Uncorking the Past Read online

  In 1989, Fritz Maytag, one of the pioneers of the American microbrewery revolution, and his talented group of brewers at Anchor Steam Brewery in San Francisco took up the challenge of reviving the ancient Sumerian beer. I had the opportunity to taste two versions of the beverage, appropriately named Ninkasi. The first was presented at a tasting with Michael Jackson—the beer and scotch maven, not the performer of dubious reputation—at the Penn Museum. It had an effervescent, champagne-like quality, with a hint of added dates. The second version was unveiled at a special event hosted by Archaeology magazine in New York City. This beverage was distinctly different. Its more toasty, caramelly, and yeasty character was due to well-baked bread, also mentioned in the Ninkasi beer hymn, that was added to the brew kettle. In deference to its ancient origins, Fritz decided not to take Ninkasi into commercial production, and we are still awaiting a skirret version.

  Turning the clock back again to 3500 B.C. and its more primitive brewing techniques, we are still left wondering why the Godin Tepe jug had interior grooves. Their interpretation as some kind of prototype for the proto-Sumerian beer-sign kaş is moot. Because we now know from the chemical evidence that the grooves were filled with beer residues, a practical reason for the grooves springs to mind: they concentrated and collected the bitter beerstone, which would otherwise have spoiled the brew.

  Once the beer was ready, it probably was drunk directly from the large jug, like tapping a beer keg. Instead of a tap fitted into the bunghole, the proto-Sumerians and proto-Elamites had another way of accessing the precious brew: they drank it with long drinking tubes or straws, sucking the beverage from below the surface and avoiding the grain hulls and yeast that floated to the top. That this was the way barley beer should be drunk is shown by illustrations on numerous cylinder seals (decorated tubes whose imprints were rolled onto clay to mark personal property), which span thousands of years of Mesopotamian history (see figure 13). Some of the scenes on these seals show an individual dipping his straw into the brew in privacy; others show a man and woman enjoying sips together. The earliest known instance of this motif is a clay sealing (the impression left on clay by a seal) that a Penn excavation recovered from Tepe Gawra in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, which dated to ca. 3850 B.C., several centuries earlier than our Godin Tepe jug. The sealing shows two very schematically rendered figures on either side of a jar that is two-thirds their height. This motif had been impressed at least twice on the shoulder of a jar, perhaps to mark it as a special drinking vessel. The individuals have been interpreted as either holding poles for stirring or drinking through sharply angled tubes. It is also possible that the figures are holding straight straws away from their mouths in between sips, a pose that is well attested on later cylinder seals.

  On other seals, large wide-mouthed jars, like the Godin jug, are depicted as sprouting multiple straws and must have been intended for larger social gatherings. Because it does not keep or age well, beer lent itself to fairly rapid drinking, within a day or two, in a communal setting. There are also some practical reasons for drinking beer from the vessel in which it is made. When beer is transferred from one container to another, the nutrients and volatile components bound up in the yeast, the spent grain, and the surface of the container can be lost. As we know only too well from the insipid beers of the world’s major breweries, processed beers may sell well, but their taste and aroma profiles are deficient. Moreover, if a vessel is expeditiously emptied and used to make a second batch, yeast that has taken up residence in the pores can be put to work again. Another way to reuse the yeast is to skim off some of the surface detritus, rich in the microorganisms, and set it aside for inoculating a future batch, much as yogurt is still made today throughout the Middle East.

  The communal drinking of beer through straws was not just the prerogative of some ancient inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent and environs. It is a worldwide phenomenon—attested in China and the Pacific, the Americas, and Africa and still widely practiced. The custom is so wide-spread that one suspects that another factor is at work beyond simple utility. Certainly, reeds and stalks are easily come by, and their long, uniform hollowness would have invited blowing and sucking. A solid head of husks and yeast on the surface of a brew keeps out oxygen and preserves the beer longer, so it is worth keeping it intact and using a drinking tube to get at the good stuff below. Even if such practicalities argue for independent invention, one is still left with the question of why drinking through straws and employing the same vessel to both make and consume the beverage are nearly universal practices for cereal beer but generally unattested for fruit wines and mead.

