Uncorking the Past Page 14

  Muslim scholars and others have tried mightily to reconcile the eroticism of the Bacchic poets with the tenets of their faith. As with the Song of Solomon in biblical tradition and hermeneutics, theologians interpret the love of women, and sometimes of young men in the Arabic and Persian poems, as an allegory of the love of God. The fullest expression of this method of interpretation can be found in the many diverse orders of Sufism, which draw upon Gnostic mysticism—Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian—and esoteric paganism. Sufis sought and still seek to experience God directly and in all his glory, a state that is referred to as “intoxication.” They are not averse to using physical stimuli to achieve their mystical and ecstatic states, especially when wine or another fermented beverage for attaining oneness is forbidden. They spin around in circles, like the whirling dervishes, or repeat Koranic verses and even graphic love and wine lyrics, ad infinitum.

  An explicit mystical thread does exists in Omar Khayyam’s poetry and has been cited in support of the cause. For example:

  HE IS, and nought but Him exists, I know,

  This truth is what creation’s book will show;

  When heart acquired perception with His Light,

  Atheistic darkness changed to faithly glow.

  (Aminrazavi 2005: 138)

  Abu Nuwās, on the other hand, was unmoved by warnings of the faithful. He wrote: “You are beguiled if you insist on this repentance, tear your garment [for all I care]! I will not repent.”

  The Arabic and Persian Bacchic poets have much in common with their Chinese counterparts, who served their emperors at about the same time and escaped into mystical revelry in nature with a bottle of wine in hand. The erotic element may be missing from the Chinese verse, but the overwhelming influence on the origin and development of both poetic genres was a fermented beverage—grape wine in western Asia and a cereal wine in the east.

  CONCLUSION

  The Chinese mixed beverage from Jiahu (chapter 2) may so far be the earliest known alcoholic beverage in the world, but the Middle East was not far behind, and new evidence may reverse the situation. Grape wine was probably being made in the innovative villages of eastern Turkey—the final word from the chemical analyses is still not in—at about the same time that the Jiahu grog was being prepared along the banks of the Yellow River.

  As the experimental brewers in both areas played with the many possible variables of ingredients and production, the Neolithic democratizing spirit was increasingly subsumed by hierarchical societies, headed by kings. The more generic role of the shaman was redefined as priest, fortune teller, medicine woman, and beverage maker. Specialized beverages, based on a single ingredient or with just a single additive (such as a tree resin, which helped preserve it), became the rule, and the more traditional mixed beverages were pushed aside.

  One is struck by the similar timing of Neolithic experimentation, followed by the refinement of ingredients and processes to make specialized beverages, on either side of Asia. The ingredients differ somewhat in the two areas; only honey and grape, albeit different varieties and species, are common to both areas. It may also be more than coincidence that the ancient Chinese pictogram (jiu) for wine or any alcoholic beverage, which shows a jar with a pointed base and three drops falling from its lip, is so similar to the proto-Sumerian pictogram (kaş) for beer, which depicts a very similar jar. Perhaps the explanation for this similarity is related to why rice wine is still drunk through straws in Asia, as ancient Mesopotamian peoples consumed their beer thousands of years ago.

  Because there is no archaeological evidence of direct contact between the regions in the Neolithic period, I propose instead that the Neolithic Period saw a transfer of ideas, very piecemeal, from one group to another across the deserts and mountains of Central Asia. The archaeological picture of cross-fertilization is much clearer when we come to explain how similar wines and love lyrics arose in the Middle East and China during the first millennium B.C. The discovery of our first chemically attested wine vessel, the jar from Godin Tepe, stands as a marker of the possible transmission of ideas and fermented-beverage technology via trade routes across the continent.

  FOUR

  FOLLOWING THE SILK ROAD

  THE SILK ROAD CONJURES UP romantic images of the past. Two grains of opium compelled Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797 to write the inspired poem that begins: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.” Xanadu, or Shangdu, was the summer palace of the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century A.D. It lay east of the forbidding Gobi Desert, on the high grasslands of the Mongolian plateau. When the Mongol hordes swept into China from the north under Genghis Khan, they took control of northern China and the famed Silk Road. Its eastern terminus was Xi’an, home to the spectacular terracotta army of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.

