Uncorking the Past Page 24
Numerous Greek legends tie Crete to Phoenicia. Europa, a daughter or sister of the king of Phoenicia, is said to have been ravished by Zeus (the Semitic El or Baal) in the form of a bull and carried off to Crete. As if looking forward to the day when most of Crete and the rest of Greece would be planted with grapevines, she is often shown draped with dense vine leaves and grape clusters. In yet another story, Dionysos marries Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, after she has been abandoned by Theseus, the slayer of the half-bull, half-man Minotaur, on the Aegean island of Naxos. Perhaps this tale reflected other journeys of Canaanite ships deeper into Greek waters, following the same route as the Uluburun ship along the southern coast of Turkey into the Aegean. Or could it be that the Bronze Age Minoans (Minos being their eponymous founder) transferred the Near Eastern wine culture to their neighbors?
Dionysos himself is represented as being just as fun-loving and ebullient as any Canaanite deity or shamanistic reveler in Central Asia or northern Europe. Popular winter and spring festivals, called Dionysia, took drinking, singing, dancing, and ribaldry to new heights. As in a Latin American carnival today, people paraded in costumes and played games, such as trying to balance on a greased wineskin. The frivolity eventually led, in the sixth century B.C., to the earliest public theater in the world: the Theater of Dionysos at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens.
Yet there was a darker side to this revelry: the “Bacchic rage,” in which the emotions unleashed by the god and his beverage knew no bounds. Euripides’ fifth-century B.C drama The Bacchae illustrates the serious tensions that Dionysiac worship introduced into Greek life. By transforming himself into a bull, Dionysos incites the women of Boeotian Orchomenos, northwest of Athens, to flee into the hills, where they dance and sing praises to the wine god. They sacrifice a child, tear animals apart, and eat them raw. In the tragic finale, the prince regent Pentheus of Thebes, who appears in the guise of a lion, is dismembered by the women, including his sisters and mother. They proudly carry his head back to his father and king, Theseus, who recoils in shock and disgust. This orgy of wild abandon and violence is too much for the Theban monarch (who also traced his ancestry to Sidon or Tyre, according to Greek mythology).
Peter Warren of the University of Bristol has taken some of the tantalizing hints embedded in the classical literature and set them on firmer ground. He excavated a small, late third-millennium B.C. farming community at Myrtos-Phournou Koryphe, along the rugged southern coast of Crete. Belying their seemingly unpretentious character, the storerooms and kitchens of ordinary houses throughout the site yielded up numerous large jars (pithoi), each with a capacity of about ninety liters.
Even before Peter Warren sent samples to us for analysis, we might have anticipated that the jars had once contained wine. They had peculiar exterior dark red splotches and drips that were reminiscent of the Egyptian Scorpion I jars. And like the latter, many of the Myrtos vessels had reddish interior residues. Some even contained grapeseeds, stems, and skins. Horizontal rope appliqués running below loop handles under the wide mouths of the jars suggested, again like the Egyptian jars, that leather or cloth covers had originally been secured by rope. Another peculiarity that the Myrtos jars shared with some of their Near Eastern counterparts from Godin Tepe and other sites in the Caucasus and Anatolia (see chapter 3) was a small hole near the base, deliberately made before firing the pottery, for decanting a liquid.
Our analyses of four of the Myrtos jars confirmed that they had held a resinated wine. Indeed, this is the earliest evidence to date of retsina from Greece itself, the only country in the world that has perpetuated this ancient tradition until the present. Granted that retsina is an acquired taste (easily come by when traveling in Greece, as I discovered), it is essentially a variation on ageing in oak. As already mentioned in chapter 3, modern Greek winemakers have begun toning down their retsinas by adding small amounts of pine resin to their native varietals.
Peter Warren excavated numerous circular vats, often called bathtubs, and pithoi at Myrtos. Such finds, also well attested in ancient Egypt, are most often associated with industrial winemaking. The bathtubs, outfitted with spouts for draining the grape juice into the large jars, allowed a succession of workers to stomp the grapes: as one tired, the next one could step into the vat and take over. Large-scale production was also marked by a massive funnel, the stock in trade of the Near Eastern winemaker; and impressions of grape leaves on the pottery pointed to vineyards in the vicinity.