  We cannot leave our discussion of the Godin beer jug without posing one further question: What was the purpose of the hole between the handles, beneath the applied-rope knot? It certainly could not have been used to pour out the liquid. It is, however, the right diameter to accommodate a drinking tube. We might imagine that the shamanistic headman of the Godin clan or the leader of the Sumerian trading party was given pride of place at some communal function. Others dipped their straws in through the large mouth of the jug, but he was assigned a special hole of his own.

  To date, our Godin Tepe beer jug offers the earliest chemical evidence for beer making and consumption from anywhere in the world, at least for a relatively traditional barley beer. A slight variation on this type of beverage arising at about the same time has been documented far away in the western Mediterranean (see chapter 6). Yet there is a long lapse between the time when barley was first taken into domestication during the ninth millennium B.C. and the manufacture of the Godin jug. This gap raises some crucial issues about what was happening in the interim, as humans went from hunting and gathering to a more settled existence.

  WHICH CAME FIRST: BREAD OR BEER?

  A major anthropological debate in the 1950s raised another provocative and related question: Did the discovery of bread making pave the way for beer making, or vice versa? In an article in Scientific American, Robert Braidwood, the doyen of Middle Eastern prehistoric archaeology at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, argued for a direct relationship between humans’ settling down in year-round settlements in the Neolithic period and the domestication of wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum). Amply supplied with the domesticated grain from their fields and with the knowledge of how to make bread, Neolithic humans would have launched a monoculture food source of enormous potential.

  Braidwood’s hypothesis was an outgrowth of his extensive surveying of the so-called Hilly Flanks or foothills of the Zagros Mountains. On the assumption that the current climate and range of plants were in place in the immediate aftermath of the last Ice Age, he saw these fertile hills and valleys, extending up into the Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey, as the literal seedbed for the domestication of barley. A suitable environment, with 250 to 500 millimeters of precipitation per year, would have invited early cultivators to pick out wild plants that held their grains tightly rather than dropping and dispersing them before humans had a chance to gather them up. To release the grains, humans had probably also begun to experiment with threshing and winnowing methods.

  In the Scientific American article, Braidwood took his theory one step further, arguing that a single processed food—barley bread—was the driving force for the “Neolithic Revolution.” Braidwood’s approach offered an alternative explanation for the radical shift from hunting and gathering groups to sedentary farming villages. It was a far cry from previous environmental and social deterministic explanations, which stress overpopulation or competition for scarce resources as the motivating forces.

  Once Braidwood had laid down the gauntlet, Jonathan Sauer of the University of Wisconsin came back with the reply that beer, rather than bread, would have provided the greater impetus for domestication. Braidwood followed up with a landmark conference titled “Did Man Once Live by Beer Alone?” at which different positions were presented but no resolution reached.

  From a pragmatic standpoint,
the question is really a no-brainer. If you had to choose today, which would it be: bread or beer? Neolithic people had all the same neural pathways and sensory organs as we have, so their choice would probably not have been much different. For those who require a more scientific argument, barley beer is, in fact, more nutritious than bread, containing more B vitamins and the essential amino acid lysine. But why skate around the compelling reason for favoring beer? With a 4 to 5 percent alcohol content, beer is a potent mind-altering and medicinal substance when consumed in quantity.

  The real answer to the anthropological question, however, is that neither bread nor beer came first. Beer was probably not the first fermented beverage, simply because it is more difficult to make. As already noted, barley requires a lot of processing, from sowing and winnowing the grain to milling, malting, and fermenting it. The starches in the grain must be broken down into simple sugars and yeast added to start the fermentation. In other words, wine and honey mead would have readily won the ancient fermented-beverage competition.

