Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia with Tate Paulette

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: In the Land of Nasi, College of the Holy Cross, Jacob Dom, Makunta Voules Merinudia
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Hamukar
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Ningeru
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Talbazi, Talbazi
5. 40:00 – 50:00: Ninkasi, Talbazi, Talbazi

Notable quotes from "Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia with Tate Paulette"

• Spend one hour learning from experts in the field of archaeology and ancient history. Now I'm Jacob Dom. I'm an officer of the local Worcester Massachusetts regional AIA…

  about Jacob Dom · at 0:09

• Difficult to select from his many publications but I do want to put some emphasis on his most recent book in the land of Nasi a history of beer in ancient Mesopotamia published…

  about In the Land of Nasi · at 4:10

• Really great to be here with you this evening. thanks to the AIA for inviting me, and to the Worcester Society for hosting, and of course, thanks to all of you for joining in.…

  about Worcester Society · at 6:43

• Seal that we're focusing on here and it was found at this place called Hamukar, an archaeological site in northeastern Syria.

  about Hamukar · at 15:38

• Building that was excavated in a sort of temple precinct called the Bagara dedicated to the god Ningeru. and what in the book I give us another little imaginative scenario…

  about Ningeru · at 27:49

• Quickly through it. A pair of babbling putts. here I take us to the site of Talbazi in Syria, an archaeological site. What you're seeing here is a plan of a building that looks…

  about Talbazi · at 39:31

• The nigdurb which makes a pleasant sound is ninkasi has placed appropriately on top of a large lan. So what you generally have is a vessel with a hole in its base sitting over a collecting vessel. They love to talk about the wonderful.

  about Ninkasi · at 41:28

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Jacob Dom — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:13
• Tate Pette — Person · 1 mention · first at 3:33
  Okay. So now I can take some time to introduce our speaker Tate Pette who's an associate professor in the department of history at North Carolina State University where his research and teaching focus on the food systems as.

Books & papers

• In the Land of Nasi — Book · 2 mentions · first at 4:15

Companies & orgs

• College of the Holy Cross — Company · 1 mention · first at 0:24
  Massachusetts regional AIA chapter and a member of the classics department at the College of the Holy Cross. And I'm deeply excited to be introducing our program and our…
• Oxford University Press — Company · 1 mention · first at 4:23
  The land of Nasi a history of beer in ancient Mesopotamia published with Oxford University Press in 2024 but also I want to mark my excitement for a forthcoming volume of which…
• Worcester Society — Company · 1 mention · first at 6:47

Concepts & topics

• Talbazi — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 39:37
  Quickly through it. A pair of babbling putts. here I take us to the site of Talbazi in Syria, an archaeological site. What you're seeing here is a plan of a building that looks…
• Ninkasi — Concept · 2 mentions · first at 41:32
• Ningeru — Concept · 1 mention · first at 27:54
• Inana — Concept · 1 mention
• Nasi — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

• Talbazi — Place · 2 mentions · first at 39:37
• Makunta Voules Merinudia — Place · 1 mention · first at 3:59
  World but currently is co-director of the excavations and I am going to do my best on this one. Makunta Voules Merinudia in western Cyprus and I'll go ahead and say now in…
• Hamukar — Place · 1 mention · first at 15:41
• Uruk — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Hello everyone. Uh I want to welcome you all to the first archaeology hour of the year and this is our free lecture series open to the public where we can all spend one hour learning from experts in the field of archaeology and ancient history. Now I'm Jacob Dom. I'm an officer of the local Worcester Massachusetts regional AIA chapter and a member of the classics department at the College of the Holy Cross. And I'm deeply excited to be introducing our program and our speaker today. Now, before I dive into all of that, I'd like to introduce our organization to those joining us for the first time today. The AIA is the oldest and largest archaeological organization in North America, but more importantly, it is an organization deeply connected with all levels of those interested in ancient studies. For the most from the most senior academic researcher to a first grade classroom learning about the

0:57 ancient world for the first time, the AIA has programs and efforts linked to a whole range of those interested in the past. Now, our organization publishes the popular archaeology magazine, but also the world's leading academic journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, the American Journal of Archaeology, both of which are available to AIA members. In addition, the AIA facilitates access to a number of different ways for individuals to pursue an interest in the past. This includes traveling far a field uh possibly by some of the uh fieldwork opportunities listed on our web page uh as well as a number of uh tour opportunities to go around the world with experts and even elements that are much closer to home uh organized by the AIA, its local chapters or other collaborating organizations.

1:52 So, if you are at all interested in membership or our events, please do scan the QR code visible on the screen here or visit our website archaeological.org. Membership to the AIA offers a number of benefits, including discounts on AIA programs like tours or the annual meeting, but also access to unique AIA resources uh in the form of publications, fellowships, and grants. As a nonprofit organization, we do rely on donations of all levels to support our mission. These donations support a wide variety of efforts centered on studying and preserving cultural heritage as well as programming like this. And if you're at all interested in supporting the AIA, please use either the QR code located on the screen or visit our website at archaeological.org/donate, also visible here.

