Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Which Came First: Beer or Bread?

Episode Date: October 9, 2021

The rise of agriculture has been pointed to as being responsible for the rise of civilization as we know it. However, that raises the question, what was responsible for the rise of agriculture? In particular, at least in the Middle East with the cultivation of grain, the debate has always been which came first: Beer or Bread? Learn more about the great beer vs bread debate, and which was responsible for the rise of civilization, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The rise of agriculture has been pointed to as being responsible for the rise of civilization as we know it. However, that raises the question. What was responsible for the rise of agriculture? In particular, at least in the Middle East with the cultivation of grain, the debate has always been between which came first, beer or bread. Learn more about the great beer versus bread debate, and which was responsible for the rise of civilization on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep, only to have your mind start to be? racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need

to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. This episode is sponsored by Audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is The Brewer's Tale, a history of the world according to beer

by William Boswick. The Brewer's Tale is a beer-filled journey into the past. The story of brewers gone by and won brave writer's quest to bring them and their ancient forgotten beers back to life, one taste at a time. This is the story of the world according to beer, a toast of flavors born of necessity and place, in Belgian monasteries, run-down farmhouses, and the basement nanobruery next door. Fueled by Dayton Honey Gruel, sour petiochoccus-laced lambics, and all manner of beers in between, William Boswick's rollicking quest for the drink's origins, takes him into the redwood forest of Sinairobi, Noma County, to bullet-ridden South Boston brew pubs, and across the Atlantic, from Mesopotamian sands to medieval monasteries to British brewing factories. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and to free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking

on the link in the show notes. If someone were to just ask you which came first, beer or bread, most people would probably respond, bread, and with good reason, bread is a form of food, and beer is something that isn't really a necessity. Sure, it's probably nice to have, but beer doesn't seem like something which would drive the rise of agriculture, let alone civilization. In fact, given how most people react to beer, it seems like something that would probably get in the way of civilization, not grow it. The question of which came first, beer or bread, is actually a very tricky one. For starters, I'm only going to be focusing on the development of agriculture in the Middle East

in the Fertile Crescent. Agriculture independently arose in several different places, around the world. This includes places such as Papua New Guinea, Peru, and the Indus Valley. I'll be talking about the rise of agriculture in those other places in future episodes, but for this episode, I'm going to focus on the places which first harness grains such as wheat, which means the Middle East in Egypt. There was an enormous amount of overlap between beer and bread, so trying to untangle the two might be a very difficult prospect. The real question then isn't which came first, beer or bread, because that's pretty much an impossible question to answer. The real question is what drove the rise of agriculture? Did

ancient people grow grain to make beer or to make bread? If you remember back to my episode on the history of bread, there is evidence of humans processing grains at least 105,000 years ago. That wasn't necessarily bread, however. It was just grain processing. The oldest evidence we have of something that we can call bread goes back 14,000 years. There were some burnt crumbs found around an ancient campfire in modern Jordan. It was probably just something like Banach, which isn't a leavened bread, and it was cooked over an open fire. Beer, on the other hand, doesn't leave crumbs. So what's the earliest evidence for the production of beer? Written evidence of beer goes back as far as written evidence. There's a pictogram dating back 6,000 years from the

settlement of Tepe Gawara in modern-day Iraq, which shows two figures drinking from a large jug through straws. There are tablets from the Sumerian town of Uruk, which are the oldest examples of human writing that we have. These tablets are actually accounting receipts that record the distribution of food and beverages. There is a Sumerian character for beer, and the documents show countless entries which say such and such was, quote, issued his daily ration of beer and bread. It is believed that beer and bread were considered payments for labor. In the epic of Gilgamesh, It says that the wild man Enkadoo was given beer to drink, and quote, He ate until he was full, drank seven pictures of beer,

His heart grew light, his face glowed, and he sang out with joy, unquote. And that would probably happen with anyone who had seven pictures of beer. A poem written from that time period was an ode to the Samarian goddess of brewing Ninkasi. It says, quote, Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat. It is like the onrush of Tigris and and Euphrates, unquote. Ancient Egyptians would greet each other with the phrase, bread and beer. Pyramid workers were allotted four loaves of bread and about five liters of beer per day.

