The fermented cereal beverage of the
Sumerians may not have been beer
17 January 2012
was even beer.
Although many of the more than 4,000 years old
cuneiform texts contain records of deliveries of
emmer, barley and malt to breweries, as well as
documentation of the activities, there is hardly any
information on the details of the production
processes, and no recipes to follow. According to
Damerow, the administrative texts were most likely
written for an audience that was already familiar
with the details of brewing. They were not intended
for informing the modern-day reader about the
processes.
This is an archaic writing tablet from Mesopotamia
(approx. 3000 B.C.): The tablet which contains protocuneiform writing, belongs to the most ancient group of
written records on earth. It contains calculations of basic
ingredients required for the production of cereal
products, for example, different types of beer. Credit: M.
Nissen, 1990
Moreover, the methods used for recording this
information differ between locations and time
periods. Also, the records and calculations are not
based on any consistent number system. Instead,
the Sumerian bureaucrats used different number
systems depending on the nature of the objects to
be counted or measured to count or measure.
This has cast doubt on the popular theory that
Mesopotamian brewers used to crumble flat bread
Archaeological finds from cuneiform tablets and
made from barley or emmer into their mash. The soremnants of different vessels from over 4,000
called "bappir" (Sumerian for "beer bread") is never
years ago show that even around the dawn of
counted as bread in the administrative texts, but in
civilisation, fermented cereal juice was highly
measuring units, like coarsely ground barley.
enjoyed by Mesopotamia's inhabitants. However,
Damerow also points out that the high degree of
besides the two basic ingredients, barley and
standardisation, which meant that the quantities of
emmer (a species of wheat) the brew produced in
raw materials allocated to the brewers by the
the clay jars of the Sumerians is shrouded in
central administration remained exactly the same
mystery. Despite an abundance of finds and scribal
over long periods, sometimes even decades,
traditions which point to an early love of fermented
makes it difficult to base any recipes on them.
cereal beverages, reconstructing ancient brewing
methods is very difficult, according to the historian
of science and cuneiform writing scholar Peter
Damerow of the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science in Berlin. A scholarly paper by
Damerow, who passed away at the end of
November 2011 in Berlin, carefully examines the
beer brewing technologies of the Sumerians.
However, the author also expresses great doubts
as to whether the popular brew in ancient times
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Nothing suggests that a production process that
worked under the special conditions of Tall Bazi
must have worked in the same way at other places
in Mesopotamia, since the local conditions varied
greatly. In fact, the experiment only demonstrates
how modern methods can be used to produce a
beer under the same conditions that were prevalent
in Tall Bazi.
These uncertainties lead to a question, which the
author considers "much more fundamental": to
These are wort coppers in a modern brewery. Also called which extent is it at all possible to compare ancient
products with modern ones? "Given our limited
kettles, they are used to boil the wort during beer
production. Credit: Pixelio
knowledge about the Sumerian brewing processes,
we cannot say for sure whether their end product
even contained alcohol", writes Damerow. There is
no way of ascertaining whether the brew was not
According to Damerow, even the "Hymn of
more similar to the bread drink kvass from Eastern
Ninkasi", one of the most significant sources on the Europe than to German Pilsner, Altbier or wheat
ancient art of brewing, does not provide any reliable beer.
information about the constituents and steps of the
brewing process. This lyric text from the Old
Nevertheless, Damerow considers the approach of
Babylonian period around 1800 B.C. is a
the scientists in the Tall Bazi Experiment to be a
mythological poem or song that glorifies the
good way of finding the answers to questions about
brewing of beer. Despite the elaborate versification, the early history of the art of brewing. "Such
Damerow states that the procedure of brewing is
interdisciplinary research efforts might well lead to
not conclusively described. It merely offers an
better interpretations of the 'Hymn of Ninkasi' than
incomplete record of the individual steps. For
those currently accepted among specialists working
instance, there is no clue as to how the germination on cuneiform literature", writes Damerow.
of the grain was interrupted at the right time. It can
only be speculated that the barley was layered and More information: Damerow, Peter. Sumerian
that the germination was stopped by heating and
Beer: The Origins of Brewing Technology in
drying the grain as soon as the root embryo had the Ancient Mesopotamia Cuneiform Digital Library
right size.
Journal 2012:2 ISSN 1540-8779 Version: 22
November 2011.
Furthermore, the content of the hymn does not
quite fit the results of the Tall Bazi Experiment. This
was a brewing experiment carried out by
archaeologists from the Ludwig Maximilian
Provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Universität in Munich together with brewing experts
from the Center of Life and Food Sciences
Weihenstephan at the Technische Universität
München, with the intention of reconstructing the
ancient brewing processes. Using cold mashing,
the archaeologists managed to produce a brew of
barley and emmer and adjust the alcohol level by
changing the percentage of water; however, in
Damerow's opinion, this result must also be treated
with scepticism.
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APA citation: The fermented cereal beverage of the Sumerians may not have been beer (2012, January
17) retrieved 15 June 2017 from https://phys.org/news/2012-01-fermented-cereal-beverage-sumeriansbeer.html
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