2:52 So before we launch into the part everyone's here for, I want to take a moment and uh show off our program of speakers. Um, as you can see, we have a number of scholars coming in for our archaeology hour over the course of 2025, 2026, all of whom will be speaking on absolutely fascinating and ranging aspects of the past. I'd also like to make special mention of our next talk. Again, these are effectively monthly to be delivered by uh delivered by Justin Levenger of Stanford University titled Shipping Stone for Justinian's Empire.

3:30 Okay. So now I can take some time to introduce our speaker Tate Pette who's an associate professor in the department of history at North Carolina State University where his research and teaching focus on the food systems as well as the societies of some of the earliest polities and cities of the ancient near east. He has conducted fieldwork all over the world but currently is co-director of the excavations and I am going to do my best on this one. Makunta Voules Merinudia in western Cyprus and I'll go ahead and say now in introducing uh Tate when faced with a CV like this it becomes more than a little difficult to select uh from his many publications but I do want to put uh some emphasis on his most recent book in the land of Nasi a history of beer in ancient Mesopotamia published with Oxford University Press in 2024 but also I want to mark my excitement for a forthcoming volume of which he's the

4:30 editor titled a cultural history of wine and antiquity. His articles cover a broad range of topics, everything from zoo archaeology to alcohol studies to more traditional archaeological analyses. Though the number one uh one that I do want to miss uh is possibly one of my favorites, an article titled inebriation and the early state, beer and the politics of affect in Mesopotamia. One that I've actually used in the classroom many times. I would also like to point out all of his work uh in a public capacity, bringing experimental archaeology to the broader public through experimental recreations of ancient beers and appearing on such wonderful programs as the people in the past podcast. Needless to say, I am deeply in excited to introduce our speaker uh who will be delivering his lecture beer in ancient Mesopotamia.

5:22 Before turning it over to Tate, I have two last announcements, so bear with me. uh with respect to our presentation. The first is a friendly reminder to our guests to respect the intellectual property of our presenter and not record this talk as this is prohibited. Uh the talk is being recorded by the AIA and will be shared publicly at a later date. In addition, um we have some settings tips for Zoom users to assist you. Notably on the screen you'll see uh instructions for how to mute chat popups throughout the talk. Uh whether you're joining us on a mobile platform or computer.

6:03 Uh if you have questions as well, please type them into our dedicated Q&A box uh not the chat and we'll try to get to as many as possible at the end of the lecture. I I'll be reviewing these in the hopes of uh presenting them to Tate to answer. Okay. So with all of that aside, I am very happy again to introduce our talk. So please Tate.

6:38 Okay. Hi everyone. Um I hope the screen sharing is working all right. Uh it's really great to be here with you this evening. Um, thanks to the AIA for inviting me, uh, and to the Worcester Society for hosting, uh, and of course, thanks to all of you for joining in. Um, I'm going to use the time that I have this evening to introduce you to my new book, In the Land of Nasi, a history of beer in ancient Mesopotamia. So, first, just a quick intro to the book, what sort of thing it is, the audience that it's aiming at, guiding principles, that sort of thing. Uh then I want to move through five moments from the book using these to dig down into the kinds of evidence I uh the kinds of questions I address, the kinds of evidence available um and really just give you a sense of what the book is like. Um and then I should have some time for questions at the end.

7:29 Okay. Uh all right. So, I uh I called this book um an introduction to the world's first great beer culture. Uh so, what do I mean by that? Um we are these days, if you're if you're interested in ancient alcohol, this is a really great time. There's all kinds of interesting work being done. There's been a lot in particular using organic residue analysis. So, you know, residues preserved on the inside of ceramic vessels, stone vessels, etc. to look at earlier and earlier evidence for um alcohol in different parts of the world.

8:10 And so we're getting all kinds of interesting information about the very earliest days of alcoholic beverages. In many cases, uh we don't in those examples we learn we get little bits of info. You know, these particular vessels held a beverage that included the following ingredients or something like that. But we haven't we can't really paint a full picture of the what that alcohol what alcohol was doing in that particular society. So when I talk about Mesopotamia as the world's first great beer culture, what I mean is this is the first time where we have a really broad range of different kinds of evidence that allow us to to really um talk about this beer culture in its full complexity.

8:53 Uh so and and I should say I do spend a little bit of time in the book on that that much earlier um that earlier evidence but the real focus of of the book starts in the vicinity of 3000 BC a little bit before that. Uh so uh what is this book? Um I I've given a a lot of different talks over the years about beer and Mesopotamia to all different kinds of audiences. um whether academic audiences, college students, um uh brewers, or just general audiences of all different kinds. Um and my overriding impression that is across all of those different audiences um people are not just interested in hearing um our conclusions. You might think that once you move beyond um a strictly academic audience, people just kind of want to hear um the conclusions of our research. I don't think that's right. I think across the board people ask very good questions that really want to dig down into um the details how we got to

9:53 those conclusions. And so the kind of guiding principle behind this book is that I am going to write for that broad audience but I'm not going to um avoid difficult issues of evidence and interpretation. It's just that I'm going to do the work to to pull people into those issues and guide them through it. um trying to be very clear about exactly what we know about beer in an ancient Mesopotamia, how we know it, but also try to be really upfront about um what we don't know with um absolute certainty. So I raise a lot of questions um and sometimes those questions are are not answerable. Um, but I also do think that part of what I'm trying to do in the book is to show readers just how much we actually know about the world of ancient Mesopotamia and in particular about beer uh in that world. So, um, so you I do you'll see quite a lot, um, that's really sort of strikingly familiar that that mirrors some things

10:55 about our own kind of beer cultures, but then immediately um, other things that might seem odd, um, surprising, um, strange in various ways. Uh, and so, uh, I I kind of I'm trying to juxtapose those two elements throughout. In terms of style, um it is meant to be informal and light-hearted. Um I try to keep the narrative moving um as quickly as I can and not get too bogged down in any particular issues. Uh, I use a lot of sort of semifictional um vignettes taking us back into the past, particular places of time. Um, and to really dig down into um the kind of evidence we're dealing with. Um, but but to also kind of make it feel more real.

