The Ancients - Origins of Beer

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

It's one of the most popular alcoholic drinks in the world. But did you know that beer is also one of the world's oldest beverages, with a history that stretches back more than 10,000 years. Beer was the beverage of choice for a whole host of ancient Bronze Age civilisations arrayed across Mesopotamia. But why did cities like Babylon and Uruk become the first great beer drinking cultures in history? And what traces of this love of alcohol did they leave behind?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Prof. Tate Paulette to discover how those living on the plains of ancient Mesopotamia bred such a love for liquid amber and explore how exactly they brewed it.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.The Ancients is recording our first LIVE SHOW at the London Podcast Festival on Thursday 5th September 2024! Book your tickets now to be in the audience and ask Tristan and his guest your burning questions. Tickets on sale HERE https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients/Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘ANCIENTS’. https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hi, Tristan here, and I have an exciting announcement. The Ancients has been invited to open the London Podcast Festival. We will be recording our very first live show on Thursday, the 5th of September at 7pm at King's Place. And being the first live show where we want it to be extra special,

so I've invited a friend of the podcast, Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, to join me on stage where we will be diving into the captivating story of the Tower of Babel, from its first mention in the Book of Genesis to the real-life great ancient Babylonian structure that it was based on. Of course, the ancients is nothing without you, so we want you to be there in the audience taking part and asking us your burning questions. Tickets for the festival always sell fast, so book yourself a seat now at www.kingsplace.co.uk forward slash what's on, or click the link in the show notes of this episode. I really hope to see you there. Go into a pub or bar today and what beverage will you find on offer almost everywhere you go?

That's right, beer. Beer is the most popular alcoholic drink in the world, and it is also one of the oldest, because beer's history stretches back more than 10,000 years. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we are covering the origins of beer. In the past, we've covered the origins of both olive oil and wine, so it felt like a must that we added an episode on beer into the mix. Now our guest today is Professor Tate Paulette. Tate, he is an expert on early beer and the surviving archaeology for it, so much so that he has just written a book all about it. In particular, Tate has a strong interest in beer drinking in ancient Mesopotamia. In particular, Tate has a strong interest in beer drinking in ancient Mesopotamia.

Think cities like Babylon and Uruk, and civilizations like the Sumerians, the Akkadians, Assyrians, and so on. Because these Bronze Age Mesopotamian societies, well, they were the first great beer drinking cultures in history. They even had their own god of beer. It's insane. Much of the earliest evidence we have for beer drinking comes from these societies, and there is a lot of it, including mentions of beer in the Epic of Gilgamesh. So sit back, relax, maybe even grab a beer or another beverage of your choice, and enjoy this fascinating exploration of the origins of beer. Tate, what a pleasure. Great to have you on the podcast. Hi, Tristan. It's great to be here.

And for what a topic, beer and history's first great beer culture. This occurred thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia, and there is so much evidence surviving for it. This is an extraordinary field of research. Well, yes, I think so. There's really a huge amount of information about beer in ancient Mesopotamia. I mean, this is, you mentioned that, you know, it's the world's first great beer culture, and that's how I like to present it, because we, like, there's been a lot of work lately on pushing the origins of beer and other alcoholic beverages back deeper and deeper into the past. But usually in those cases, we get like

just little bits of information about those beverages, often presence, absence kind of evidence. Whereas with the stuff I'm talking about, we have just wonderful evidence, lots and lots of written documents, lots of archaeological material, lots of artistic representations. So yeah. And the archaeological material, I'm guessing, is pottery quite a big part of that? Because I remember doing an episode recently on the origins of wine where they look at the residue analysis in the inside of pottery. Is that a big part of the archaeological side of this discussion? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have giant amounts of pottery from ancient Mesopotamia. I guess one of the things is that there hasn't actually been that much organic residue analysis done in

kind of Mesopotamia proper. And so as that kind of picks up speed in the coming decades, we will learn a lot more almost certainly. Right now, there's just about sort of three cases of that. So we have like, you know, millions of ceramic vessels, but only small cases where we can say, yes, this exact one once had beer in it, or once was used to produce beer. Even though I think if you ask many archaeologists who work in the region, they would say, yeah, lots of these vessels we have probably were somehow involved with beer. We just can't say yes, definitely. That's so exciting. With so many different fields of Mesopotamia, whether it's deciphering more of