  EGALITARIAN LIVING AND EASY DRINKING IN THE NEOLITHIC

  My first foray into the world of the Neolithic Middle East and its lineup of fermented beverages came after the seminal 1991 wine conference “The Origins and Ancient History of Wine,” at the Robert Mondavi Winery. I returned from that conference fired up with the prospects of finding even earlier evidence of wine. The Neolithic period, from about 8500 to 4000 B.C., seemed to offer the best prospects for discovering more. In this period, humans took control of their food resources by domesticating a variety of plants and animals, leading to the first permanent, year-round settlements in the Near East. The invention of pottery around 6000 B.C. gave impetus to the process of settling down, as it allowed wine and other foods and beverages to be prepared in special vessels and protected from spoilage by storing in stoppered jars. What can be termed a Neolithic cuisine emerged. A variety of food-processing techniques—fermentation, soaking, heating, spicing—were developed, and Neolithic peoples are credited with first producing beer, bread, and an array of meat and cereal entrées, many of which we continue to enjoy today.

  The invention of pottery also markedly improved our prospects for detecting residues of ancient foods and beverages. Clays are readily formed into processing, serving, drinking, and storage vessels, which would have been ideal for the production and consumption of wine and other fermented beverages. Once fired to a high temperature, the pottery is virtually indestructible: sherds will survive for millennia even if a vessel is shattered. Most important, liquids and their precipitates readily accumulate in the pores of pottery fabrics, where compounds are preserved from environmental contamination by being sequestered in the chemical matrix of the clay.

  The Penn Museum was the ideal place to look for chemical evidence of Neolithic wine, as it has one of the world’s best collections of well-documented excavated artifacts. I simply had to ring up and talk with Neolithic archaeologists on staff, or others who had carried out excavations for the Museum, some of whose archaeological materials had been consigned by the host country to its permanent collections. Mary Voigt, now at the College of William and Mary, was my first contact, and, as it turned out, I did not need to look any further.

  Mary told me about her 1968 excavations of a small Neolithic village, Hajji Firuz Tepe, in the northern Zagros Mountains southwest of Lake Urmia, at an elevation of more than 1,200 meters above sea level. Its Neolithic inhabitants appear to have enjoyed a very comfortable life. Animal and plant resources were abundant. Their well-made mudbrick homes were approximately square in shape, with a large living room (which may have doubled as a bedroom), a kitchen, and two storage rooms. The buildings are nearly identical to those still seen in the area today and could have accommodated an extended family then as now.

  Because the site dated to the Pottery Neolithic, ca. 5400–5000 B.C., my next question to Mary was the obvious one: Had she seen any pottery vessels that might have contained wine (see plate 5b)? Yes, she recalled sherds with a yellowish residue, which were later reconstructed into a complete jar. The residues were confined to the inside lower half of the jar, suggesting that their contents had originally been liquid. Six jars of the same shape, each with a volume of about nine liters, had been set into the floor of a kitchen in one of the Neolithic houses, lined up along one wall. On the other side of the room was a fireplace, and pottery vessels, probably used to prepare and cook foods, were found scattered and broken on the floor. Whatever they originally contained, the six jars were presumably involved in the Neolithic cuisine of the village.

  When Mary first noted the residue on the sherds, she had thought they might be from milk, yogurt, or some other dairy product. The vessel was taken apart and scientific analyses carried out to identify them, but the results were negative, probably owing to the poorly developed state of biomolecular archaeology before around 1990.

  In 1993, we descended into the storage-room “catacombs” of the Penn Museum and reexcavated the sherds from their modern burial. Chemical analysis enabled my laboratory to solve the enigma of what the jar originally contained. Our identification of tartaric acid confirmed that the jar had been filled with wine. After our finding, reported in Nature, became a cause célèbre, I was given access to another, intact jar from the kitchen, on exhibit at the Museum, which had a reddish residue on its inside. Our analysis showed that this, too, came from a resinated wine. Whether this was a red wine, to go with the white (yellowish) wine of the first jar analyzed, can only be determined by identifying the pigment as a red anthocyanin (cyanidin) or a yellowish flavonoid (quercetin), which we have yet to do.