11:44 Uh, and I also do a lot of focusing in on some particular piece of evidence that we can dig down into. Uh, okay. So, with that said, just a second. All right. So, this this is just a a table of contents just in case you're interested. How is this book organized? Um, it moves broadly from a general introduction to sort of beer in world history. Um, uh, and then an introduction to ancient Mesopotamia, the kind of sources we have available, that sort of thing. and some sort of overview um framing about the role of beer in the society. And then we really dig down in uh first to the brewing of beer starting out with um brewing ingredients and the types of beer that they were brewing then brewing technologies and techniques then brewers and brewing spaces. So that's all about brewing and then for the later part of the book I move into um drinking. So, drinkers and drinking practices and then the experience of

12:42 beer drinking and then the the final part um digs down into some of this experimental brewing work that I've done but also that some others um have done. Okay. So, as I said um that's my general intro. Um from now on what I want to do is I want to take us through um five sort of moments from the book and these are those moments. So, a suggestive seal, a brewer who's stewing, a goddess who's brewing, a pair of babbling pots, and an ill- fated tavern. So, let's start out with a suggestive seal. This seal right here. Um, if you're not familiar with this, this is a what's called a cylinder seal. One of the classic, um, artifact types from ancient Mesopotamia. Um, these are often very small. I think this one is about a centimeter and a half high, often made out of precious stones of different kinds and they have intricate designs um carved into them, often really kind of artistic masterpieces. Uh people would

13:44 have used these kind of like a signature. Um if you can think of how you uh you take a a stamp seal and put it in wax on the back of a letter for example, this is something similar. This is a but a cylinder seal that they would have taken and rolled in wet clay and then it leaves behind an impression of the of the scene that's carved into it. And yeah, so people used it as a kind of signature and they would often have it um either um tied around their on a cord around their wrist or around their neck. Uh so for a little bit of context about this particular one um so where was this found right? Uh for that we're going to zoom out quickly to um what where is the place that I'm talking about today?

14:23 ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers. Here you have a a general map to orient us. You can see in the background, I hope you've got modern political boundaries. You can see that we're we're talking basically about modern-day Iraq uh and parts of northeastern Syria. And what I've highlighted here um in the two circles um is the two kind of main sub regions of Mesopotamia. Southern Mesopotamia, which is the kind of classic heartland of cities, the irrigated agriculture zone, and then uh northern Mesopotamia, which is the um uh dry farming or rainfed zone. We're going to be looking at material from across um both of these.

14:59 Uh oh, chronologically, um we are my book covers a a broad range of time. I say that I get started a little before 3000 BC. Um and then it basically covers the next three millennia. Um, and that's what you see in pink over on the left side there. Um, and I do quite a lot of sort of picking from different jumping back and forth from across for to different time periods, which is maybe not ideal, but I don't think that we're at a point yet where we can really tell a complete story that moves through time and tells us about the evolving beer culture, but I think it's a good goal for the future. Uh what I've highlighted there in red is the early Bronze Age and that is because that's the date of this um seal that we're focusing on here and it was found at this place called Hamukar, an archaeological site in northeastern Syria.

15:46 Um this seal was excavated in 2010, which was the the last season that my wife and I were working um at the site of Hamukar in Syria. uh and at in that season she was in the second um year of supervising um excavations for her um PhD dissertation. So she had a series of excavations across the site um with different um supervisors in charge of each um the co-director of the site Salam Alar was actually helping uh my wife um with a excavate a series of burials in this trench that you see here. And I'm uh it's actually the one sort of in the background to the left there that I'm showing you a plan of. Um this this little seal was found um in that burial that I've highlighted there, L130, and it it had been suspended on a necklace around the person's neck who was buried there. Um and what you're seeing there um on the bottom center right is the very first time that we rolled this seal out. Because what's

16:46 funny about these is when you just look at them, it's very hard to actually figure out what is what scene is carved into them. So what you have to do is you have to roll them out. So we had to go in search of some modeling clay so we could roll this out and see what was actually depicted there. So this is our first attempt at that. But I'll I'll zoom in now, show you a sort of nicer rolling of it. There you see the seal on the right and then the seal impression. Um if you're having trouble seeing what's going on, I'm going to actually zoom in a little bit further. Okay, now have a look at it. Can you see what's going on? I'm not going to describe it in in great detail. What you have in the in the center is a a sort of conicle vessel sitting on the floor. There is a woman who is bending over and is drinking out of that vessel almost certainly through a straw that we can't see. And then behind that woman there is