There are more references to beer in ancient Egyptian writing than any other food stuff, including bread. It's pretty clear that if we go back to the dawn of civilization, both bread and beer, were pretty important, and beer might have even had a slight edge in terms of the number of times it was referenced. Before I go over the evidence even further back in time, I should describe exactly what we're talking about when we're talking about ancient beer. It probably wasn't anything at all close to modern beer that we have today, regardless of what type of beer you're talking about. It wasn't an ale, logger, IPA, stout, or anything else you'd be served at a bar. The closest thing you could describe it as would be a grain-based gruel. It would have been much thicker than modern beers and might still have bits.

of grain floating about in it. What would have been the point of brewing beer? The purpose of of beer thousands of years ago would have been very different, but not totally different, than the reason we drank it today. First and foremost, beer was a source of calories. If you've ever heard of beer being called liquid bread, that isn't actually far from the truth. Beer was a form of food insofar as it provided calories and energies to those who drank it. Secondly, beer provided a way to safely consume drinking water. Ancient water sources were, Probably cleaner in some respects than modern water. However, they still hit to deal with waste and dead animals in their water, which was probably worse.

The process of brewing beer would heat the water, killing many pathogens. Furthermore, the alcohol in the water would further kill pathogens and ensure that many of them wouldn't grow back. Drinking beer was safer than drinking stray water. This was actually the case up through the early 20th century with the development of modern water treatment facilities. People consume what we would consider an incredible amount of. alcohol, even though much of it actually had a very low alcohol content. Finally, beer was relatively easy to produce. Modern home brewing is actually rather complicated with all the various recipes and equipment

which most home brewers need. Ancient beer was usually nothing more than mashed up grain in water. They wouldn't have used hops back then. The yeast would have come from naturally occurring yeast in the air. Some seeds would be allowed to sprout, resulting in malt. Okay, so what was the beer situation before, Sumerians and ancient Egyptians. While we can't find crumbs of beer, we can't find chemical evidence of fermentation in pottery and vats. There have been traces of a substance called beerstone

found at the bottom of pottery in Iran. Beerstone, also known as calcium oxalate, is still a problem that plagues brewers today. Fermentation evidence was found in ancient China 9,000 years ago, before the advent of the rice revolution, when grains like millet and wheat were still more important crops. The oldest evidence found so far for beer fermentation was in the caves near Mount Carval and Israel. These fermentation pits were from the ancient Natufian people and date back 13,000 years.

So beer and bread both go back really far, but it still doesn't give us a definitive answer to the question. One possible answer might come from Golbeki-Tepi. Now, if you remember back to my episode on Golbecky-Tepi, there has not been any evidence found there to indicate that people permanently lived at Golbeki Tempe or that they ate anything other than wild game. However, there is evidence that there was brewing taking place. The implication of everything is that nomadic people came to Golbeki Tempe to build monolithic structures, eat game meat that was hunted, and drink beer.

Gobeki Tempe might have been the Neolithic equivalent of a permanent Oktoberfest site. If this interpretation of the evidence is correct, beer might have been the reason for Neolithic humans to harvest grain. It would have been used seasonally for socializing with other nomad groups. This seasonal harvesting of wild grain might then have evolved into full-blown agriculture. Also, making primitive beer was probably much easier than making primitive bread. The processing of the grain required to make bread would have been much more in terms of the milling and the removal of husks. If true, this would mean that the rise of agriculture, at least in the Fertile Crescent, had more to do with ritual and socialization

than it did with trying to cultivate surplus calories. Or, to put it more simply, agriculture might have arisen just because early humans wanted to get their drink on. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please join the list of patrons over at patreon.com. And also remember, if you leave a review or send me a question, you too can have it read on the show.