Uncorking the Past Read online

  Ethiopia’s national fermented beverage, tej or t’edj, is a kind of liquid gold and a fitting counterpart to the solid metal that was exploited here in antiquity. According to the Roman geographer Strabo in his Geography (16.4.17), this drink of the nomadic peoples then inhabiting the land, the Troglodytes (“cave dwellers”), was made from honey and consumed exclusively by the ruler and his retinue. Very likely the honey beverage, which Europeans first encountered when they began exploring Ethiopia and was still being served to Emperor Haile Selassie in the early twentieth century, followed a recipe going back thousands of years. By mixing five or six parts water with one part honey, a perfect acidic medium is established for the activation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast, already present in honey. As the liquid ferments for two or three weeks in a gourd or pottery jar, much of the sugar is consumed and excreted as alcohol and carbon dioxide by the microorganisms, to yield a beverage with 8–13 percent alcohol.

  This fermented honey beverage or mead was not restricted to Ethiopia. Many African peoples have been drinking some variation of a fermented honey beverage for a very long time throughout the continent. The strongest versions have been reported from the Rift Valley, where added fruit (e.g., of the sausage tree, Kigellia africana, and tamarind), with additional yeast to spur an extended fermentation, boosted the alcohol concentration.

  Sub-Saharan Africa is a honey-eater’s and mead-drinker’s paradise. The familiar European honeybee (Apis mellifera) makes its home here, but some of the subspecies are more aggressive than their European relatives, which accounts for the sensational name “killer bees” for Africanized crosses between the two populations. Native peoples seem to have been undeterred by the bees’ reputation for ferocity. For example, the Mbuti pygmy peoples of central Africa would set aside everything else to collect honey from a beehive. They scaled high trees with improvised liana ropes to reach the hive; once at the nest, they would plunge their arms deep within it and immediately cram as much as they could of the comb, dripping with honey, into their mouths. The pleasure they derived from this indulgence apparently made up for the hundreds of bee stings they sustained. In southern Sudan, the Bviri honey hunters go naked, as the bees can get caught in clothing and sting later.

  Even with the obvious deterrent, many animals readily raid beehives. The honey badger or ratel, which inhabits sub-Saharan Africa, at certain times eats nothing but honey. Its sharp eyesight enables it to follow airborne bees back to their hive. The ratel then simply tears the hive apart to devour its contents; sometimes it first drives out or asphyxiates the bees by rubbing an anal secretion around the hive’s entrance.

  Among African hominids, the chimpanzee, which shares 99 percent of our genome, most ingeniously hunts and exploits beehives. Chimpanzees have been observed cooperating at the task, with one chimp prying open a hive with a stick while another pulls out the honeycomb. An eleven-yearold female chimp in Zaire was extraordinarily enterprising in her use of tools: she used two thick, chisel-like branches to ream a hole into the hive, then pierced the wax layer protecting the honey storage compartment with a sharp-ended stick, and finally swished a long, flexible vine around inside the nest for ten minutes, collecting as much honey as possible. Simian bystanders threw screaming fits while the female gathered her feast, but she treated them to an occasional piece of comb, still oozing honey, which she tossed to the ground. The Belanda-Biri tribe of southern Sudan described the chimpanzees in their district as “great honey thieves.”

  Humans undoubtedly took some cues from animals to perfect their beehive-raiding techniques. They also immortalized the activity in spectacular depictions of honey hunting, such as those engraved and painted on rock faces and boulders in South Africa and Zimbabwe over millennia. Although difficult to date precisely, they represent the enduring record of native peoples, including the San (Bushmen). A typical scene shows someone climbing a flimsy-looking liana ladder to a single enormous hive or cluster of hives suspended under cliff ledges. Swarms of enraged bees encircle the hives and the plundering humans.

  One evocative painting in the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe, which reputedly dates from as early as 8000 B.C., shows the hunter perched on one knee on a ledge, as he or she (the person has long hair pinned at the back, perhaps with a bird’s feather) holds out what looks like a mass of smoking vegetation to a cluster of hives. Bees are seen leaving the hives. Smoking out the bees was (and remains) a technique for subduing a bee colony before removing the honey. In Zimbabwe and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa more recently, the use of specific plants and fungi with narcotic properties for this purpose has been documented (e.g., Spirostachys africana, a tree that exudes a toxic latex, and the giant puffball fungus). Some of the hives targeted by the ancient Matopo Hills hunter have darker rear sections behind lighter areas marked with small dots, likely a depiction of brood cells at the front of the hive, separated from the darker honeycombs that provide their food.