17:31 a man. Um, you can probably see what's going on. Uh, but these are kind of this is kind of a stick figure version of a scene that's actually um relatively common, not super common, but relatively common in Mesopotamia where you have um a man and a woman having sex while the woman is bending over drinking beer um almost certainly beer from a vessel through a long straw. So I I start out the um Just a second. Yeah. Uh drinking through through a straw is kind of the classic way uh that they like to depict beer consumption in Mesopotamia. Um there are lots lots more examples like the one you see here uh where you have we have what's called banquet scenes where people are sort of sitting kind of primly on seats drinking from a shared uh vessel through these long straws. We have lots and lots of these hundreds. Um here here are some other examples. For example, down there at the bottom right, um you see two

18:31 people um drinking from from straws. Again, uh but then what I'm showing in the other two examples is that they also depict people drinking from cups. I think we feel pretty confident then that when they're drinking from straws, it's probably beer that they're drinking. The cups, we're not necessarily so certain. Could be wine. Um we we don't really know when it comes to the straws though. Um, so these would have we we have some super fancy straws um preserved that are made out of metal. Uh, but in general these would have been long reeds and reed does not preserve well um archaeologically. So very rarely do we have any traces of these drinking straws um except that we have this wonderful um series of artifacts that are um basically little metal sort of fingerlength filters um that are you can see one there. It's kind of cone- shaped and they had perforations through them.

19:22 So they would have been attached to the end of a reed straw and then that end would have been um submerged into the beer where it served as a kind of filter. So we have a series of these mostly from uh the middle bronze age and especially not all of them but especially coming from uh burials where they were found a single one down in the base of a pot like the the one that I've circled here and uh here you see that one um on the left and then three others from the same site. uh Chagar Bazaar in Syria. All the same date, all found in burials. Uh just to just to point out though, um the scale is different here for the vessels and the straws. The straws are actually much smaller relative to the vessels than what you see here. Uh and what one thing that's fun here though is on those uh three of those um filters, you can see that there was actually reed preserved on the inside of them. So, we

20:10 know that they were once attached to the end of one of these reed straws. Uh so I open up the book with this particular seal because I think it's a really interesting way to get us into this question this this issue of of sort of like um what are the similarities but also the differences in in this this very ancient um beer culture compared to our own. And I think it does a nice job of of opening up these kinds of questions. Um what I'm showing you here I also to kind of continue that for each chapter I started out with a little quote from a text and many of those are Sumerian proverbs and they they like to talk about beer in their proverbs. There's some wonderful ones like not to know beer is not normal. He is fearful like a man unacquainted with beer. Beer is a bull the mouth is its stairway. Or the pleasure it is the beer. The discomfort it is the journey. I just love these. um they get us again into this territory

21:05 where we kind of recognize we can see they they love beer. We can see some similarities but then also some of the proverbs are pretty pretty perplexing. Uh in any case, let's move on to our second moment. A brewer who's stewing. Uh here you see what the um the ancient city of Uruk looks like today. Um this was the the first city in world history. Um here you see it as a ruin but I I want you to imagine this as a bustling city. Um at this period maybe 20,000 people something like that. Um we are going to zoom down in into a city street where we're following a man named Kushim as he leaves his house in the morning and he starts making his way um through the busy streets and he's making his way towards the high point in the city where there's these big fancy buildings in the distance. Um, and he sort of makes his way through the streets for a while and then we uh follow him and he ends up at

22:03 this um u mudbrick building, goes in the doorway um and he he sort of surveys the scene and there's a series of workers doing various things and then he though very quickly runs over into a little side room, opens it up um breaks the seal on the door that he had sealed with a cylinder seal um the previous day. He goes in uh goes over and grabs two clay tablets to compare them because he had basically been up all night worrying that he had made a mistake uh in his accounting. He compares the tablets and everything's fine. Uh and then uh he's sort of feeling better. He goes back out and starts chatting with some of the workers. Uh and we learn that this is in fact a brewery and he is in charge of this brewery. Uh and and these are some of the brewery workers. Uh, and so, um, I open up with this little scene of a of a of a brewery in this in the world's first city. Um, partly just well because I want to talk

22:59 also about the world's first writing. Um, and in fact, many of these earliest documents that we have from Espatamia are about beer. Um, but I've constructed this kind of semi-fictional, quite a lot of it is fictional narrative and I do that and then I start saying, well actually there's a lot about this that we don't actually know for certain. We don't really know um that we don't know what this brewery actually looked like. Um, we don't know who worked there. We don't actually know exactly what they were doing there to brew the beer. In fact, we don't know that this guy Kushim was a brewer. There's a possibility that he was in charge of something more like a storage facility where they kept uh brewing ingredients.

