Whatever Happened to Sumerian Beer?
Feature Article by () _HorstDornbusch_
( file/HorstDornbusch) / 07-13-2007
Anthropologists and archaeologists believe that the first humans ever
to make the great leap from a nomadic and tribal into a civilized and
sedentary existence were the Sumerians, some eight to ten thousand
years ago. The place was Mesopotamia (now the southern portion of
present-day Iraq). Apparentlythe Sumarians had migrated there all the
way from India. Once settled in the Middle East, they build elaborate
communities, grouped in prosperous city-states, and surrounded by
fertile fields, which they kept lush by communal irrigation from the
waters of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. The most magnificent of
their urban centers was Babylon on the banks of the lower
Euphrates. The Sumerians are considered the world’s first builders,
farmers, and writers – and, as we know from archaeological finds,
probably the _first brewers, too_
( 3) . Beer was at the
center oftheir religious rituals. Their highest deity was the goddess
of beer and fertility. It is a measure of the importance of beer in
Sumerian society that eventually about half their grain ended up in
their brews.
The Official Story of the Sumerian Exit from History
The Sumerians’ ingenuity and wealth soon became a magnet for other,
non-brewing, people around them. Newcomers, mostly Semitic tribes from
thenorth and west, began to move into Mesopotamia – sometimes
commingling peacefully with the Sumerians, sometimes fighting wars
against them for supremacy. As a result, the Sumerians eventually
began to be absorbed by their numerous neighbors and gradually
disappeared as a distinct culture. By the start of the third
millennium BC, Sumeria had faded almost completely into oblivion. In
its place arose a new culture, which historians call Babylonian.
The new masters of Mesopotamia centralized power away from the many
scattered city-states ruled by kings, queens, and priestesses, to just
onecenter, Babylon, and they unified the loose cluster of Sumerian
settlements into a territorial state and government. This new, broad
regional organization, Babylonia, was, in essence, the first sovereign
country in history.
Once the Babylonians consolidated their power internally, they turned
their attention to external conquest. They poured their resources into
building a mighty army, which they marched westward to the shores of
the Mediterranean, northward into Armenia, eastward into Persia, and
southward into Arabia and the islands of the Persian Gulf. In the
process, they amassed the first true empire in history – with the king
of Babylon known as the King of the Totality, or the King of the Four
Regions. He ruled an empire that spanned the four corners of the
then-known world.
This is the official story of the demise of the Sumerians and the
Babylonian take-over of their lands, at least as it is written in the
history books. However, the common narrative of history always seems
to focus on political and military events, while the less transient
forces of social evolution often receive only scant attention. What we
do not learn from the shifting sandsof military power in Mesopotamia
is what happened to the all-important Sumerian beer as Sumerian
society changed under the burden of conquest! Born out of the mist of
prehistory as the twin of society itself, did beer survive in the new
order? That’s a question historians rarely address.
The Real Story: Beer a Target of Governance
While Sumerian social and religious rituals had been hedonistic and
expansive, Babylonian rituals assumed an austere, military panache –
more Spartan drill than spiritual experience. In the zero-sum game of
power between the rulers and the ruled, and with the concentration of
might in just a few hands, the political stakes were high. Wealth now
depended less on the bounty of the harvest than on the fortunes of war
and on control over other humans. Those new virtues, however, as the
Babylonians were eventually to find out, could be more fickle than the
moods of a beer goddess.
Initially, the future of beer in Babylonia seemed assured, because the
new rulers of Mesopotamia, like all good conquerors, usurped the
achievements of the vanquished for themselves. The Babylonians
continued the Sumerian tradition of making beer, yet they could not
leave well alone. While beer in Sumeria was mostly a matter of
religion and economics, beer in Babylonia became mostly a matter of
politics. That shift in vision found its manifestation in a novelty
that has since been imitated by just about every government, even to
this very day: The Babylonians were the first to institute beer
regulation.
Compared to the social rules among the happy-go-lucky Sumerians, laws
in the power-and-control machine of Babylon were severe. In the new
Babylon, no facet of life could escape the tyranny of bureaucracy, and
beer was no exception, especially once Hamurabi (1728 -1686 BC), the
6th king of the 1st Babylonian dynasty, took over. Hamurabi ran his
realm with an iron fist and epitomized in his deeds what the new order
stood for. Life was controlled by a written set of rules, which is now
known as the Code of Hamurabi, mankind’s first body of laws. The code
consisted of 360 paragraphs, which were chiseled into a seven-foot
high column made of diorite, a dark-gray to greenish igneous rock.