  Figure 22. A rock painting in the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe, dating possibly as early as 8000 B.C., showing a befeathered, longhaired honey hunter smoking out a hive of bees on a ledge. The hairstyle is similar to that of the central Saharan sorghum-beer drinkers (see plate 10). After H. Pager, 1973, “Rock Paintings in Southern Africa Showing Bees and Honey Gathering,” Bee World 54(2): Register ZW-001.

  The Matopo paintings include numerous concentric arcs, which have been interpreted as a view of a beehive from below, its honeycombs stacked one upon another, hanging from a cliff cavity. A rock painting in the Drakensberg area of South Africa shows a swarm of bees moving in and around a set of five such curves. This geometric figure has been described as an entoptic phenomenon (see chapter 1) that the brain generates in the first stage of a mind-altering experience, such as a shamanistic trance state. As common motifs of rock art around the world, such phenomena could have been inspired by consuming an alcoholic beverage or plant hallucinogen or by sensory deprivation or overload.

  A closer look at African rock art has convinced investigators that their meaning extends beyond aesthetic enjoyment to address spiritual and religious concerns. As in the Stone Age caves of Europe, handprints are common, as are strange animal-headed figures and fantastic creatures (see chapter 1). Among the latter, images that may represent mother goddesses or rainmaking animals in San mythology are sometimes shown mobbed by bees: blood streams from the noses of the animals, and dancers leap and somersault. Figures that merge into crevices and cracks in the rock suggest that the artwork paralleled the changes occurring in the mind, aiding the shaman’s access to another realm.

  According to the San, bees provide power for taming the animal world and ensuring rain. When honey is in season—major flows occur once or twice a year—men go out on week-long expeditions. They collect as many as ten nests in a day, which can yield five to thirty kilograms of honey. The hives are often located by following bees from a watering hole back to their nests and observing their minute droppings as they fly. An amazing symbiotic relationship also developed between the hunters and the honeyguide bird (Indicator indicator). As its name implies, the bird can locate a beehive and steer a human or other mammal to it by attracting attention to itself: it lands on a nearby, conspicuous perch, performs a distinctive song, and flies a short distance while displaying its outer white tail feathers. Step by step, the bird leads its “partner in crime” on a beeline for the hive. The bird cannot open up the hive without the partner’s help, and the partner reaches the sweet reward much sooner with the bird’s assistance. By imitating the honeyguide’s call and luring the bird, a human can save several hours of honey hunting. Shamanistic “spiritual flight” might well have taken a cue from the honeyguide’s close association with the bees.

  Today, a hunting party’s return to the camp or village with honey is a cause for great celebration. Perhaps, in Palaeolithic times, the hunters brought back not only honey but also on occasion an animal skin or gourd full of mead. Rainwater might have filled the nest of a fallen tree and fermented t
he honey, as envisioned by the Palaeolithic hypothesis (see chapter 1). One of the crucial requirements in making mead is a relatively airtight container, and the hive itself, lined with propolis gums and resins by the bees, met this need. Eventually, an enterprising human might have thought of making mead in a more controlled fashion in a leather bag, gourd, or bark container. The honey-hunting scenes of eastern Spain, which closely resemble the African depictions and are approximately contemporaneous (ca. 8000–2000 B.C.), sometimes show the hunter holding such a vessel, precariously balanced on a rope ladder beside a hive and reaching inside to fill the vessel.