23:40 Um we don't even know that his name was actually Kushim. The signs at that at this period that we read Kushim, they might not have been a personal name. They might have been like um an office of some kind. We don't really know. Um we don't even really know that he was um active in the city of Uruk. Um uh just to show you another slide here. This is a zoomed-in shot of some excavations in the city of Uruk up at the high point um at the center of this village uh this city. That's what he was heading towards when he was on his way to work. Um this is what's called the Ayana precinct. Um it's it's in the a series of monumental buildings in this area. Some of them temples, others we're not as sure what they are. This is where most of the earliest um cuneaoifor documents, the earliest written documents in uh world history were found. Something like 5,000 in the ruins of these buildings, not specifically the ones that I'm talking

24:38 about here. Um which is why there's some uncertainty about um where he was active. But so when I I start pulling back the layers on this little story about all that we don't know. So what do we know? What what we do know is those tablets that he went to get in his little office. Um those are actually preserved and you can see some of the the two here that he was comparing. Um these come from about 3000 BC. Um not the earliest tablets that we have but very early in the history of the Kuneaform writing system. We have quite a lot of documents about beer. These particular ones very interesting. We're going to look at the one on the left in particular. What this is is um documentation uh of a series of of deliveries of beer to particular individuals. What you see is basically numerical signs in each of these little cases. And then if you kind of turn your head um clockwise 90°, I think clockwise

25:32 uh and look at these signs, you can see that they're actually depicting different kinds of jars. Some of them have a um pointy base, some have a rounded base with other little markings. Those are showing us um those are the signs for different kinds of beer. So what's being tallied up on this side of this tablet is X number of jars of this type of beer, Y number of jars of this other type of beer, Z number of jar jars of this other type of beer were delivered to X person and then it starts over again. So it's it's tabulating a series of deliveries of beer. If we flip this tablet over onto the back side, the reverse, um I've given you a drawing of it here and kind of color coded it to see if we can help. um help you understand it. Um what we have is um so you've got deliveries of beer on the other on the one side on the back what he's doing whoever was writing this tablet was tallying up all of the ingredients that

26:30 were used to brew all those jars of beer on the other side. So it proceeds by basically if you look in the center in red, it gets a total jar count for the four different beer types that were mentioned on the other side. And then for each of those total jar um counts, it breaks it down into two kinds of ingredients that were used, gros and malt um barley gatros and malted barley to brew those. And then over on the left side in blue, it gives us a total of all of the maltted barley and all of the barley gros that were used to brew all of those jars of beer on the other side.

27:04 Right? So this this early document about beer is not only showing us it's showing us both the delivery of beer but also all the ingredients that were used to brew that beer or at least some key grain ingredients. And then in orange down at the bottom you see the signature Kushim possibly this this guy that we were talking about as a brewer. Okay. Um, so, um, I made up his brewery, right? That was in my imagination, but we do have better evidence, um, from some later periods. Um, not any that where we're absolutely certain that what we're looking at is a brewery. But I'm showing you the best case here, uh, from the site of Talhiba, that's the ancient city of Lagos in Iraq. Um this is a building that was excavated in a um a sort of um temple precinct called the Bagara dedicated to the god Ningeru. Uh and and what in the book I I give us another little imaginative scenario where I take us back in time and we go

28:05 through a tour through this building that was excavated. We start out you can see my little walking tour. Um the building on the left um is probably a major shrine to the god Nin Gearsu. And we kind of peek in there, but then we quickly head down into a little alleyway between that building and another one that was built right next to it. And that's the building that um might very well have been a brewery. And we pay more attention. We go into each room of this brewery to check out exactly what was preserved in it. And I've shown you a few photos there. It's not absolutely certain that it was a brewery, but the kind of things that were found in it make good sense for a brewery. Uh there was even a kuneaoiform tablet that mentions a specific uh that mentions a brewery and also a specific named brewer uh and and the distribution of some beer. So this is our best case for an archaeologically excavated brewery uh in

28:53 Mesopotamia. Uh okay. Now our uh our third moment, a goddess who's brewing. Um, so we saw those very early um, kaiform tablets that talk about beer and brewing ingredients. For the next 3,000 years, beer is all over the place in the Kuneaoiform record. We have thousands, it appears in thousands of um, tablets. But what I'm showing you here um, is the most famous one um, or or the most famous text, the hymn to Nasi, goddess of beer. Uh this hymn to the beer goddess always appears in association with another text that we have that has been called a drinking song. We don't know exactly if that's what it was but um they appear together on three known tablets in some cases with some other songs.

29:44 And I'm giving you the names of these. They in Mesopotamia they liked to the title of a text was um typically the first line. And so I'm giving you what those names would have been if if that was the case with these. So this him nasi, this is definitely the most famous document about brewing in Mesopotamia and has played a major role in discussions of of how they brewed beer. U but if you've ever heard that this was a recipe for brewing beer, I just want to tell you it is not a recipe for brewing beer. This is a hymn or a song of some kind um that is praising the goddess of beer, Nasi. And it's it's praising her by painting a series of little pictures of her at work in the brewery doing the key activities of the brewer. So you get a little flavor of what it's telling us here. Like Nasi, you're the one who handles dough, mixing in a pit the papier with sweet aromatics. You're the one who bakes the

30:35 vapier, puts in order the piles of halt grain. You're the one who waters the earthcovered malt, soaks the malt in a jar, spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats. The one who holds with both hands the great sweet wart, brewing it with honey and wine. You're the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat. It's like the onrush of the tigress and Euphrates. Uh, right. It's nice, but it is not a recipe. Trying to use that to brew beer um is a very challenging task. Uh, and so um I spend a good bit of time in the book um trying to talk about what kind of text, how sort of temper our expectations about what we ought to be able to get from this text. Um so I do that partly by comparing it to a series of more recent drinking songs. In particular, drinking songs that also have something to tell us about the brewing of beer.