  The intertwining of music, sex, mystical experiences, and exotic beverages in Coleridge’s poem evokes the Silk Road’s otherworldliness. The poet’s vision includes bright gardens, an Abyssinian maid playing music “loud and long” on her dulcimer, and incense-bearing trees that exude enticing scents. Disrupting this idyllic scene are darker elements: a “deep romantic chasm” through which a violent torrent of water runs, and a hint of “ancestral voices prophesying war.” The speaker in the poem imagines the intoxicating effects these sensual experiences might have on him if he could relive them:

  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread

  For he on honeydew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  These beverages recall the Jiahu grog, which might have inspired its Neolithic shamans, and the resinated wines and beers of the Near East.

  According to Marco Polo, whose account is now seriously questioned by some scholars, he and his father, and his uncle even earlier, traveled east from Venice, then slogged across the Gobi and were ushered into the court of the khan. I once had a much more pleasant look at the Gobi when my plane was diverted (by a sandstorm) on a return trip from Dunhuang in Central Asia, another key staging post along the famous trade route. Looking at the Silk Road from above, whether from the window of a plane or the perspective of a satellite hundreds of kilometers above the Earth, underscores the immensity of the journey that traders and adventurers faced along this five-thousand-kilometer stretch of landlocked Central Asia, crossing a host of overland roads, deserts, plateaus, and high mountain passes.

  Using data from communication and remote-sensing satellites, archaeologists can learn much about sites in poorly mapped, remote areas of the world. Satellite images can show us the lines of ancient roads down to a one-meter resolution; they were used to locate the fabled city of Ubar in the Saudi Arabian desert. They can discern the huge images of spiders, monkeys, and birds, many kilometers wide, along the desert coast of Peru. Rather than being the creations of extraterrestrial visitors, as Erich von Däniken would have us believe, these strange phenomena were created by the ancient Nazca people (ca. 200 B.C.–A.D. 700) by clearing away the dark, lichen-varnished rocks and exposing the desert sand and lighter-colored stone beneath. In Central Asia, satellite images reveal the lush oases, hundreds of kilometers apart, requiring ten-day treks in the vast Taklamakan Desert of the Tarim Basin. We can look down on the high peaks of the Pamir, Hindu Kush, and Tien Shan mountains, the rolling sands of the Gobi, and the Oxus (Amu Darya) and the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) Rivers flowing thousands of kilometers to the Aral Sea.

  Although the route has existed for centuries, the term Silk Road was coined only in the late nineteenth century by the German explorer Ferdinand von Richthofen (the brother of Manfred, the Red Baron flying ace of World War I). Von Richthofen’s felicitous expression recalls the beautiful, diaphanous silk textiles of China, which entranced the Romans and scandalized the more prudish subjects of the empire. Many goods besides silk traversed the Silk Road by horse, camel, and donkey
: Chinese peaches and oranges, fragile and richly decorated porcelain, magnificent bronzes, gunpowder, and paper came west from China in exchange for grapes and wine, gold and silver drinking vessels, and nuts of all kinds, as well as more abstract goods, in the form of religion (including Zorastrianism and Manichaeism from Iran and Buddhism from northern India), art, and music.

  The Mogao caves, near the oasis town of Dunhuang, graphically illustrate how religious and artistic ideas were transferred along the Silk Road. In the town’s heyday, traders, monks, and scholars crowded its narrow streets. It lies on the edge of the desert at the westernmost end of the Great Wall, which was built over centuries to protect the Chinese empire from the Central Asian nomads. Here, Buddhism penetrated China for the first time in the first century A.D. through the Gansu corridor, running south of the Gobi Desert. Rather than constructing temples of wood, as was typical for the Daoists and Confucianists of the Chinese heartland, converts to Buddhism at Dunhuang decorated the walls and ceilings of nearly five hundred caves in vibrant colors. I stood transfixed gazing at the painted sky-blue bodhisattvas in undulating gowns that grace the high vaults of many of the caves.