the tablets or with beer, more and more information is going to be coming to light over the next few years and decades, which is really, really exciting. And I think a key reason why people are so fascinated in this area of the world. So ancient Mesopotamia with the story of beer. I mean, Tate, where and when are we talking in the world? Yeah, okay. So the where, we're basically talking about modern day Iraq, sort of northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, that approximate region where the Tigris and Euphrates flow through. So it's known as the land between the rivers, Mesopotamia. And so the when of it, the material I'm talking about, really, we're talking about sort of the fourth

millennium BC onward, or really about 3000 BC onward. We do have evidence from the broader region for beer before that. So you have from this site, Rakefet Cave in Israel recently, some results came out suggesting very early beer during the Epipaleolithic period, thousands of years before what I'm talking about. And then you have this famous site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, where they have potential evidence for early beer during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, also thousands of years before I'm talking about. And so we have these really early hints, and then you have a gap of several thousand years, maybe 5,000 years or something like that. And we have some potential evidence from the sort of fifth millennium BC in Mesopotamia, but it's really about 3000 BC that suddenly we have a lot to learn.

Just to repeat what you said there, Tate, so the origins of beer, it's unclear. And it seems to be that there's these several different areas creating beer thousands of years before the time that we're focusing on today however that evidence at the moment is patchy compared to this period that we're focusing on where the available evidence just explodes in the amount of detail and fun we can delve into yeah and one thing i should maybe point out there is that i feel like people have often thought that or talked about Mesopotamia or Egypt as the ultimate origin point for beer. Beer was invented in these places and then spread out around the world. And I try to argue against that kind of perspective. It's not that that couldn't have happened in some sense that beer might have spread maybe during sort of the

expansion of the Neolithic out of the Near East or something like that, sure. But what I try to emphasize is that that's, for one thing, just one very specific kind of beer. These are barley-based beers, similar to what we consider beer, many of us today. But today, even, there are all kinds of different beers being made using different grains in different parts of the world. using different grains in different parts of the world. And just like for the study of the domestication of plants and animals, it's become really clear that this was not something that happened in one part of the world and then spread out from there, even though there was an element of that. It happened in all different parts of the world at different times and using whatever local plants and animals happened to exist there and the ones that were susceptible to being domesticated.

And so I try to emphasize that when we're talking about beer, it's almost certainly the same kind of thing going on. You have different grains in different places. And we're only getting little hints of this right now, but almost certainly beer was discovered or invented many different times in many different places. Tate, it's kind of like how bread is created in different areas of the world. And bread feels quite similar to beer. And I know that we'll be chatting about both in our chat. But once again, not one single origin point emerges again and again in different areas of the world.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the only other thing to say there is that, so you mentioned wine earlier. And usually when we were talking about, I think your episode about the origins of wine was about grape wine. But of course, one can make wine from all different sorts of fruits and people have all over the world. And so when we talk about the origins of alcoholic beverages, it's very likely that a wine or a mead made from honey was the earliest discovered because it's much easier than making beer. I mean, beer doesn't require a lot extra, but it requires this extra step of taking the starches in the

grains and converting them into fermentable sugars before you can start fermenting them. Whereas with various kinds of fruits, you basically expose the juices in those fruits to yeast and they will start fermenting. We're going to be exploring all of that with the focus on ancient Mesopotamia, which is your main field of research. Having read part of your book and a few lectures just before we started this chat, I want to begin with asking this question that initially might seem quite straightforward, but I believe is actually a bit more complicated. How should we define beer at that time, ancient beer? Yeah, certainly there are many different definitions of beer out there. And in my book,