The column was discovered in 1901 near Susa (present-day Khuzestan) in
Iraq and was taken to France, where it is now in the Louvre.
Everything of importance in Hamurabi’s society was regulated by his
code … and the code has plenty to say about beer. In paragraphs 108
to 111, it classifies beer into 20 different categories, each of which
we would now call a beer style. Eight styles were made just from
barley, but most were made from a mixture of grains, with emmer (a
spelt-like grain) being the predominant one. The most highly valued
and most expensive beer style among the Babylonians was pure emmer
beer. There were also pure wheat beers, thin beers, red beers, and
black beers – as well as an aged beer for export, mostly to Egypt,
where the beer bug was happily spreading, too. In effect, by defining
beer categories in the legal code, Hamurabi was the first to regulate
the production of beer. The consumption of beer did not escape his
regulation either. Hamurabi simply slapped price controls on the
brewers and innkeepers – another "first" in human history.
Babylonian beer must have been rather strong, probably because it was
often fortified with honey or boysenberries. We can infer its potency
from the fact that at Babylonian drinking parties, guests were
generally offered various preparations against hangovers. Such
medicines tended to be taken in liquid form, dissolved … in beer!
Beer and Social Class in Babylonia
While the Sumerians had steadfastly valued beer as a
happiness-inducing social beverage to be shared by everyone, high and
low, the Babylonians saw beer more as an instrument of social
distinctions, as a means to affirm the connection among the members of
the elite. Society in Babylonia was rigidly stratified, as was the
apportionment of beer according to social rank. At the bottom rung of
society were the slaves, whose ranks were often replenished from
abroad, either through war or through purchase. They tended the fields
anddid the dirty work in the shops and temples, but received beer only
at their masters’ whim.
Next up on the social ladder were the free laborers. They had written
contracts with their employers that stipulated the length of time of
their employment and their compensation, which usually included two
crocks (of perhaps a gallon each) of beer per day. Members of the
middle tier of society, which included merchants and civil
administrators, were entitled to three crocksof beer a day, as were
regular priestesses and female civil servants. Higher echelons in the
bureaucracy and priesthood could claim five crocks a day as part of
their compensation. On religious feast days, these rations were
increased by decree, which was designed to enhance the populace’s
affection of its gods and especially its rulers.
In Hamurabi’s Babylonia, like in Sumeria, women ran the breweries and
pubs. But while they were adored by Sumerians, Babylonians really had
it in for the female sex. In paragraph 282 of his code, Hamurabi
decreed that a brewster or a barmaid was to be drowned in beer if she
watered down her liquid wares. She met the same fate if she charged
for her potion in silver coin. If she served spoiled beer, she was to
be force-fed with it until she expired from asphyxiation. Like all
good dictators, Hamurabi was not too fond of free speech and public
expressions of political opinions. He simply forbade all political
debates in drinking establishments. Therefore, if an alewife who
overheard her patrons talk over a crock of beer about politics or a
topic the authorities might deem subversive, she was supposed to
deliver such heretics to the police. On the other hand, if she
tolerated such speech, she was put to death. While priestesses under
Sumerian rule were required to run temple brewpubs, under Hamurabi,
they were burned alive if they were caught even just visiting
one. However, male brewers (as well as cooks) were held in high regard
in Babylonian society, attained high social rank and were even exempt
from military service. The lustful brewster-goddess of the Sumerians
would not have been pleased!
Beer Ousted From the Land of Its Birth
Shortly after the zenith of Babylonian power under Hamurabi, around
the fifteenth century BC, ominous clouds of change began to emerge on
the Mesopotamian horizon from two directions, the north and the
west. These clouds appeared just as Babylon had consolidated its grip
over the region – and perhaps overplayed its hand, too. To the north,
a rival Semitic center called Nineveh, dominated by Assyrians, had
sprung up on the banks of the upper Tigris, while to the west, the
Egyptians – a civilization of great future importance for both the
story of beer and the path of human progress – were getting
sufficiently well organized along the Nile to consider expanding
eastward. Both the Assyrians and the Egyptians were now poised to
challenge Babylon’s hegemony.
The political horizon for all actors in the Middle East was slowly
expanding. In Sumerian times, Mesopotamia had been an almost
apolitical mosaic of self-sufficient city states. During the
Babylonian supremacy, it had becomea unified, relatively unchallenged
territorial state. But with its rise, it also became the crucible of
political relations and expansionist impulses among rival states. The
center of the universe was slowly shifting from the Mesopotamian
cradle of civilization to its neighboring cultures which werefast
catching up. Historically, international politics as the struggle
between peoples and countries started right then and there.