The wineries were overseen by a tutelary deity (the “goddess of Myrtos”), who was honored by a figurine in a small shrine on the southwest side of the excavation. She is shown in frontal view, with her breasts exposed and pubic triangle indicated, like the earlier Neolithic figurines. She is clearly on her way to becoming the awe-inspiring mother goddess of the Minoans, whose breasts protrude from a tight bodice above a flounced dress. The Myrtos deity holds a jug with a cutaway spout, a type of vessel with numerous parallels in Near Eastern wine cultures, in the crook of one arm. She was mounted on a low stand (or altar), with offering vessels laid out at her feet. Her association with winemaking activities at the site was unmistakable, as her shrine adjoined a room filled with spouted jugs, pithoi, a stomping tub, and a spouted bowl containing grape pomace.
Much like the royal winemaking industry in Egypt, the Myrtos enterprise appears to have suddenly sprung up. It is possible that winemaking had already reached the island from other parts of Greece, especially Macedonia, where squashed grape skins were found at fifth-millennium B.C. Dikili Tash, and some of the Aegean islands (Syros, Amorgos, and Naxos), where domesticated grapes and grapevine leaf impressions on pottery are reported from the third millennium. Then there is the notable finding of domesticated grape pips inside a pithos from House I at Aghios Kosmas in Attica, about twenty kilometers south of Athens near the coast. The large jar had a hole near its base, just like the Myrtos vessels. This is prima facie evidence that winemaking, perhaps on the same scale as at Myrtos, was known on the mainland at about the same time.
Did the impetus to make wine at Myrtos come from elsewhere in Greece, or was it brought to this island by the Canaanites? On balance, the latter position is better supported. Myrtos lay on a landfall of a well-traveled route for ships from Egypt and the Levant, and the distinctly Near Eastern character of its winemaking industry bespeaks influence from this quarter. The Canaanites were looking to spread their wine culture, and they saw a wide-open opportunity in Greece to work with the local Cretan people in advancing their interests.
The debt of Greek winemaking to the Canaanites, as well as their Egyptian trading partners, is also reflected in the later signs for grape, vineyard, and wine in the earliest Greek scripts, including Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A. The characters are unquestionably derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph, which shows a well-trained vine growing on a horizontal trellis.
Even after the Greeks had become seafaring merchants in their own right and began competing with the Phoenicians for control of the Mediterranean, they expressed their ultimate debt to the eastern Mediterranean wine culture in a profound way. They adopted the Phoenician alphabet, which is the ancestor of our own. They used this revolutionary writing system not merely to inventory goods or log their sea journeys, but rather to express their sentiments about wine. The earliest archaic Greek inscription, incised on a wine jug (oinochoe) in the eighth century B.C., reads: “Whoever of all dancers performs most nimbly will win this oinochoe as prize.” Later in the same century, another amazing inscription is recorded on a Rhodian wine cup (kotyle) from the tomb of a young boy at Pithekoussai, an early Greek colony established on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. It states in elegant dactylic hexameter, the poetry of the Homeric epics, that “Nestor’s cup was good to drink from, but anyone who drinks from this cup will soon be struck with desire for fair-crowned Aphrodite.” The Dionysiac interweaving of wine, women, and dance jumps out at us from across the centuries.
Another piece of
evidence for the Canaanite introduction of winemaking to Crete via Egypt is more controversial. If this was the direction of influence, then we might expect to see evidence of the simultaneous introduction of barley beer, which was the preferred beverage in Egypt. Without intending to confirm this idea one way or the other, our analyses of two of the Myrtos pithoi showed the presence of calcium oxalate or beerstone, a byproduct of barley-beer production. Peter Warren was more than willing to take up the banner for barley beer at Myrtos, as he noted that one of the jars with the beerstone had been found in a room with barley chaff and other evidence of grain preparation. Yet ever since Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of the famous Minoan site of Knossos, claimed that Minoans had made and drunk beer, this point has been hotly contested among Greek archaeologists.