  Like the Godin Tepe jars, these much earlier vessels were superbly designed to preserve the precious liquid inside. Their narrow mouths were fitted with tight clay stoppers, recovered in the vicinity, to keep out oxygen and prevent “wine disease.”

  The chemical analyses of the two Hajji Firuz jars yielded something else of great interest. The presence of characteristic triterpenoid compounds indicated that terebinth tree resin, with known antioxidant and antimicrobial properties, had been added to the grape wine. The terebinth tree (Pistacia atlantica, a member of the pistachio family) is widespread and abundant in the Middle East, occurring even in desert areas. A single tree, which can grow to twelve meters in height and two meters in diameter, can yield up to two kilograms of the resin in late summer or fall, just about the same time that grapes are ready to be picked.

  Tree resins have a long and noble history of use by humans, extending back into Palaeolithic times. They could be used as glues and were perhaps even chewed to give pain relief, as suggested by lumps of birch resin with tooth marks that were found in a Neolithic Swiss lake dwelling. Early humans appear to have recognized that a tree helps to heal itself by oozing resin after its bark has been cut, thus preventing infection. They made the mental leap to apply resins to human wounds. By the same reasoning, drinking a wine laced with a tree resin should help to treat internal maladies. And the same healing properties might be applied to stave off the dreaded “wine disease” by adding tree resins to the wine.

  Resinated wines were greatly appreciated in antiquity, as we have come to see in analyzing wines from all over the Middle East, extending from the Neolithic down to the Byzantine period. Although some wine drinkers today turn up their noses at a resinated wine, now made only in Greece as retsina, the technique is analogous to ageing in oak. The result can actually be quite appealing: the Gaia Estate’s Ritinitis has a mildly citrusy flavor, achieved by adding a very slight touch of Aleppo pine resin to a Greek grape variety. Even the Romans added resins such as pine, cedar, terebinth (known as the “queen of resins”), frankincense, and myrrh to all their wine except extremely fine vintages. According to Pliny the Elder, who devoted a good part of book 14 of his Natural History to resinated wines, myrrh-laced wine was considered the best and most expensive.

  As we have already seen in Neolithic China, the use of tree resins was probably part of the medicin
al and plant lore that became widespread at that time, along with many other advances that have stood the test of time. But wine or any other fermented beverage has its own inherent medical benefits, if drunk in moderation. Like the tree-resin constituents, the alcohol and polyphenolic aromatics derived from the plant pigments have measurable antioxidant effects. Resveratrol, which has been touted of late, is only one of a host of these compounds, which counteract highly reactive species in the body, thereby lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease and protecting humans against cancers and other ailments.

  Resinated fermented beverages in the Neolithic, whether produced in China or the Middle East, appear to have been shared by the whole community in a fairly egalitarian fashion, perhaps with the occasional special concession to an emergent shamanistic class. There are no marked social divisions at the site: the same pottery types, for example, recur from one house to the next.

  If the six jars in the kitchen of one ordinary house are any measure, drinking in the village was not a privilege of only the rich and famous. If all these jars were filled, they held about fifty liters, or forty gallons. If the other households at the site (which has not been excavated fully) followed the same pattern of usage, we are talking about a lot of wine, roughly five thousand liters for one hundred houses.

  The availability of such a large quantity of wine implies that the Eurasian grapevine had already come under cultivation at Hajji Firuz. The area was well suited to the growing of grapes. It lies at the easternmost edge of the modern and ancient distribution of the wild vine V. v. sylvestris in the hill country bordering northern Mesopotamia, as shown by pollen cores recovered by boring into sediments at nearby Lake Urmia. However, the wild vine would have been less accessible and lower yielding than the domesticated plant. From the amount of wine available in the Hajji Firuz community, we could go a step further and propose that viticulture and winemaking were joint endeavors of the village as a whole. In contrast to its prestige status today, wine might have served as a democratizing element in the Neolithic economy and society.