I've taken a pretty all-encompassing kind of definition, not emphasizing, say, a distinction between ale and beer or something like that, but saying, you know, beer is a beverage, a fermented beverage made with the principal component being a grain of some kind and something that's not distilled. That's my basic definition. To allow us to include not just this very specific barley beer tradition that many of us are familiar with, but to encompass others like the rice beers or rice wines of East Asia or the maize beers of South America. Let's focus in on Mesopotamia. You said the surviving evidence, it seems to begin from the fourth millennium BC onwards. What is some of the earliest surviving evidence that we have? My mind for some of the earliest surviving cities would go to somewhere like Uruk. I know that there are a few

others around that time as well. But do we have much evidence right from the start, from the 4th millennium BC, of beer emerging in these Mesopotamian societies? Yes, definitely. So basically, right around that time in the centuries right before 3000 BC or so, which is right what you're talking about, the emergence of Uruk as this basically the world's first city. So we do have, for example, that's when we have our earliest organic residue evidence for beer in Mesopotamia. It actually comes from Western Iran from this site called Godin Tepe, which I think you also talked about in your origins of wine episode, because there's also some early wine evidence there. So this is basically during that period when Uruk emerges

as a city, there's also this process called the Uruk expansion that's been discussed a whole lot, where you suddenly see material culture from Southern Mesopotamia, Uruk material culture, appearing in this broad zone much further away. And at least part of that was sort of outposts, sort of trading outposts being sent out by some of these cities in Southern Mesopotamia. And so Godin Tepe is an example of one of those. And so some of our earliest organic residue evidence for beer comes from there. But this is right at the same time as the emergence of the first writing in world history in Uruk and probably other cities in the

south, southern Mesopotamia. And as soon as we get these earliest cuneiform tablets, there's beer being written about. So quite a few of the earliest written documents in world history are about beer. What do they mention about the beer? My book, this is written for a very broad audience. So I try to use quite a lot of little semi-fictional vignettes to kind of pull people into the evidence and then kind of peel back the layers to explain how we know what we know about this. In this case, I use this little story about this guy named Kusim. I narrate him sort of leaving his house in the morning and walking through the streets of Uruk on his way to work. And he's going to work at the

brewery, kind of up near the center of the city. He goes into the brewery that he's in charge of. There's some guys already there at work. He goes into a little side room where he keeps his tablets, basically, that are his accounting documents for the brewery. And he goes in there and checks some of those because he's been having a sleepless night because he was worried about some of the numbers that he thought might not have matched up. He checks these little tablets and he breathes a sigh of relief. And I actually continue this story of Cushim later on as I sort of pick back up. But so on the one hand, I tell that story and then I say, well, actually,

we don't really know that there was a guy named Cushim. This term Cushim might have been a personal name. It might have been more like a title, an occupational title of some kind. We don't quite understand. We don't actually know that it was pronounced Cushim at this period. Those particular signs, I say, well, we don't actually know that he was in charge of a brewery. It's possible that he was managing something more like a storehouse that included brewing ingredients. And when I say, well, we don't really even know that this brewery or storehouse was in the city of Uruk. So I kind of peel back these different layers and say, what we do know is we have these tablets that he went in there to examine in his little tablet storeroom, those we have.

And so what your question was, what's in these tablets? And so what he is, when he goes in there to examine these tablets, what they're about is basically brewing ingredients and the beer that was made using those ingredients, which is really wonderful information. So in these earliest documents, part of what we get is basically someone like him accounting for the ingredients that that person received from elsewhere within the institutional economy. They received malted barley and ground barley, probably. all those ingredients, then accounting for all of the different jars of several different types of beer that they brewed with that and distributed it to various places and showing that those match up. And that is right from early on, you know, with the emergence of Uruk, as you said, the first city, so that right from the beginning of the emergence of these city-states and writing,

what it seems to suggest from these tablets, although admittedly, of course, there isn't limited evidence there, but still really interesting evidence, that very quickly you have the emergence of this beer industry. Yeah. And I think it's important to say, so I've already talked about how we have this kind of yawning gap of several thousand years before that, where we don't really know what was going on with beer. There have been theories that there was a real ramping up in the production of beer, like the late Andrew Sherritt would argue this,

that during this, basically the Uruk period, you have some very dynamic periods, urbanization, state formation, et cetera, that there was a real shift in the production of beer as part of this. I don't think we really know that. And it's definitely possible. My gut is that as we do more and more organic residue analysis and things,

those thousands of years are going to get filled up with evidence for beer. So my gut says that, yes, when we get these first written documents, beer is already there. It's kind of all over the place. I think that's because there's thousands of years behind that so we should expect that we already have a pretty sophisticated brewing drinking culture at this point but that's just kind of an educated guess no absolutely fair enough and well let's move on i'm going to do this thematically i've got so many different topics i'd love to ask you about regarding this, Tate. The next one is getting a bit more of a sense of the popularity, the importance of beer to Mesopotamian society and keeping on a rook