THE LAST GASP OF A NATIVE GREEK BEVERAGE
Oddly, the two possible beer jars at Myrtos also once contained resinated wine. Maybe the vessels were reused, but a more likely explanation is that beer and wine were already being mixed together to make a “Greek grog.”
The grog at Myrtos might well have been the forerunner of a phenomenon that engulfed all of Greece beginning around 1600 B.C., at the start of the Late Minoan IA period. A truly mixed beverage of barley beer, grape wine, and honey mead from that time (according to the analyses of our laboratory and that of Curt Beck at Vassar College) appears at many sites throughout Crete and the Greek mainland. It was served in a new type of vessel, the so-called conical cup, which has been recovered in incredibly large numbers in what are believed to be cultic contexts. By Mycenaean and Late Minoan times (ca. 1400–1130 B.C.), the unusual beverage is attested in elaborately decorated vessels—high chalices (kylikes), so-called beer mugs, stirrup jars, and stupendous spouted drinking horns (rhyta) that could take the form of bulls’ heads or be decorated with swirling octopi. Such vessels occupied a central position in Greek social and religious life.
Where this Greek grog ultimately came from remains uncertain. The earlier beer and wine combination from Myrtos is probably a blip in the panorama of Greek fermented beverages, recalling the Near Eastern kašgeštin or “beer-wine” (chapter 3). The more usual formulation of such a beverage would have included honey mead, well attested in Europe and consistent with the formula for Phrygian grog. According to a hypothesis prevalent among Greek scholars, new peoples moving into Greece from Europe shifted the balance of power from Crete to the Mycenaean mainland during the second millennium B.C. If this hypothesis is correct, these people might have brought the new Greek grog, a variation on the Nordic grog, with them.
The discovery of the so-called Nestor’s gold cup from a sixteenth-century B.C. royal grave (Grave IV in Grave Circle A) close to the Citadel at Mycenae, usually identified as the palace of Agamemnon in the Homeric epics, adds a special twist to this story. Just such an elaborate gold cup, with figures of doves mounted on top of its widely splaying handles, is described in the Iliad (11.628–43), which is believed to have been written down around 700 B.C. and to reflect earlier traditions. There, we read that Nestor’s mistress, Hecamede, tended a wounded soldier in the battle of Troy by serving him kykeon from the gold cup. The kykeon was a “grog” of Pramnian wine, barley meal, and probably honey, with goat cheese grated on top.
Kykeon, which can be translated as “mixture,” fits the general chemical profile of the Phrygian, Nordic, and Greek mixed beverages: a combination of wine, beer, and mead. Although the cheese has yet to be identified chemically, cheese graters retrieved from warrior tombs in Greece and Italy corroborate the Homeric recipe. Our laboratory and Curt Beck’s at Vassar College could not analyze any residue from the celebrated golden cup of Nestor from Mycenae—which had long since been cleaned out for conservation purposes—but we were fortunate to test a pottery beer mug of the same type from the site. It contained vestiges of the Greek grog.
Kykeon was more than an odd assortment of ingredients with the potential to produce an alcoholic high. According to the Odyssey (10.229–43), when Odysseus and his companions were making their circuitous route by sea back to their home island of Ithaca, they encountered the treacherous sorceress Circe. She transformed Odysseus’s crew into pigs by tempting and stupefying them with a kykeon, which was strengthened with a pharmakon (Greek “drug”). It might be that the added psychoactive punch came from the Pramnian wine, which some scholars argue was an herbal wine. More likely, Circe used a specific spice or herb to gain her advantage. Rue, a narcotic and stimulant, is a possible candidate, as Curt Beck has detected compounds of this plant in cooking vessels from Mycenae and Pseira, a Minoan port town on a small island off the north coast of Crete. Saffron is another excellent possibility because of its analgesic effects. Some of the most delightful Minoan frescoes show women passing through fields of crocus and collecting the flowers, from which saffron could have been gleaned. Poppy and its derivative, opium, are strongly implied by a female figurine, dated to the period after 1400 B.C. when the grand palaces had been destroyed: she is shown with poppyseed capsules sprouting from her head. As yet, however, no definitive biomolecular archaeological evidence has been obtained for the drug in kykeon.