The Assyrians, geographically the closest pretenders for the throne of
Babylon, sent their armies across the lands between the upper Tigris
and the lower Euphrates and harassed the Babylonians at their northern
border. At the same time, the Egyptian pharaohs sent their armies
across the Arabian Peninsula and butted up against the western border
of Babylonia. Eventually, the two invaders joined forces in an
alliance, placing the Babylonian empire into a most precarious pincer
situation. As Babylonia had to divide its military between two fronts,
it soon became exhausted. Around 1250 BC, the city of Babylon fell to
the Assyrian invaders.
The Assyrians soon found out, however, that conquering an empire was
one thing, but holding on to it was quite another. The Babylonians may
have been defeated, but, unlike the vanquished Sumerians before them,
they simply refused to fade into oblivion. The struggle between the
Assyrians and indigenous Babylonians merely turned, as we would now
say, from an international intoa civil war. In the end, the Assyrian
interlude in Babylonia lasted about four centuries … perhaps a long
time by modern standards, but not all that long at an age when the
pace of social change was so much slower. By 600 BC Babylonian power
clearly re-emerged. The Babylonians sent the Assyrians packing, then
went after them and destroyed their capital of Nineveh. The metropolis
on the Euphrates once again assumed its former glory … but under
whose rule, and how about the beer?
Now entered the stage of history a bon vivant, a king quite unlike the
severe and austere rule-maker Hamurabi. His name was Nebuchadnezzar II
(604-562 BC). As the new ruler of Babylon, he was a man of both
military disciplineand earthly indulgences. His reign is usually
referred to as the peak of the so-called Neo-Babylonian period. Today,
he is perhaps best known as the builder of the famous hanging gardens
of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But most important
for our story, unlike Hamurabi, Nebuchadnezzar was a friend of beer.
( yloniaNebuchadnezzars_Babylon.htm)
( Nebuchadnezzars_Babylon.htm)
Like the Sumerians, Nebuchadnezzar saw the meaning of life in the
collective cultivation of grains for bread and beer, but unlike the
Babylonians, he also saw great purpose in flexing his military
muscle. He scored many victories over the Egyptians and Syrians. At
the height of his power, in 586 BC, he even captured Jerusalem,
destroyed the city’s temple, and herded the Jews to Babylon as slaves.
His power politics, however, did not diminish his hedonistic and
ritualistic embrace of the drink. Contrary to Hamurabi, who often
preferred to drown people in beer rather than let them drink it,
Nebuchadnezzar lacked that fellow’s uptight and secular relationship
to the fermented beverage. Instead, more like the Sumerians, he
promoted its enjoyment by all. Under his reign, the priestesses could
once again drink copious quantities of beer during sacrificial
services – to please their gods and to honor their king. On his
returns from military campaigns, he celebrated his successes by
virtually flooding the temple altars with rivers of beer.
Incongruously, however, like Hamurabi, he forbade his priestesses to
open pubs or even set foot in one.
Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, as it turned out, spelled the last hurrah for
the golden age of Mesopotamia. The forces that were amassing all
around it were not to be kept at bay for ever. This was the time of
awakening not just for the Egyptians, but also for the Persians, and,
more consequentially, the Greeks and the Romans. Little Mesopotamia,
the first to start civilization, was also to be the first to be
swallowed up by the success it had spawned. Mesopotamia had shown the
world what could be accomplished once mankind had figured out how to
harness its individual potential for collective action. Soon other,
bigger tribes had learned the same lesson, and the Mesopotamian empire
quite literally turned from master to slave. The first "new" tribe to
set its site on Mesopotamia was Persia. Ironically, in 538 BC, not
even two decades after Nebuchadnezzar had led the tribe of Israel as
slaves into Babylon, Cyrus II, King of Persia, overran the city from
the east and sent the Jews back hometo freedom.
The art of beer-making, which had been, so much at the core of
Sumerian and Babylonian society, albeit in different roles, now lay
dormant in Mesopotamia. Under Persian occupation, which lasted for
almost two turbulent centuries, Mesopotamian society fell into
disarray. There was simply no dominant force in the Middle East that
could have stabilized the region and provided the cultural and
political base for beer to re-emerge as a vibrant force. The Middle
East was ripe for a takeover, and when it came, it was with a
vengeance. It changed Mesopotamian society irrevocably and it dealt a
final blow to beer-making in the very land where it had started. That
blow came from the then-rising intellectual and military superpower of
antiquity, Greece.
