In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the 'wild man' Enkidu is given beer to drink. "... he ate until he was full, drank seven pitchers of beer, his heart grew light, his face glowed and he sang out with joy." That was written around 4,000 years ago and the story is based in Uruk. Well, I seem to remember being in a similar state myself over the years.
Terence, This is Stupid Stuff – from A Shropshire Lad – A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad…
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| 3,900 year old Sumerian beer recipe |
The first written records of brewing come from Mesopotamia where Uruk was situated. These include early evidence of beer in the 3,900-year-old Sumerian poem honouring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, which contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread.
There is also a receipt found at Ur, another city in the area. The ‘Alulu beer receipt’ provides specific information about the world's earliest known drinks transaction. It was written during the 45th year of the reign of Shulgi, the King of Ur (2050 BCE) – we can be sure of this because the scribe who wrote it, Ur-Amma, signed and dated it. The text translates as “Ur-Amma acknowledges receiving from his brewer, Alulu, 5 sila [about 4 ½ litres or eight pints] of the ‘best’ beer”.
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| Sumerians enjoying a drop of 'best beer' |
Written records aside, Thomas Sinclair says in his book, 'Beer, Bread, and the Seeds of Change: Agriculture's Imprint on World History' that the discovery of beer may have been an accidental find.
Paul Lenz writes in ‘A History of Ancient Beer’ that the very earliest, Neolithic, beers were almost certainly made in Africa, from grains such as sorghum and millet, but as the brewing vessels would most likely have been made from animal skins no evidence for them survives.
Then in the New Scientist on the 10th December this year Michael Marshall asks the question ‘Did ancient humans start farming so they could drink more beer?’ New evidence suggests that alcohol was a surprisingly big motivator in our monumental transition from hunting and gathering to farming. He continues thus:
‘Why this happened is puzzling, given that our species had survived successfully for around 300,000 years without having to reap and sow – not to mention milk, shear and shepherd. Many ideas have been put forward as possible explanations. The earliest physical traces we have found date back 13,000 years and were found in the Raqefet cave on Mount Carmel in Israel. Residues of fermented wheat and barley were identified on stone mortars, suggesting these grains were crushed to make a mash which was then brewed to form a thick, porridge-like beer.’
‘Why this happened is puzzling, given that our species had survived successfully for around 300,000 years without having to reap and sow – not to mention milk, shear and shepherd. Many ideas have been put forward as possible explanations. The earliest physical traces we have found date back 13,000 years and were found in the Raqefet cave on Mount Carmel in Israel. Residues of fermented wheat and barley were identified on stone mortars, suggesting these grains were crushed to make a mash which was then brewed to form a thick, porridge-like beer.’
Anthropologists have been pondering this change since the 1950s. However, they didn’t have the technology back then to test any ideas. The challenge is to distinguish between beer and bread. Baking bread and brewing beer look superficially similar in the archaeological record, says Jiajing Wang at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who has spent years finding evidence for the oldest alcoholic brew.
A good starting point was the later settled societies, like ancient Egypt, where beer-making was glaringly apparent. Egyptian archaeological sites often contain distinctive pottery jars. “They literally just call it a ‘beer jar’”, says Wang. At Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt, for example, they found beer jar fragments containing starch granules from cereals, yeast cells and crystals of calcium oxalate, or “beer stone”. These showed that people there were making beer from a mixture of wheat, barley and grass between 5800 and 5600 years ago – more than 2000 years before the first pharaoh of a unified Egypt.
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| Egyptian beer brewing |
Similar evidence has been found in the 7,000-year-old site of Godin Tepe in modern-day Iran, while in Asia there is evidence from 9,000 years ago that a form of beer was being made in ancient China from rice, flavoured with honey and fruits. Meanwhile at the Skara Brae site in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, brewing was taking place more than 5,000 years ago. Beer was not invented just once; rather it seems that almost every culture that had grains figured out that they could be turned into beer.
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| Skara Brae brewery, Orkney |
Well, that’s enough for now. It’s 10pm, New Year's Eve, and time for a small Guinness.
Terence, This is Stupid Stuff – from A Shropshire Lad – A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad…
Thanks for reading, Terry Q.