The Greek grog finally lost out to the Phoenician wine culture in the centuries following Homer, as the Greeks fought for control of foreign markets in the Mediterranean and consigned their beer and other mixed drinks to the barbarous European hinterland. Kykeon was never totally forgotten, because it was incorporated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. The little we know of this mystical religion of the Hellenistic and Roman eras suggests that the initiatory rites involved drinking a mixed beverage that promised expiation for one’s sins, along with otherworldly delights. Some investigators surmise that a hallucinogenic mushroom or the fungus ergot, which infects rye and wheat, might be involved; this also remains to be proved.
Although I was never as adventuresome as the priests of the Temple of Demeter at Eleusis or its sister temple near the Acropolis in Athens, I did carry out some experiments in re-creating a modern-day kykeon. With the help of Takis Miliarakis, owner of the Minos winery in the beautiful Archanes hill country south of Herakleion on Crete, we gathered local herbs, including diktamon (Origanum dictamnus, which has a taste like oregano) and saffron. We found the best mountain honey, for which the island is well known, and negotiated for fine Cretan barley malt. The plan was to make a “Bull’s Blood” concoction for the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens. The name alluded to the close association of Dionysos and bull sacrifices in Minoan religion. The frescoes on a sarcophagus from the palace or villa at Ayia Triada during its heyday, from about 1600 to 1400 B.C., were among our inspirations: they show the blood of the bull, symbolizing Dionysos, being collected in a jug, while a figure believed to represent a priestess presents another beak-spouted jug, presumably containing Greek grog, before a horned altar. We thought the blood should be reflected by a grog in which dark red wine predominated. The project, unfortunately, ground to a halt when the winemakers tasted the result and were repulsed (they never sent me a sample to try). Either they did not have the experimental fortitude of a beermaker like Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, or they still harbored some prejudice for a purer wine, even a retsina.
REACHING OUT TO ITALY
The Homeric period of the eighth century B.C. saw the climax of Phoenician and Greek competition for the hearts, minds, and palates of native peoples throughout the Mediterranean. Many islands—Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, and Ibiza—were parceled up by the two seafaring nations.
The evidence from the trading colony of Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia, which had been established by immigrants from Euboea, an island in the Aegean not far from Athens, illustrates how carefully one must disentangle the overlapping Greek and Phoenician wine cultures to understand how they influenced the peoples of Italy and the Western Mediterranean. A series of elite warrior tombs at Pithekoussai, as well as at their home base of Lefkandi on Euboea and elsewhere in Campania and Etruria, yielded very similar assemblages: large metal cauldro
ns of Near Eastern style, and sets of kraters, filters, and ladles for serving wine, and cheese graters.
The sources for the metal cauldrons can be debated, but we know that the initial inspiration for the vessels’ designs came from the eastern Mediterranean. Cauldrons of the same type are illustrated in the Assyrian reliefs decorating the royal palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad, dating to 714 B.C., and these were likely made by Phoenician or Syrian craftsmen for the Assyrians. One of the richest burials on Cyprus, tomb 79 at Salamis, yielded similar cauldrons with griffins, sphinxes, and other protomes or busts attached to the rim. A particularly spectacular cauldron from Salamis was filled with tin-plated, mushroom-lipped juglets, which pointed to Phoenician involvement.
Most of the cauldrons shown on the walls of Sargon’s palace very likely held only wine, as the Assyrians are known to have had extensive vineyards, and wine is frequently mentioned in their texts. However, our analyses of the residues from the Midas tumulus (see chapter 5) indicate that these cauldrons were filled with Phrygian grog, not wine, and a similar pattern might well hold elsewhere outside Assyria proper.