The Hellenistic Takeover of the Cradle of Beer
The final trouble for Mesopotamia started in 337 BC, when the
Macedonian King Philip II (359 336) declared war on Persia. Not unlike
what the Babylonians had done in Mesopotamia, Philip had united all
the Greek city states and had harnessed their combined military,
economic, and brain power for the cause of aggression against Darius
III, King of Persia. Within a year, Philip had decimated the Persian
armies and was just about to exploit his victory, when, on his way
home he was murdered. This put his young son Alexander, known as The
Great, at the head of the Greek army. Alexander immediately embarked
on one of the most remarkable feats of empire building. Within just a
few years, the world – to the extent that it was known to the ancients
– became Hellenistic … in taste, in culture, in politics, and in
drink! In 330 BC, Alexander arrived in Babylon to occupy it. There he
died seven years later at the young age of 33.
The Greeks, unfortunately, like the Persians before them, were not
much interested in beer. The fermented beverage from grain, often
referred to as the most democratic drink, did not catch on in the
cradle of democracy, because there just wasn’t enough spare grain in
the Greek homeland to support a beer culture. The climate and soil of
most of Greece are more suited for the cultivation of grapes and
olives than of grains … and wherever the Greeks went, they put their
cultural stamp on society.
This is not to say that the Greeks were unaware of beer. There was one
place where the Greeks actually did attempt some beer-making of their
own, in the province of Thrace. Only in Thrace did barley grow better
than grapes, and Dionysus – generally considered the Greek god of
wine, the sun, and agriculture – was also revered as the guardian of
beer. Even an authority as unassailable as Aristotle (384-322 BC),
philosopher and tutor of Alexander the Great, had a kind word to say
about beer drinkers, and this in spite of the general Greek disdain
for beer. Aristotle wrote, that "those who get drunk from beer fall on
their backs and lie with their faces up, while those who get drunk
from wine fall down every which way." The ancient Greek word for beer
is zythos, which has survived to this day in modern Greece, where beer
is still called sythos. From this etymology of zythos, we can surmise
that the Greeks first learned about beer from the Egyptians (whom the
Alexander had conquered, too, in 332 BC), because the ancient Egyptian
word for beer is zytum.
Beer had flourished in old Mesopotamia for at least five millennia
before the Greek conquest, probably even longer. With the Greeks in
charge, however, beer-making was at an end in the land where it had
started. Beer could not stand on its own, without a supportive
political and cultural environment.
Mesopotamia set an example that was to be replicated everywhere,
henceforth: In societies where there is ample grain, there is ample
beer, and where there is ample beer, beer cannot be ignored. Because
beer is important in society, our collective institutions will always
have an eye on it, for better or for worse, no matter what the
particular time and place and social order. This is the truth that is
at the heart of the story of beer throughout the ages. Political
fights, such as the struggle over brew rights in medieval Europeor the
fight over Prohibition in North America after World War I, are
essentially no different from Hamurabi’s struggle with the brewsters
and barmaids of his time.
The End of Beer … Almost
As the center of power shifted in antiquity from Mesopotamia to lands
less sympathetic to beer – first to Greece, then to Rome – wine, the
favored beverage of these new powers, replaced beer as the people’s
drink. As civilization was expanding, however, and new cultures joined
the world around the Mediterranean, beer found new opportunities to
become established in new places. Plato, in his Phaedo, once likened
the Mediterranean to a pond. "The earthis a very large place," he
wrote, "but we…live in only in one small part of it, around the sea,
like frogs around a pond." While the Greeks and the Romanshad their
day in the sun around that pond, there were other cultures, both near
the pond and far beyond, ready to take the plunge into civilization,
and – like the Sumerian pioneers – to farm the land, to raise the
grain, and to make the beer. The end of beer in Mesopotamia,
therefore, did not mean the end of beer in the world. The most
important standard bearer for beer from the decline of Babylon until
the beginning of the Christian era many centuries later was the most
productive grain-growing culture of antiquity, the one that had given
the Hellenistic conquerors their word for beer. That culture was
Egypt.
For an account of beer-making in its new home of ancient Egypt, see
_Horst Dornbusch on Beer and Civilization #7, Egyptian Beer for the
Living, the Dead … and the Gods._
( 629)
For those interested in further reading about the ancient cultures of
the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians and Egyptians can go to The
Ancient Near East by Amélie Kuhrt. The book can be read online at:
_books.google.com_
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