and a topic that we have discussed on the podcast in the past, that great poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the most popular in ancient Mesopotamia. the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the most popular in ancient Mesopotamia. But this also has a link to beer and quite a strong link to beer. Now, Tate, what is this? And what can that also reveal about the importance of beer in Mesopotamian societies? Tate Yeah, beer appears in a sort of pivotal episode in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a particularly famous one, where you have the wild man in Kidu who's been sent down to confront Gilgamesh. And he's basically living out in the wild with the animals, with the gazelles. And before he can come into the city of Uruk and confront Gilgamesh, he has to basically be turned into a civilized human being. And that happens partly through sex. This woman, Shamhat, is sent

out and she basically takes off her clothes and he says, whoa, and they have sex for like a week straight. So that's part of his civilizing. But then another key part of it is she basically has to teach him how to eat bread and drink beer. That's what humans do. If he wants to be a human, he has to learn how to do this. And so we have this little episode where he drinks a bunch of beer and it's sort of, he starts to sing. And so, yeah, you have, I mean, there are other things here. He has to get cleaned up and have clothes put on him and everything. But beer is really there at a sort of key episode

as one of the main indicators of what makes one a civilized Mesopotamian. So this actually has deeper meaning in itself, do you think, as a reflection of the importance of, it almost feels like two staples. It's interesting that water's not mentioned there. It's bread and beer rather than bread and water. Bread and beer are kind of just like become food and drink, general terms for food and drink. Yes. And so it does point to one aspect of beer in Mesopotamia is that it wasn't everyday food slash drink. This was almost certainly contributing a significant amount to the diet in a nutritional sense, which is very common cross-culturally yeah and if beer is important as more and more of these cities grow up we've talked about a rook but of course there are many many others that emerge

across the hundreds and thousands of years do we get from the surviving archaeological record even the literature that survives tate is there a sense that as there would have been different cultural traditions in each of these city-states each of them boasting very proud history and heritage, were their brewing traditions different as well? If beer is an important part of, in their mindset, being a civilized person, but did they have almost kind of different styles of beer, different traditions? Yeah, that's a great question. I think the answer is we don't currently really know. I would say almost certainly yes. And if, you know, you've had a look at my book and you probably noticed that the way I've written it,

it's not really organized chronologically or geographically. I'm sort of picking from lots of different places and times. And that's partly because we don't yet have a good sense for chronological and geographical variation. We have hints of it. But I think in writing this, I partly want to sort of set the stage for people to really dig into questions like that. Can we demonstrate that there were very distinctive brewing traditions in southern versus northern Mesopotamia or in this city versus its neighbor? So the answer is probably yes, but I can't really tell you right now. But let's explore ingredients and recipes for this tate. I mean, do we know what the main brewing ingredients in Mesopotamia was for their beer, for ancient beer?

Yeah, we have a pretty good sense. There are some big questions. It's a kind of theme in my book. There's a lot that we know, but there's also a lot that we don't know. So many kind of puzzles out there still to be solved. So in one sense, these were based on malted barley, as far as we can tell, I think across the board, which is a point of connection with the beers that many of us are most familiar with today. The other key brewing ingredient, we don't know if it was always, these two were always used together, but there's this ingredient called Bapir in Sumerian and it's harder. We don't know exactly what it was. There have been lots of different theories and lots of debates about this. Early on, it was thought to be some kind of bread and it's possible that it could be a kind of bread or cake or something like that. It's very enigmatic. And we get all these different little

hints about it. And people disagree. I think where I've tended to come down, and this is not based on solid incontrovertible evidence, but I tend to follow those who think that it might have been something like a dried out sourdough starter, like a fermentation starter, so that they had a means of intentionally initiating fermentation, adding yeast bacteria to start the fermentation, as opposed to people who have suggested for a long time that they just relied on yeast from the environment or from a previous batch of beer or kept within, you know, they didn't wash their brewing vessels. So the yeast just continued in there. But it's definitely possible that this

other key brewing ingredient was a means of intentionally starting fermentation. So there's those two. They also used emmer wheat in a lot of their beers. And then there's some other grain products that like ground or crushed barley. Then there's some others that are a little less certain. For example, we're not completely sure about whether or not they used any sort of roasted grains that would have given these beers sort of darker colors and that kind of thing. But there's at least two ingredients, especially this one called tea tab, and another known as Ninda Kuma, that might have somehow been in that realm sort of roasted or toasted.. Because we know in particular that those two ingredients went into two different kinds of dark beer.