31:20 Like this one at the top. Beer, beer, beer. Lord Bless Charlie Mops, the man who invented beer, beer, beer. A barrel of malt, a bushel of hops. You stir it around with a stick, the kind of lubrication to make your engine tick. Or John Barley Corn, which is a song that takes us, it sort of we have a personified barley corn, and it takes us him from the field as he's processed and turned into um beer or maybe whiskey in this case. Um, I try to do this just to sort of think like what if the hima nasi was something more like a drinking song.

31:51 It was certainly a song. Um, just to get us to sort of again temporary expectations about what we ought to expect to get from it because in either of these examples I'm showing you here again using that to actually brew beer would be uh very difficult. A number of other issues that I spent some time on um there are major translational difficulties in the Hampton and Kasi. have two main translations by Miguel Seville and much more recently by Walter Salberger. Um, and there's still there there's substantial differences in how these two um, sumerologists understood um, the brewing process behind the translations. Um, certainly Solburgers had 50ome years um, of further research to draw on behind it.

32:35 So he's um, there are all kinds of improvements in the way he's understanding it. um but also you know he has a very specific understanding of how brewing um worked in Mesopotamia that's coming through in this translation. And so the reason I've highlighted these in colors is just allow you to sort of compare um the the same how these two um sumerologists translated the same lines. Um I'm not going to read through them uh right now need to keep moving. Again I spend a lot of time on this text because it's been very important um in in discussions of beer and Mesopotamia. One thing that I talk about is I talk about what I call two traps um that have sort of seductive traps that I think have hindered our interpretation of it. One I called a minimalist trap. Uh the other the terminological trap which is what I'm illustrating here. Um and that is the bas basically the idea that um when translating this text it's been Miguel

33:28 Seville for example is the example I'm using here. um he took a lot of the ancient terms and translated them using terms from from our own sort of European derived brewing tradition. Um and I think it introduces a lot of assumptions that are probably unwarranted and there's the danger of kind of um taking what might have been a very different brewing process from the past and sort of um erasing the possibility of seeing how it might have been very different from our own. Um, so, um, I spend a good bit of time on this terminological trap and then also the minimalist trap. Um, gonna talk a little bit more about this.

34:05 I'm probably not going as fast as I need to. Um, so in uh, the two main languages of Mesopotamia, Sumerian and Acadian, the words for the basic words for beer were kosh and shikaru. But we also know about a lot of different kinds of beer. Um this is showing you um different types of beer as we move through time from the rook period at the top left where we can't really translate them very well through the early dynastic where we have golden dark sweet dark red and strained beer to in the Acadian period differences that are seem to be based probably on the malt content of the beer. So probably rate higher and higher in alcohol content. Maybe something similar in the or three period where we have ordinary good and very good beer. maybe ordinary strong good and very sorry ordinary strong and very strong beer and then you see some other examples from the old Babylonian period. Um it's it's relatively rare that we have the kind of

35:00 evidence that I showed you from the rook period where we know exactly the ingredients that went into those particular types of beer. Um but in the early dynastic period for those the golden dark etc. we do have some of those. This comes from the city of Gearsu. I'm showing you one example where we see a certain quantity of golden beer, 45 L in our um system. And then we see the exact proportion of three different ingredients used to brew it. Emmer wheat, which is um an ancient kind of wheat that you can still get today. Maltted barley, which is the main ingredient in many of our own beers today, and then an enigmatic ingredient called Bapier.

35:34 Um maltted barley, again, this is a real point of connection between our beers and their beers. This is the base um of basically all of all of their beers and many of our beers today. But it's actually we actually know relatively little about exactly how they were going about maltting barley. Um what I'm showing you here is a series of phrases in Sumerian and Acadian that give us little hints about the maltting process. U which is basically maltting is basically where you're wetting a grain and allowing it to start germinating and then halting the germination. So that's what you're seeing little examples of here like the horn growing out. um for the germinated malt. I can't dig down into this now, but um so maltted barley that is the point where everyone is pretty much in in agreement about what this this ingredient was. Bapier is totally different. There have been a lot of different interpretations of what

36:24 this key ingredient might have been. Here I'm just showing you some of the different kinds of texts that we have to tell us about Bapier. And to illustrate kind of the challenge of triangulating on all these different um uses of the term to try to figure out what it actually was, we have lexical lists or word lists like at the top left where you get little hints about things that might have been done to the map. Here you get recipes kind of things. down in the bottom left. Uh at the top right, this is a a recipe. Oh, no, sorry. This is a letter where you have um uh this is I believe a wife writing to her husband um who is a trader far away and um she's saying, "The baptier I made for you has become too old. I need to make some more. I need ingredients." And then on the bottom right, you have a recipe uh for making um a particular kind of meat stew. And so Bap here, this brewing ingredient, is also being used to make a

