented it to his consort.

  The first foray of our laboratory into biomolecular archaeology was to put the Melqart legend to a scientific test. A battery of analyses conclusively showed that the purple color inside the Sarepta amphoras was true molluscan purple, or dibromoindigo. This compound is produced in nature only by three Mediterranean species of Murex and Thais, along with related mollusks around the world. When a purple-dye factory, with piles of shells, special processing vats, and heating facilities, was found in the same area at Sarepta where the purple-stained sherds were excavated, we had an open-and-shut case for the earliest evidence of royal purple production; and, just as the legend claimed, it was from Phoenicia. Other piles of the same mollusks have been found elsewhere in the Mediterranean, but so far earlier evidence for a dye factory (as opposed to discarding the shells after eating the animals or stockpiling them for pottery or plaster manufacture) has not emerged.

  What remains to be done on the biomolecular archaeological front in Lebanon is to analyze more vessels for wine, as much a luxury good as the purple dye. We should cast our nets as widely as possible, including material from Sarepta and other coastal and inland sites (for instance, from the new excavations at Sidon and from Kamid el-Loz, a rich Bronze and Iron Age city-state in the southern Beqaa Valley), to determine the starting date and dimensions of the wine industry.

  THE CANAANITE AND PHOENICIAN WINE CULTURE

  As with so much else Phoenician and Canaanite, our knowledge of this wine culture is severely limited by the scarcity of archaeological and textual evidence. Yet some understanding of its allure is needed to explain how this hardy maritime people propelled viticulture across the Mediterranean during the second and first millennia B.C. In its wake, native fermented beverages, including grogs and beers, were marginalized, modified, and displaced.

  The extensive literary corpus of Ugarit is our most reliable source for second-millennium B.C. Canaanite society, and it portrays a people, with its gods and revered ancestors, focused on grape wine. Here and there, honey is mentioned; beer is noticeably absent. This might be expected in a region where grapes did well, gave a better return on investment, and used up less arable land than cereal production. Even today, wild Eurasian grapevines survive along the coast of Lebanon, at the southernmost extent of their distribution. More important than these considerations, however, wine was probably preferred simply because it contains twice as much alcohol as beer.

  We read in the Baal Cycle, a group of tales about the trials and exploits of the storm god and other Canaanite gods, of Baal’s grand feast after he defeats the sea god, Yamm. He celebrates by taking a large goblet in both hands—“a large vessel great to behold, a container for mighty men”—which is filled by a “thousand pitchers . . . [of] wine.” He “mixes a myriad in his mixture,” which may be a reference to various tree resins or herbal additives. Like the Sogdian hutengwu dancer who is spurred on by drink (see chapter 4), Baal then breaks out in song, accompanying himself on cymbals. The story continues with the construction of Baal’s palace, made from the choicest cedar of Lebanon and adorned with silver and gold. In celebration, Baal brings out jars of wine for the gods, who sit on their chairs and enjoy goblets and gold cups filled with the elixir. Sometimes the divine party goes to extremes, as best illustrated by El, the supreme god, who gets so drunk that he staggers home and collapses in his own excrement.

  The available archaeological depictions of the gods and kings are not nearly as graphic as these literary descriptions. One of the best known stelae from thirteenth-century B.C. Ugarit shows El in the standard regal pose, sitting on a chair and holding a wine cup in salutation. Three centuries later, even though the Near East had passed through a turbulent period of foreign invasion and economic collapse, the early tenth-century B.C. ruler of Byblos, Ahiram or Hiram I, appears in a similar pose on his sarcophagus. He sits upright on his cherub-sided throne, one hand grasping a cup and the other a lotus flower (a common wine additive in ancient Egypt), with a feast laid before him. Solomon commissioned this same Hiram to build the first temple in Jerusalem, made of cedar of Lebanon like Baal’s palace, glis
tening in gold and decorated with statues of cherubim and purple hangings.

  The ancestors—likely the best understanding of the Rapi’uma in the Ugaritic texts—had been an essential part of Levantine religion since the Neolithic period (see chapter 3). The Canaanites and Phoenicians maintained this tradition by their institution of the marzeah. At regular intervals, the dead were honored at elaborate funeral banquets. The most highly placed and privileged members of the community, men and women alike, would gather in a bet marzeah (Semitic “house of the marzeah”). There, a feast, liberally accompanied with wine, would be overseen by a rb marzeah (“prince of the marzeah”), a forerunner of the Greek symposiarch, who served as host and toastmaster. All celebrants were expected to provide food and wine from their own estates. As in Burgundy today, the Ugaritic countryside was a patchwork of family-owned vineyards; according to a fifteenth-century B.C. tablet, the vineyards of one small village in the realm were carved up among eighty-one owners.