There's also, so date syrup was certainly used in some beers. Often they just use the term lal, which means honey or syrup in general. So it could be honey, but their main sweetener was date syrup. They had lots and lots of dates. And so probably that's usually what we're talking about. It doesn't show up in texts that give us sort of, we don't really have recipes, but kind of a breakdown of the ingredients in particular beers, where it shows up more often is like in literature as something that was being added to the beer to

give it taste or that kind of thing. So at least sometimes date syrup. And then there's a huge question about, well, what other kinds of herbs or spices might they have used? Aromatics. And unfortunately, we know very little. As you get into later periods, the first millennium BC, there's a very specific one called casu that was definitely used for beer. But this is complicated by the fact that when we get into that period, they use the same word to refer to barley beer, but also to a date wine that they've started drinking. And they definitely use this particular aromatic

with date wine, sometimes with barley beer. But when you go into earlier periods, it's a very frustrating thing. We just don't know much about that. So they did not have hops, which is the key flavor ingredient for many of our beers. We're always wondering, well, did they add any kind of bitterness to these or just any of the kind of flavors that we associate with beer? And currently we don't know. Currently then you don't probably know how

it would taste. Would it be less or more alcoholic than beers today? I'm guessing all of this is still a big area of debate in the research until more information, let's say, residue from pots and so on becomes available. Absolutely. I think the question of taste is very hard still. We can probably get kind of close to that. And certainly, I think most would agree that these would have had a sour or tart element to them, given the likelihood that they're not using pure yeast cultures. These are a mixture of yeast and bacteria fermenting these. So we can probably get some angles of the flavor profile, but it's still hard. The question of alcohol content is a really interesting one, which I do talk about a good

deal in the book. And it's difficult. We definitely don't know for sure. You will see if you sort of Google around. There are quite a lot of articles out there and things saying, well, oh, Mesopotamian beer was apparently super low in alcohol content. It's like 0.5% alcohol or something. And a lot of that came, it was the result of a specific project, this site called Talbazi in Syria, which I talk about a lot because they have some wonderful evidence for beer, archaeological evidence. They did organic residue analysis. They could basically show that most of the households at the site were brewing their own beer. They have some possible taverns. It's great. And they had a standardized set of brewing vessels that they would find in these houses. And then they decided to see if they could replicate these beers, basically using the same kind of processes that they would have used at the site. They made one very specific argument for what they call a cold mashing process, which is a little bit just different than what we're

used to today. They were basically saying during the process where you have the ground up malt, malted barley that you've suspended in water in order to sort of activate the enzymes to break down those starches into fermentable sugars, they're saying, we don't think any heat was added. And normally one would heat this up to the ideal temperature for this process. And so then they tried to use this cold mashing process to brew some of their own beer. It was successful. It was a very low alcohol beer, I think in the 0.5 to 1.5% ABV range, which is interesting. But what I try to point out is that, well, they did prove that this is viable, this process that they are reconstructing. But

also in the articles, there's always a sentence that says, because we know that children sometimes drank beer in ancient Mesopotamia from cuneiform texts, we're assuming that these were low alcohol beers. Therefore, we've used a low malt to water ratio. So really, they, you know, they intended to produce these low alcohol beers, rather than demonstrating that these beers were necessarily low alcohol content. And so I prefer us to step back and say, well, the fact that children were drinking beer does not necessarily mean that these were low alcohol beers. And I've spent some time, I've written some articles about this saying, look, if you look at the literature, for example, which we have a lot