37:15 stew. Um what you're seeing here is some of some some efforts to not only interpret what this bapting collaborated with the University of Chicago um uh back in the late uh 80s to brew a Mesopotamian beer. They interpreted vapier as something like a biscati, a twice baked bread that they were using early in the brewing process, putting it into what's called the mash, where you're basically taking molted barley, heating it up in water to extract sugars, um, enzymes and things. So, they used it as a source of sugar and flavor and that kind of thing. Here you're seeing uh me over the past um, couple of months I've been working with Trophy Brewing uh, here in Raleigh where I live um, to make a Mesopotamian beer for an event that's coming up later this week. And here you see me playing with our version of Bapier. We've gone with a totally different interpretation was that it was something like a sourdough

38:07 starter um that had been dried out uh and that was then being used as the fermentation starter for this beer. So I was trying all different ways of drying it out uh to try not to kill off the the yeast uh to have it function well. Um I can't spend any a lot of time on this but um I actually got into this topic in the first place through this kind of experimental work when I was a grad student at the University of Chicago. Uh we um had a sort of long-running um collaborative project with Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland to try to recreate Mesopotamian beers as accurately as we could. You can see here some of our um ceramic vessels that we were using. Uh, and here you see just some shots of the making of those vessels and some of the different processes that we were aiming for. We were basically trying to go with as authentic equipment as possible, as authentic process as possible, and also

38:58 ingredients. There were lots of uncertainties, but that's what we were aiming for. Um, we held a series of tasting events in different cities where we would let people try our two be always at least two beers. One was the one brewed on the replica equipment. That's the Inky Brew that you see here. And then we would let them try another one that was the same ingredients but brewed in our modern equipment and that's the Gilgam mash that you see next to it. We also would let people try try it through straws. Um which was a lot of fun. Okay, my fourth moment. I'm going to have to move quickly through it. A pair of babbling putts. Um here I take us to um the site of Talbazi in Syria, an archaeological site. What you're seeing here is a plan of a building that looks kind of like houses at the site, but it actually is possible that it was a tavern, a house that had been converted partly into a

39:48 tavern. Um, and at the entrance to the tavern was this big vessel that they have interpreted as a beer vessel. This is because the excavators there did a bunch of residue analysis on a series of vessels um and found evidence for the brewing of beer in a whole series of them. So, they feel pretty confident that they know the set of vessels that was used to brew beer at this site. And they've used that to argue that basically every house was brewing its own beer, but then you also have um some potential taverns. So, you're seeing two key vessels on the right. Um one a sort of collecting vessel and then sitting it above it a vessel that has a hole in its base. If you can see that um we have um lots of evidence for vessels. When you excavate in this region, you find huge numbers of ceramic vessels. A real challenge though is connecting that up to another very rich source which is types of vessels mentioned in

40:40 kuneaoapoiform tablets. There are lots and lots of words for vessels of all different kinds and I'm showing you some of them here in Sumerian and Aadian but I want to highlight um one particular class of vessels. There's a whole there's a bunch of different terms for vessels that had a hole in the base. Uh and so uh some even are named after that. So the niggdurb is basically it means a vessel whose bottom is a hole. Um, this is one of our best points of connection with archaeological record where we can say, look, we have a whole series of vessels that have holes in the base that we think are probably the same as what's being mentioned um in the in the Kuneaoiform record. And these are really like the classic brewing vessels in Mesopotamia. When they talk about brewing um they they often are talking about these and they often talk about them as part of a pair, which is what you're seeing here. They something like

41:28 the nigdurb which makes a pleasant sound is uh ninkasi has placed appropriately on top of a large lan. So what you generally have is a vessel with a hole in its base sitting over a collecting vessel. They love to talk about the the wonderful sound that these vessels made. Uh they even give us a great example of onomatapia at the bottom here where they say the shagub and the lamsari make a dub double sound. Uh if you're having trouble imagining that sound, say it over and over a few times. double double double double double double like some liquid dripping from one vessel down into the other. Um, we don't really know what these vessels were doing in the brewing process. Uh, but almost certainly this is this was a sound to them that means either the brewing of beer or the finished beer moving down into the vessel. Um, not leaving enough time.

42:17 I'll go very quickly through this part. The other thing from Talbazi that I wanted to mention is that they also brewed some beer back in the day and um uh they they basically used it to make an argument that the beer may have been very low in alcohol content in Mesopotamia and that kind of got picked up by a lot of other people and so there is a sense of that out there and um like from this quote you see on the screen here and I just I it is it is definitely possible that some of their beer was very low in alcohol. Um, but I I often I always question this because I think there's plenty of evidence, especially if we look at the written record that they considered beer something that impacts people. It does something to us when we drink it. Like from the epic of Gilgamesh and Ku drinks um the seven goblets of beer. His mood became free.

43:00 He started to sing. His heart grew. His face lit up. Uh or we have texts like this letter at the top that's telling us about a trader who was being chided because he had sold some cloth to another trader while he was drunk and presumably didn't get a good deal on it. or this great piece of advice in the instructions of Sherupac. You should not pass judgment when you drink beer. We even have medical texts that might be giving us a sense for some of the negative effects of beer consumption, making people unsteady on their foundations, diminishing their eyesight, making your head hurt. He continually forgets his word and slurs them when speaking, not in full possession of his faculties um etc.

