Complex Numbers

Gilgamash

From aeon, a tale as old as time. Well, as old as civilization, anyway:

    The fermented crescent  
Ancient Mesopotamians had a profound love of beer: a beverage they found celebratory, intoxicating and strangely erotic

So, they were human.

I should note that, like many free articles, this is a stealth ad for a book. But, for once, it's a book I would buy. (I'm not going to add to the advertising; the details are there at the link.)

Hamoukar, Syria. 20 May 2010. We are midway through what will be the last excavation season at the site for some time. The following spring will see the outbreak of a long and brutal civil war.

I don't talk about them much in here, but I do keep up with current events. Still, I find it hard to follow all the ins and outs of the disturbances in Syria. Nevertheless, yes, I heard about Assad, and I remember my inner cynic (which, frankly, is just Me) going, "Oh great, what fresh hell will Assad be replaced with?"

Today, though, the archaeologist Salam Al Kuntar, balanced on tiptoe at the bottom of a tomb, has just uncovered a little green stone. It is a cylinder seal, an ancient administrative device. We roll the tiny seal in clay – just as its former owner once would have – to reveal an impression of the intricate scene carved into its surface. It may not be the finest seal ever seen, but the tableau is eye-catching: a stick-figure man and woman are having sex, the man standing behind the woman, who bends over to drink from a jug on the ground. And is that a straw emerging from the mouth of the jug?

I, of course, instantly knew the implication: chick was drinking beer, maybe because her partner was ugly. I once saw a shirt that read: "BEER: Helping ugly people have sex since 1862!" And I snorted and said, "Yeah, right. More like 6000 BCE."

It may surprise you that our ancestors had sex, until you stop and think about how they became our ancestors.

Indeed, the drinkers of ancient Mesopotamia often drank via straw – though not always, shall we say, in this particular position.

While drinking beer through a straw today is as much a social faux pas as serving warm white wine, it was kind of necessary then because, apparently, the beer had floaty things in it and the straw kept them from getting swallowed. It would filter out the biggest and grossest solids.

Yes, the Sumerians (probably) invented beer. No, it wasn't the tall, frosty Pilsener of today. For one thing, no refrigeration. For another, no hops. But it was still fermented grain, hence: beer.

Banquets were a key part of the social calendar in Mesopotamia, and beer was an essential element. But people also drank beer at home, on the job, in the tavern, in the temple, pretty much everywhere.

Before we knew shit about microbes, beer was often a better choice than water because the process requires boiling water, which we know now destroys bad microbes. Hell, a big part of beer production today involves letting the proto-beer (called wort) cool enough for the yeast (good microbes) to be able to survive and work their magic. They wouldn't have known exactly why beer was good, only that it was.

Perhaps you have encountered the notion that beer was ‘invented’ in Mesopotamia. That is a hypothesis at best.

Yeah, well, it's still better supported than other hypotheses.

And, as the global search for earlier and earlier traces of alcoholic beverages gains steam, there is at least one key takeaway: beer was invented (or discovered) many times in many different places.

I'm okay with that clarification, and will note that yes, it is one of those things where you can have a legitimate philosophical argument over "invention" vs. "discovery."

The famous ‘land between the rivers’ was also the land of Ninkasi, goddess of beer. When Ninkasi poured out the finished beer, ready to drink – a Sumerian song tells us – it was like ‘the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates’.

Before you rush out and claim a name, there's already Ninkasi Brewing. It's located in Oregon, so I haven't tried many of their offerings, but I seriously doubt they used the ancient Sumerian recipe. However, as the article later attests, other brewers have attempted Sumerian beer. One of them was named Gilgamash, which utterly delights me (hence the entry title today, which, now you know, wasn't an original Waltz pun). But I'm getting ahead of myself, here.

The article goes on to discuss several aspects of ancient beer culture, including a paraphrased version of when Inanna got Enki so drunk that he gave her all his prized possessions. I'm sure I've covered that in here before.

Beer was brewed at home, in neighbourhood taverns, and in breweries managed by palace and temple authorities. In some cases, we know the names of the brewers – for example, homebrewers Tarām-Kūbi and Lamassī (both women), tavern-keepers Magurre and Ishunnatu (both women), and palace brewers Qišti-Marduk and Ḫuzālu (both men).

While your image of a brewer today probably involves a very large, very bearded man, historically, beer has been either a female project or ungendered.

The most detailed account of the brewing process appears in the ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’, goddess of beer. But this lyric portrait of Ninkasi at work in the brewery is hardly a set of instructions for brewing beer.

I will defer to this author's greater experience in the historical arena, but everything else I've read does call it a recipe of sorts. Not standardized like today's recipes, with their precise measurements and somewhat detailed instructions following about 50 pages of backstory, but more like a mnemonic, which the brewers were expected to fill in with passed-down knowledge and maybe even proto-science.

I'm not sure the distinction is overly important to us. Hell, we have problems re-creating other recipes from a century or more ago, precisely because a lot of the handed-down knowledge is lost. What's more important is that beer was important enough to write hymns to the gods about.

The author has a lot more to say about this, and I can, again, provisionally defer to his greater knowledge.

In conclusion, yes, I would read that book for sure. I might wait to buy it until after the holiday season, though, just in case someone wants to give me one as a present.

No, that's definitely not a hint.

Or is it?