  Apart from a climb of more than 4,500 meters over one of the Pamir passes, connecting Russian Turkestan with Xinjiang Province in China, the most difficult part of the journey between China and the West was through the Taklamakan Desert at the center of the continent, a thousand kilometers across. The Taklamakan, which has also been called the Desert of Death, is one of the largest bodies of sand on the Earth. Taklamakan may derive from an early Turkic expression meaning “unreturnable,” which gave rise to the expression “If you go in, you won’t come out.” It is more likely, however, that the initial element of the name, takli, derives from a Uyghur word meaning “vineyard.”

  Intrepid travelers could skirt the Taklamakan to the north, although this route required a long, difficult trek through shifting sands and barren wilderness. Grasslands occasionally crop up where meltwater from the high snowy peaks of the Tien Shan descends to the plain. The Silk Road leading south around the desert took longer, but the trip was relieved by more oases, fed by waters from the Kunlun Shan range. This was the route taken by most traders, pilgrims, and adventurers, including Marco Polo. A third route crossed the cooler, well-watered grasslands north of the Tien Shan and followed the White Poplar River through the Flaming Mountains down to Loulan on the eastern side of the Tarim Basin, and then continued to Dunhuang and China.

  THE FABLED FERGANA VALLEY

  Faced with the different options for crossing the Pamirs, most travelers chose a northern route over the high Terek Pass. They needed ample supplies of food and drink, to judge from the famous story of General Zhang Qian, an emissary of the Chinese emperor to the western fringes of the empire in the late second century B.C. Zhang describes a verdant oasis on the western side of the Pamirs—the Fergana Valley—where the wealthy stored away thousands of liters of grape wine, which might be aged for twenty years or more. A century later, the Roman historian Strabo wrote in his Geography that enormous quantities of wine were being produced in this distant locale. The vines were enormous, he declared, with huge clusters of grapes. Strabo might have been referring to a unique grape variety of the Central Asian oases—the Mare’s Teat, with distinctively shaped, brownish-purple grapes. The wine, which improved with aging for as long as fifty years, was so sublime that it did not require a tree-resin additive, according to Strabo. Modern Chinese winemakers in the Grape Valley of the Flaming Mountains, where the Mare’s Teat was transplanted long ago, still revel in its sweetness and succulence.

  Like all adventurers, Zhang Qian suffered his share of calamities. He was taken captive by one of the recalcitrant Central Asian peoples, the Xiongnu. Only a short time earlier, this tribal confederacy had defeated the Yuezhi and made their king’s skull into a drinking cup. Mercifully, Zhang faced a less dire fate: he was forced to marry a native woman, with whom he had a son, and then he escaped to the Fergana Valley. He had the presence of mind to take cuttings of the domesticated Eurasian grapevine (Vitis vinifera ssp. vinifera), which grew there in profusion, and bring them back to the capital in Xi’an, ancient Chang’an. They were planted there, and, according to ancient texts, they yielded the first grape wine in China, to the emperor’s delight. As we have seen, the Neolithic people at Jiahu were harvesting the native grapes of the Yellow River basin for their mixed beverage much earlier.

  The very advanced winemaking industry of the Fergana Valley in the late first millennium B.C. echoes developments that occurred during and after the Neolithic Revolution at both ends of the prehistoric Silk Road. V. vinifera still grows wild in Fergana and the other fabled oases of the western Silk Road: Tashkent, Samarkand, and Merv. Although definitive archaeological and chemical research remains to be carried out, we can surmise that the domesticated Eurasian grape was established very early in the Fergana Valley, with the main impetus coming most likely from the ancient Iranian wine culture but possibly also influenced by ideas about fermented-beverage production and plant domestication percolating in from China.