  Proper homage to one’s ancestors meant drinking and eating in excess, according to the divine standard set by Baal, El, and other gods. We can imagine that music, dance, and the recital of Canaanite myths accompanied the merriment, along with bouts of sexual intercourse to match any Roman bacchanal. It can be inferred from the prophetic warnings and abjurations in the Bible that a marzeah in Phoenician Byblos, Sidon, or Tyre was just as dissolute as any Canaanite ceremonial feast.

  THE WINE CULTURE TAKES TO THE SEA

  The Byblos ships of the Canaanite and Phoenician seafarers carried much more than huge shipments of wine, purple textiles, and other exotic goods. They also conveyed a new way of life, based on wine, which gradually permeated the societies, religions, and economies of those they came in touch with. We can see much the same thing happening today in New World locales. Whether in Australia, South Africa, Argentina, or frigid North Dakota (the last state in the United States to acquire a winery), a sea change in wine production has occurred over the past forty years. When I was growing up in Ithaca, New York, cloying Niagara or Manischewitz wine was the norm, served only on special occasions. Now, for many, a meal is not complete without wine or another fermented beverage, and a vast media enterprise has grown up around the art of matching food and wine.

  The most dramatic example in antiquity of a wine culture “captivating” another people came in Egypt. We have seen how Scorpion I began importing large quantities of this previously unknown beverage into the country around 3150 B.C., and how he felt compelled to store wines for eternity (the ultimate in cellaring and aging). A century and a half later, at the beginning of Dynasty 1, the pharaohs of a united Egypt went further. Rather than rely on the foreign suppliers to import enough fine wine, and perhaps in order to tailor the wines to their tastes, they established the first royal wine industry in the Nile delta.

  Soon, extensive tracts of the delta were planted with the domesticated grapevine, a feat that could have been accomplished only by employing specialists from the northern or southern Levant. It served as a kind of dress rehearsal for building the pyramids, when the pharaohs called on their own people to accomplish this grand enterprise. For the wine industry to succeed, foreign traders had to supply the grapevines, which would have been brought in most conveniently by ship. Grapevines embedded in soil have been noted among the dunnage used to cushion the wine amphoras of later shipwrecks (see below); the hull of the Uluburun merchantman was also packed with branches and leaves that have yet to be identified. Embedding the vine roots, branches, or buds in soil was essential to keep them moist and alive. Once the grapevines reached the delta, other Canaanite experts stepped in. Farmers and horticulturalists had to lay out the vineyards, train the vines on trellises, and dig irrigation canals. Architects and craftsmen were needed to construct winemaking facilities, especially winepresses, and to make specialty vessels for processing and storing the wine. Above all, vintners were required to oversee the operations. It can take up to seven years before grapevines begin to produce fruit. Vines had to be tended and fermentation and aging of the wines carefully managed. Thousands of years later, the imprint of the Canaanites in setting up this industry was still evident in the Semitic names of many ancient vintners (for example, those recorded on the inscriptions of New Kingdom wine amphoras).

  Local inhabitants must have provided most of the manual labor at first and later shared in the day-to-day activities of winegrowing. Slowly but surely, they too were being absorbed into the Canaanite wine culture. Except for drinking, treading the grapes at harvest is probably the most visceral, sensual experience in viticulture. The later colorful depictions of winemaking in Egyptian tombs show lively bands of stompers, who hold tightly to grapevines to keep from slipping into the pomace as they sing to the snake goddess (see plate 6). In 2003, I had the opportunity to appreciate this way of making wine on a trip to the upper Douro River in Portugal, where fine port is produced. After a memorable dinner at Dirk van der Niepoort’s Quinta do Passadouro—enhanced by German Rieslings, a Burgundy Richebourg, and a 1955 Passadouro vintage port—we put on swimming trunks, climbed into the lagar or winepress, and began sloshing through the knee-high mass of skins and juice. I am told that the best port is made by this labor-intensive method: the human foot, it seems, is ideally configured to extract the juice without breaking the seeds that introduce bitter tannins, which instead float to the surface.