  The probable importance of mead among early hominids is reflected in its central role in many religious and social ceremonies throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Today among the Kikuyu people of Kenya, for example, a prospective suitor is expected to offer twenty liters of mead to his future father-in-law as a bride price. Generally made by men (contrary to the general rule that beverage making was a woman’s job), mead was regularly drunk by very old men: it was seen as one of the benefits of growing old and a recognition of the closeness of the elderly to the ancestors. Another group in Kenya with different origins and leading a pastoral way of life, the Masai, celebrate the circumcision of young boys with a feast among adult near relatives and neighbors at which mead and meat are served; the young males, however, are expected to drink only cow’s blood and milk. When the young teenagers are ready to live in separate households, the older family members are plied with mead to keep them in good humor and secure their blessings. The teenagers are then allowed to drink a horn of blood and mead. When it comes time to marry, not only are the elders satiated with mead, but a sacrificial ox is first made drunk, then slaughtered. The goodwill of the elders is conveyed by their spraying mead onto the assembled group. There is hardly any Masai ceremony—whether an inheritance, funeral, impending crisis, removal of a curse, expiation for a sin, or marriage—that cannot be enhanced by pouring out or sprinkling mead on the ground or formally presenting it to the aggrieved or petitioned party.

  We must be cautious, however, in too easily transposing current practice to a period in the distant past. Honey was the most concentrated source of sugar available to early humankind; when eaten as honeycomb filled with brood, its protein and nutritional content exceed those of meat. As other fermented beverages made from grains and roots became popular, honey, which had always been in short supply, might have been used more as a sweetener than as a source of mead. Similar developments can be traced in the Near East and China. Even in Europe north of the Alps, which trailed Asia in technological development, mead gradually lost its grip on the popular imagination as the supreme beverage of gods and kings and was eventually displaced by wine, beer, and, later yet, distilled beverages.

  Ancient Egypt serves as a case study for tracing how honey and mead could shift in symbolic and social value. Located in the northeastern part of the continent and serving as the gateway to western Asia, Egypt is the source of our earliest depictions of beekeeping and the processing of honey from anywhere in the world. The grandiose sun temple of Pharaoh Neuserre of Dynasty 5, ca. 2400 B.C., at Abu Ghurab, just upriver from Cairo and the Great Pyramids, sets the pattern for the next two thousand years. A long, covered corridor, lined with finely painted reliefs of the flora and fauna that the sun god Re had bestowed on the land of the Nile, led from the king’s pyramid to his funerary temple close to the river. There, in a courtyard open to the sky and marked by an obelisk to the radiant sun orb, his death was commemorated with offerings of oxen and other royal fare. Before the priests emerged into daylight from the corridor, they would have seen the careful rendering of the hieroglyph for the honeybee, showing the Egyptian subspecies (larmarckii) in profile. They would also have gazed on an elaborate scene that showed very sophisticated beekeeping. One worker in the scene apparently blows smoke from a container into the ends of nine sun-baked clay beehives to drive the bees out. Other workers transfer the honey to large basins and tall jars, which are then sealed shut.

  Later scenes, especially from the New Kingdom and the Late Dynastic period, follow a similar pattern. In the tomb of the vizier Rekhmire at Thebes, which is also well known for its winemaking fresco, the hives are constructed like those shown in the tomb of Neuserre. Wisps of smoke leap from bowls in the direction of the hives, and round cakes of honeycomb are being removed and stacked. Other workers pour honey into jars and containers, made by placing two large bowls mouth to mouth, and seal them with clay.

  It is not known how early the ancient Egyptians adopted this method of beekeeping, nor whether they were influenced by practices in the Levant or areas to the south of Egypt, where wild beehives are abundant. Evidence for gigantic stacks of artificial hives have thus far been discovered at only one site in the Middle East—Tel Rehov in the northern Jordan Valley—but its relatively late date, around 900 B.C., does not help us to decide whether this mode of beekeeping was an Egyptian innovation. Ancient beehive complexes have not been discovered in Egypt itself or elsewhere in Africa. Much later, sub-Saharan African peoples did make long cylinders, similar in shape to those of ancient Egypt, out of bark, plant leaves, woven reeds, gourds, and sometimes clay; these hives, however, were not stacked up but hoisted high into trees and dispersed widely. One thing is clear: the symbol of the bee was supremely important in ancient Egypt from the dawn of its dynastic history, ca. 3100 B.C., when Narmer or Menes, the first pharaoh of the united country, chose the honeybee (Egyptian hit) hieroglyph to represent his conquest of Lower Egypt and the unification of the country. This hieroglyph preceded the pharaoh’s name in the royal titulary, a practice that continued until the demise of the Late Kingdom at the hands of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. The close and enduring association of bee and pharaoh points to even earlier prehistoric developments, which would account for the precociousness of the industry.

