Whatever Happened to Sumerian Beer?
By HorstDornbusch
13/7/2007
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_
(http://beeradvocate.com/news/stories_read/673) .
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, nonbrewing, 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
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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
Regulatio n 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
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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 selfsufficient 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
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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 socalled 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.
(http://www.bible-history.com/babylonia/BabyloniaNebuchadnezzars_Babylon.htm)
(http://www.bible-history.com/babylonia/BabyloniaNebuchadnezzars_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,
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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
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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._
(http://beeradvocate.com/news/stories_read/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_
http://books.google.com/books?id=3DEQiJsxWr_L0C&pg=3DPA590&lpg=3DPA590&dq=3Dn
ebuchadnezzar+ii+604+562&source=3Dweb&ots=3DSS-xf1Q1N&sig=3D6O6kZx933rxiq76JIE6UFCXfQ2U#PPP1,M1
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