of, and they talk about beer quite often, beer is usually often paired with wine. They're recognized as similar in some sense. And drinking beer does things to people. It produces effects on people that we would, we recognize as, you know, inebriation. Even if they don't often talk about people being really drunk, definitely like tipsy or inebriated in some sense. I feel we need to talk about the importance of beer in these societies not just for pleasure but in many different areas of these Mesopotamian societies with the first area of taste that I really want to focus on being being in religion because when we talk about recipes and ingredients earlier I have in my notes and it seems quite a famous recipe or ingredients or tablet, which is if you type in earliest surviving beer recipe, it immediately comes up. The Hymn to Ninkasi. What exactly is this? Because this brings another fascinating

insight into how ancient Mesopotamian societies viewed beer. Yeah, the Hymn to Ninkasi is a fascinating document. So Ninkasi was the goddess of beer. Goddess of beer? and certain cities and things like that. But she certainly shows up in literature and other places and most prominently in this song, basically, written to praise her, the goddess of beer. So this is for her. And it is, the reason that it shows up

when you Google earliest recipes for beer is because in the process of praising the goddess, it sort of starts out and talks about her parentage, that kind of thing. But then most of the text is showing us these little scenes of Ninkasi as a brewer. So it's showing her at work in the brewery and it seems to be sort of arranged

in a maybe step-by-step fashion with her kind of moving through the brewing process. So she wasn't just the goddess of beer. She was very much depicted as a brewer. And so this is our best evidence for the overall brewing process in Mesopotamia. But it is definitely not a recipe for brewing beer. I mean, so I actually spend some time in the book, I don't know if this is effective or not, but I do a little comparison. I say, what if this song was actually closer to a drinking song? And so I dig into some sort of more recent drinking songs that also reference the brewing of beer in them, just to sort of temper our expectations about how much we should actually take

from this particular hymn when it comes to reconstructing the brewing process. It is definitely a song. It always appears alongside another text that we call it a drinking song. We don't really know if that's what it was, but both of them were songs of a sort. So yes, it's wonderful, but it does not say, in order to brew beer, step one, do this. It just gives us these kind of evocative descriptions of Ninkasi doing the things that a brewer does. Is it interesting that the god, the deity of beer is a woman? It's a goddess rather than a god. And does it hint that women in Mesopotamian societies could be brewers in one of these cities? The short answer is yes, definitely. It's an interesting question, and I don't think we can yet really make an argument that I think some people would be

interested in making, which is that there was essentially a kind of shift over time where you have brewing as a sort of women's art or craft from early on that was gradually sort of in the process of state formation, institutional expansion, basically co-opted into the male realm. So that when you have brewers who are working for the big palace and temple institutions, they're usually men. Sometimes there are women mentioned, but when you're talking about sort of institutional breweries, it's usually men. When you're talking about taverns, on the other hand, which don't appear as much in

the written record, they don't appear in like the institutional accounting documents and things, but they appear in literature, tax documents and other things. Those are really, you have both male and female tavern keepers, but especially in literature, for example, the tavern keeper is a female profession, basically. And then we have even more scattered evidence for home brewing. But I think that always points toward that being done by women, even if we can't say that across the board, that was the case. Keeping on that administrative part of it, the management of these breweries in these various city-states there. I mean,

was the big guy at the top or the royal family at the top or the chief priests or whoever, was it normally the wealthiest, most important people who had a big role in overseeing the creation, the production of beer, and it would ultimately filter down into lower levels of society? But was there almost kind of a monopolization of beer by those figures right at the top? It's a great question. I don't think we know for certain. I do try to sort of set this up as a big question in the book, which is that there have been big debates about how the economy in Mesopotamia worked for a long time. And there have been those who say, especially in certain periods, these institutions, the palaces and the temples were really dominant in the sense managing most of the economy so that there wasn't much space for private enterprise of different kinds. Many people would not agree with that. So there's

been big debates about this. And I think beer sort of sits right at the center of that. And we have evidence for both. Definitely the people at the top were not managing themselves, but had breweries that were under their control, where they were both distributing beer to say the dependents of the palace on a daily basis, or producing beer for particular festivals, feasts, that kind of thing, sometimes giving out as rations to workers, things like that. But when we're talking about taverns, for example, as far as we can tell, those were generally privately owned. So those were not institutionally managed. We don't know exactly how common they were, but I think the evidence suggests that they were probably pretty common. And then, again, we don't know that much about home brewing. But say, like I mentioned Talbazi, where they've excavated something like 50 houses at the site, and they argue at least that almost every house was brewing their own beer. So in that sense, there at least, it was definitely not being monopolized by the people at the top.