  Especially striking about the new Egyptian industry was its level of sophistication from the outset. Of course, the Canaanite specialists had many millennia of tradition behind them when they brought grapevines to the Nile delta. Even the Egyptian hieroglyph meaning grape, vineyard, or wine is a telling piece of evidence for viticultural expertise. As the earliest written character referring to the domesticated grapevine and wine from anywhere in the world, the hieroglyph graphically depicts a well-trained vine growing up onto a trellis of vertical poles, forked at their upper ends to hold the vine. The plant is rooted in a container, probably for ease of watering. One could say that the best practices of modern vineyard management, including a drip system, were on display at the inception of the ancient Egyptian industry.

  The Canaanite winemakers also had to think outside the box. Levantine vineyards, generally sited in hilly terrain with good drainage during the rainy winter, had a terroir much different from the flat, alluvial Nile delta. With the blistering summer heat and much lower precipitation, Egyptian crops, especially water-sensitive grapes, had to be irrigated. A pergola system minimized direct exposure of the grapes to intense sunlight. Fortunately, the rich alluvium of the delta, washed down from the upper Nile during the annual inundation, was well drained and salt-free. The conglomerate of sands, clays, and diverse minerals was a calcareous soil, not so different from parts of Bordeaux.

  The Levantine winemakers succeeded beyond the wildest expectations in transferring their wine culture to Egypt. Until the Islamic invasions of the seventh century A.D., the delta domains supplied the temples of Egypt and its kings with millions of amphoras of wine. Wine, which was specifically identified in hieroglyphs by its place of origin in the delta—the ancient equivalent of today’s vineyard-specific wine labels—had achieved the status of an essential funerary offering by Dynasty 6, around 2200 B.C. In time, nearly every major religious festival, including the all-important heb-sed to guarantee the continued welfare of the pharaoh and the fruitfulness of the land, called for wine offerings and prolific drinking, often lasting for weeks.

  Despite the significant inroads of wine into Egyptian society, however, it never supplanted beer, the drink of the masses. Beer always preceded wine in the offering lists and was the focal point of many Egyptian festivals and myths, such as the Drunkenness of Hathor. Large public projects, exemplified by the pyramids, depended on the workers’ getting their daily provision of beer and bread. Like wine, beer was likely introduced from the Near East. Barley and wheat seeds grew in profusion all along the Nile and in the oases. Millet, introduced from central Africa, was also grown and m
ade into beer (see chapter 8).

  One advantage of a beverage fermented from cereals was that, unlike fruits, the grain could be stored long-term for conversion to beer as needed. This circumstance, as well as the need to feed a burgeoning population, may explain why other native Egyptian beverages—in particular, date wine and honey mead—barely receive a passing mention in the literary sources and are as yet unattested in the archaeological record.

  ESTABLISHING A BEACHHEAD ON CRETE

  With the Egyptian winemaking success behind them, the Canaanites on their Byblos ships ventured farther and farther out into the Mediterranean. They applied a similar strategy wherever they went: import wine and other luxury goods, befriend the rulers by presenting them with specialty wine sets, and then wait until they were asked to help in establishing native industries. Besides offering expertise in winemaking, the Canaanites and later the Phoenicians could also instruct their trading partners in the production of purple dye (the requisite mollusks were found throughout the Mediterranean), shipbuilding (assuming that wood was available), and other crafts (especially metalworking and pottery-making). Once they had established a foothold in the foreign land, other, less tangible expressions of their wine culture—perhaps an artistic style or a mythological motif—might be adopted or merged with indigenous customs.

  According to our biomolecular archaeological evidence, one of the first stops in the island-hopping jaunts of the Canaanites across the Mediterranean was Crete. Nearly one thousand kilometers from the port city-states of Lebanon, this large island at the entry to the Aegean Sea lies on the threshold of the Greek world. Although modern scholars are understandably skeptical about the often contradictory and fantastic tales of classical writers, a recurring element running through many accounts has Dionysos, the Greek manifestation of the Near Eastern wine god (known to the Romans as Bacchus), voyaging from Phoenicia to Crete as a daring seafarer. One beautifully painted drinking cup (kylix), made by the master potter Exekias in the sixth century B.C., shows the god single-handedly manning a small sailboat, its mast festooned with a luxuriant grapevine. Apparently when attacked by pirates, Dionysos fought back by miraculously growing the vine and dousing his attackers with wine; they were transformed into frolicking dolphins, who are seen circling around the boat. Could this tale have been inspired by an actual voyage that carried the domesticated grapevine to Crete aboard a Byblos ship?