  The Fergana Valley lay in the ancient Persian province of Sogdiana, which rose to prominence in the Silk Road trade during the first millennium A.D. Its wine culture is wonderfully captured in two kinds of dances, which likely have very ancient roots. These dances were adopted by the Chinese as early as the Eastern Han Dynasty (ca. A.D. 25–220), and during the seventh and eighth centuries they became all the rage under the Tang rulers, who had a taste for all things Western (that is, from Iran and the Central Asian oasis cultures). In the hutengwu dance, as depicted on frescoes, wine vessels, and jade ornaments, a single male dancer was attired in a cone-shaped hat that was sometimes pearl-studded, a silver or brocade belt with grape motifs, a tight jacket or shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and felt boots. As many as ten dancers, each on their own carpet, might perform in turn. With wine cup in hand or a wine gourd strung around the body, each dancer rotated rapidly to the left and right, hands held aloft to clap or beat a small hand drum in time to an accompaniment of waist drums, flutes, cymbals, harps, and lutes. Spinning around on their carpets like whirling dervishes, the dancers culminated their performances with somersaults. A Tang poet described the movements to be like those of a fluttering bird; but after hours of dancing and replenishing their cups from the large wine jar, the dancers staggered around drunkenly and sank to the floor.

  The second dance, the huxuanwu, was apparently quite similar to the first (xuan means “swirling”), although it was less strenuous and performed by women. Limited pictorial evidence, such as the images of solo dancers in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang, suggests that it arrived in China later, perhaps during Tang times, when troupes of dancing women were brought in from Sogdiana.

  Travelers in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean can still experience the thrill of such dances, which are often stimulated by an alcoholic beverage. My wife and I were once treated to the sight of a wild dance late at night on Mykonos, an island in the Aegean. One man danced alone, leaping and twirling to the music, and holding high two live lobsters. Female dances are generally more gentle and sinuous, like the exotic moves of a belly dancer.

  During the Tang era the Chinese were enticed by other Western luxuries and customs, including grape wine and fine riding horses. One court official went so far as to have an “ale grotto” built, a gigantic mudbrick edifice fitted with numerous drinking bowls, for his friends to slake their thirst. The most famous Tang ruler, Taizong, signaled his respect for his neighboring Turkic foes by importing their horses; he most desired those from Fergana, the “heavenly horses.” Taizong had his six favorite horses immortalized on stone plaques that decorated the burial chamber of his massive tumulus northwest of Xi’an. Each horse is realistically portrayed with a Central Asian riding saddle and stirrups. A groom is shown carefully removing an arrow from the breast of one of the horses, now on display in the Penn Museum.

  PERSIA: A PARADISE OF WINE />
  In light of its present political and religious strictures, it is ironic that Iran, on the western periphery of the prehistoric Silk Road, has yielded our earliest published chemical evidence for unadulterated grape wine. Expatriate Iranians in the United States, however, had no problem reconciling our discovery with their history and culture when the sixth-millennium B.C. Hajji Firuz wine was first announced. I was interviewed by an all-night radio station in Los Angeles with an audience of nearly a half million Iranian emigrés in the Tehrangeles section of the city. Listeners calling in to the show were ecstatic to hear that their homeland might have been the cradle of winemaking. I reminded them that one of their own Bacchic poets (see chapter 3) had said that “whoever seeks the origins of wine must be crazy.”

  The earliest Iranian winemaking is often traced back to the apocryphal, late story of King Jamshid, whose existence is otherwise unattested in the historical and archaeological records. As a Zoroastrian high priest, it seems, Jamshid not only invented a way to dye silk and make perfume, but also discovered the world’s first wine, just as Noah is credited with this advance in the Book of Genesis. Jamshid had a particular fondness for grapes, which were stored en masse in large jars in his palace. Once, when the stock inside one vessel spoiled, it was labeled as poison. A harem woman who suffered severe migraines then tried to cure her woes by eating some of these grapes. She fell into a profound sleep; when she awoke, she was cured. Told of this incident, Jamshid discerned that the liquid was a powerful medicine and ordered more to be made.