there at least, it was definitely not being monopolized by the people at the top. But it's also interesting to envisage, isn't it, Tate? And I remember you mentioned earlier, some of those earlier surviving tablets from Uruk, that if taverns, let's say in a city, we don't know how many there were, but presumably there were a few in each city, what that relationship was between the tavern and the breweries, which was state run, and kind of the negotiating of prices, the acquiring of the finished beer products from the breweries to take to your taverns, which are privately owned. You can imagine that they must have had the bureaucracy behind that with all their tablets, cuneiform tablets. That would have been a big thing, an important part of the whole industry. Yeah, absolutely. So I said that taverns don't appear that often in the cuneiform record,

in literature, for example, but where they do show up is where they interface with the institutional economy, which is in things like paying taxes. And so we get them, for example, delivering spent grain, so the brewing byproducts as taxes to the state, basically, because those byproducts are often fed to livestock. And so they were actually pretty valuable in themselves. So we do see that interface between the taverns and the institutional system, but not that often. So in the famous Code of Hammurabi, where we have all these, not exactly laws, but all these law-like things promulgated by this of Hammurabi, where we have all these, not exactly laws, but all these law-like things promulgated by this King Hammurabi, a number of them reference

tavern keepers. One of them, for example, has to do with the tavern keeper and whether she is willing to accept both grain and silver in payment for her beer. So there was some element of regulation trying to guard against tavern keepers who were sort of like price gouging or something like that. I don't know what you'd call it. The other laws that appear in there, one of them takes us into a totally different territory, but it's a punishment for a tavern keeper where there are criminals that are congregating in her establishment and she's not reporting them to the palace. So you have little hints of the tavern as a very distinct sort of space where you could have, I don't know,

problematic people gathering. And so you have both a sense that taverns were a part of everyday life, but then occasionally you get these hints that they might have sometimes been these kind of liminal spaces where things that wouldn't have been allowed elsewhere can happen in taverns, you know, and that maybe brings up this question of sex that you're talking about. But I don't think everyone agrees about this. Some people really do think that they were these sort of taverns were kind of kept at a distance. But I think there's plenty of evidence that they were more common and more integral to sort of urban space than that. Well, let's go into that sex question then. So I mean, looking at the surviving evidence and

the arts, is beer, is it closely linked to sex in Mesopotamia, this idea of intoxication and fornication almost kind of going hand in hand and almost sometimes warnings against not drinking too much on a night out or something like that. Yeah, definitely there's a close relationship. It doesn't mean that across the board that was the case. But so for example, we have some wonderful Sumerian love poems that are also in the territory of kind of songs. They often make reference to beer, often as a kind of metaphorical description when a man is talking about his lover, he's like describing her as, you know, either providing him with beer or

describing her as beer in some sense. So there's a close link there. I mean, perhaps the most obvious link is in the artistic record, where we have, especially during a pretty restricted period of time, sort of late third millennium, early second millennium BC. We have this relatively common scene in the artistic record where you have a man and woman having sex. The man is standing up behind the woman, the woman is bent over at the waist, and she is drinking through a straw from a vessel that sits on the ground. And that's almost certainly beer. So we have these scenes, they often appear on these little clay plaques that people could have had, we think, in their houses. They're not super expensive to produce or anything. A lot of the other artistic evidence comes from things like cylinder seals, which were fancier items. But on these little clay plaques,

we have these beer and sex scenes. We also do have some earlier examples. I said they were kind of restricted. I actually start the book by narrating the excavation of the cylinder seal at the site of Hamukar in Syria, where a friend of mine, Salam Al-Kuntar, was excavating this burial, which was actually part of my wife's dissertation research. And in that they she excavated this little tiny cylinder seal that had one of these scenes on it it's fascinating that i'm glad you mentioned that particular example as well that is right at the beginning of your book but it's also interesting you mentioned those love poems and you know talking