  The quantities of honey produced by ancient Egyptian beekeepers are staggering. If we take one of the New Kingdom pharaohs, Ramesses III, at his word, he offered fifteen tons of honey to the god of the Nile. Inscriptions describe different grades of honey: for example, a light-colored “pure” variety and a darker, reddish blend from the desert. Pollen analyses of ancient samples have shown that the honey came from a variety of domesticated and wild flowers and trees, including cloverlike lucerne and other desert plants, the persea or Egyptian avocado tree (Mimusops schimperi), the fragrant balanos oil tree, clover, currant, flax, marjoram, rose, and many more. Among the analyzed samples, a New Kingdom bowl, similar to those illustrated in frescoes of the period, is especially noteworthy: it contained a large piece of well-preserved honeycomb.

  One issue that likely challenged early Egyptian beekeepers was how to keep their bees busy throughout the flowering season, which began earlier in the hotter climes of the south and progressed to the more temperate north. A river that flowed in the same direction provided a ready solution. As a French traveler reported in the eighteenth century, the hives were placed on boats, which were moored at one locale after another. The bees were not choosy about their pollen sources, and by the end of the trip, the honey could be sold in Cairo. Because the Nile was the principal means of transport in antiquity (see chapter 6)—whether the cargo was granite columns for temples or the exotic goods coming from Punt, thought to be located in Somalia or Ethiopia—this solution probably dawned on an entrepreneurial beekeeper who had nautical contacts. Moving bees by boat would have been a much more efficient method than that used today by my uncle, a beekeeper in South Dakota, who has to move his hives overland in trucks from field to field and as far as Texas or California for overwintering.

  The great antiquity of honey production in Egypt raises the question of whether mead was made from all this honey. My thorough search of the voluminous ancient Egyptian literature, as well as artistic and archaeological materials of all kinds, came up empty. The ancient Egyptians had many other uses for honey, among them as a bactericide and salve for wounds, an internal medicin
e, a sweetener, an ingredient in cosmetics, and a component of offerings. So why was it not made into mead, one of the easiest beverages to produce and likely one of the first beverages enjoyed by our ancestors millennia ago?

  The most likely explanation for the notable absence of mead in ancient Egypt is that other alcoholic beverages were already predominant there by ca. 3000 B.C. and captured the imagination, palates, and pocketbooks of kings and peasants. We have already seen how a Dynasty o pharaoh, Scorpion I, was captivated by grape wine (see chapter 6). Beers could be made in quantity from wheat and barley, which flourished in the Nile floodplains and were much cheaper and easier to obtain than precious honey. Perhaps ancient Egyptian tastes had shifted from sweet to sour, just as Americans moved away from the ultrasweet jug wines and pink Zinfandels of the 1970s and ’80s to today’s drier varieties. Whatever the explanation, honey went to making specialty items and for ceremonial use during historical times in Egypt.

  A GRUELLISH BEVERAGE

  Egypt launched its royal winemaking industry around 3000 B.C. Because wild wheat, barley, and sorghum grew in the Nile Valley, beer making could have begun even earlier. Excavation of a transitional Early to Late Predynastic site in Upper Egypt at Hierakonpolis, where the famous Narmer palette commemorating the union of the country was discovered, suggests that the brewing of beer was underway by at least 3500 to 3400 B.C. Where the Wadi Abul Suffian opens onto the Nile alluvium at Hierakonpolis, archaeological excavation during the 1970s and 1980s by a team from the University of South Carolina revealed a curious complex of structures. On a built-up platform three to four meters in diameter, Jeremy Geller uncovered six “firing pits,” which he interpreted as parts of a large oven for baking bread. Six large, wide-mouthed, conical vats were found on another platform nearby, apparently freestanding and surrounded by carbonized debris. A thick black residue coated their interiors, gradually tapering off and disappearing toward the bottom of the nearly meter-high vessels. Quite possibly the residue ended where a bowl had once been inserted at the bottom of the jar, as suggested by comparisons to similar facilities at other sites.