about beer there it's like they're celebrating beer through love poetry which is fascinating in its own right i wish i could ask you so many more questions, Tate, but I will pick you up on one detail that you mentioned there, which was the depiction of a woman drinking beer through a straw with the bowl on the ground. Now, therefore, should we be imagining if you went to a tavern or somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia that you shouldn't imagine the equivalent of your pint glass today in a pub. But instead, if you were served your beer, you'd be served it with a straw. I mean, do we know much about how people in ancient Mesopotamia, how they drink beer, how they drank beer? We do know a good bit about this. And I should start by saying, definitely, you could sometimes get beer in different kinds of cups. Definitely. Equivalents

of the pint glass, for sure. But they also, especially when they're depicting beer drinking in the artistic record, it is often from straws. I mean, we have huge numbers of these scenes that show people. It's a very particular kind of event. These are called banquet scenes. And we assume that they're a sort of elite banquet where you have people sort of sitting primly on chairs. Sometimes they're holding little conical cups in their hands, which could be for drinking beer, could be for drinking wine. But then also in those same scenes, you often have often two people sitting on either side of a big vessel. And then from that vessel, you have straws sticking out and those people are drinking through straws. So this is not a rare scene. We have lots and lots of examples of this. And I actually wasn't aware of this as I

was working on the book. And I love this additional piece of evidence that we have for straws. So for example, we have some super fancy straws made out of metals that have survived. But in general, these straws would have been made out of reed, which doesn't survive well in the archaeological record. And so they are very seldom preserved. But what we do have is these little, often copper or bronze filter tips that would have been attached to the end of the reed, and they have little perforations in them. And that's what you would have submerged into the beer that would filter out any solid matter. And so we have quite a few of those preserved, often sitting in a burial, a single one sitting at the bottom of a vessel in a burial, as if when that person was buried, that next to them was a vessel with a straw sticking out of it with its filter in there.

But they're not always that way. So this site of Tel Bazi, they also recovered a number of these filter tips, for example, and they had a little room in a temple where there had been some kind of special exclusive feast going on. And there were a number of these filter tips recovered there. So yes, they often drank their beer through these long reed straws from a communal vessel. Beer drinking, does it endure all the way down to let's say the Iron Age, maybe into the time of Alexander the Great and the Persians? Would someone in Babylon or Susa in that area of the world, would they still know someone like Ninkazi, Mesopotamian beer drinking culture? Does it endure all the time? Is it one of the most long lasting traditions of Mesopotamia? Do we know much about that?

time? Is it one of the most long lasting traditions of Mesopotamia? Do we know much about that? Yeah, I think the answer is yes. I think, you know, my book basically takes us up into the Persian period, but not beyond that. And sure, beer drinking is still going strong in Mesopotamia at that point. I think what kind of complicates it is what I mentioned earlier, which is where they're also drinking another beverage that they call beer, but it's a date wine at the same time. So you do get this other beverage coming in. Also at the same time, grape wine, which especially in earlier periods was coming, this is not a wine producing region, really. It's mainly coming from the hillier regions around. And early on, it was very much a luxury item.

It gradually becomes more and more common so that by the first millennium BC, I mean, it's still, I think, a luxury item, but relatively common. And so you have maybe a more diverse landscape of beverages by that point. But yeah, beer drinking is continuous across those three millennia of history. Definitely, we shouldn't assume that the beer was the same across that period of time or that drinking customs were the same or the way they were brewing it. So I think we can argue for both long-term continuity, but also evolution over time. evolution over time. Tate, this has been absolutely brilliant. Last but certainly not least, you have written a book. We've mentioned it a few times during the episode. You have written a book all about this. It is called? In the Land of Ninkasi, A History of Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia. Tate, just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It was my pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Tate Paulette talking all the things early beer the origins of beer with

a particular focus on beer and beer drinking in ancient mesopotamia the first known beer drinking culture in the world i really do hope you enjoyed today's episode now last things from me first of all we do have our first ever ancients live show it's happening in london on thursday the 5th of september at 7 p.m as part of the london podcast festival i really do hope to see you there it promises to be a really fun evening we've got fan favorite lloyd's luellen jones in the flesh we're going to be talking all things the tower of babel in front of a live audience and And I really do hope to see you there. Link to tickets are in the description.

So definitely, if you can, and if you are willing to, please do come and see us at our first ever live show. I'm really, really excited for it. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe, and as a special gift you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use code ANCIENTS at checkout. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.