43:36 Um, we have those individual effects. We also have collective effects. It's kind of a trope in Mesopotamian literature. Um, very often you'll have two persons, in this case, um, sheep and grain who sat down together, they started drinking beer and wine, and then it launches them into an argument or a debate. Uh, we have other texts like this one about the gods Inana and Inky where we have Inana basically getting all dressed up and all fancy to go possibly intentionally to to the god Inky and essentially um not steal but take a series of powers from him that he's in control of. They sit down, they drink beer together, he gets drunk uh and then we see him waking up and he says, "Where have all my powers gone?" to his minister who's standing there. And his minister says, "You just gave them all away while you were drunk." So, we have these examples of alcohol impacting people. Um, so I again

44:28 I I it's possible that some of their beer was very low in alcohol, but um but I'm skeptical that that all of it would have been. All right, one final moment which will be brief. An ill- fated tavern. Um, this is another uh one of one more little fictional scene that I uh that I depict where we are in a street um uh in thousands of years later after the city of Uruk uh in the city of Babylon. Um there's several other possibilities, but I'm putting us in Babylon. Uh we're walking down the street, we see two guys bent down on the side of the road doing something weird.

44:59 One of them scoops up some dirt and puts it in a little pouch on his belt and they get up and they talk a little and they head off down the road. We peek in behind them and we're like, "Well, this is like carpenters workshop. What's going on here? This is weird. Let's follow them." So, we follow them through the city streets and they keep stopping off at different doors or at intersections and gathering up dirt. They stop off at a mult. They stop off by the gate to the palace. They're moving all through the streets.

45:22 Eventually, they end up down by the river where they scoop up some river water and then this guy dumps all of the dirt down in there. He takes another little flask out and dribbles some oil in, stirs it all up, and then they head off again. and we follow them and they end up in front of a building where he takes some goop out of that and he puts it across the top of the doorway and then they go in and they head up some stairs in the back. So, we follow them in and we we discover, oh, this is a tavern. Nice. Uh, so we sit down and have some beers, we but while they're up on the roof and we hear all this kind of chanting going on. Uh, and so so I so I give us this scene um which I think is fascinating. Uh, and I'm going to show you that some of the evidence behind it here. Um this was a special kind of ritual procedure. Um it might seem at first like oh so it ends so it it starts out but part of it at least is all about

46:11 gathering this dust just like I had told you. But it ends up with this guy one of the guys calling out Ishtar stand by me to further my affairs. May this tavern trade be your tavern trade. Uh Ishtar lay your hand on the pot stand and mixing that. May profit come my way and never cease. This text seems like it might be about guaranteeing profit for a tavern, but it's actually more interesting than that. Uh what it probably is is an example of what's called a Nam Burby ritual. Um these were basically rituals designed to to counteract a negative omen. The Mesopotamian world was basically full of signs of all different kinds um that could be read in the stars or in the flight of a flock of birds or the way a dog barked or in the intrails of sheep. Um and so you had all these omens it was a major form of knowledge um production in Mesopotamia. They were high level specialists invol like working for the king doing this. Um uh

47:06 but this meant what one important thing was what happens if you're one of those people say working for the king and you get a negative omen what do you do and there there emerged a series of rituals for counteracting the effects of negative omen. So we have here seems to be a way of counteracting a a negative omen for this particular tavern. It's even on a tablet that one of the tablets is preserved on looks like it could have been hung from the ceiling of the tavern. Uh basically to to be there physically providing uh protection. So I just think this is a fun little moment.

47:35 And I'm going to finish with one slide here. So um in the book I finish up with this. I suggest that we take a line from that drinking song that always appears with the hima nasi and maybe that we bring it back in as a uh as a toast ourselves. Uh, so Ninkasi Zada Humu Udanti, may Ninkasi live together with you. All right, thanks. Sorry that I went a little long.

48:03 All right, thank you so much, Tate. That was wonderful. Um, we have a lot of questions in the Q&A, so I'm going to do my best to get as many of them to you uh before our time is up.

48:13 Yeah, I'm sorry about that. No, no, no, no, no. So, one of the uh questions that actually has come up a few times in a few forms, so I'm going to kind of blend a few together here is this question about um whether or not beer was there because uh and so popular because the water was unsafe or some variation therein.

48:33 It's a great question and I don't know the answer. It's on my list of things that I actually want to figure out a way to address because I think it's often an assumption and it's not an unreasonable one. I mean you have the for the first time in world history huge numbers of people living together tightly in these densely packed settlements and lots of animals etc. So yes maybe I don't currently know of good evidence for that like good evidence that the water was not safe to drink and it's a challenging issue to try to figure out what that evidence would look like. I know I I once saw one um medical text that mentioned a diagnosis for someone. Well, the diagnosis was you're feeling the way you do because you drank um contaminated water, but it's not something that I that I at least that I know of in large quantities. Um so, it's a great question and I would be I would love to hear ideas if someone knows can think of a

49:23 good way to address this in text um archaeologically, but um I think it's only an assumption at this point. Um, we have another question I want to raise. This one's from Charles Compass, and apologies if I pronounce your name incorrectly. Was beer drinking by both sexes only for men in special places? So, the gender of

49:46 That's a Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know why I didn't include some angle on that in the in the talk. Yes, the question of gender is a is a fascinating one. I mean, um, and in special places. Okay. So the the simple answer is both men and women were drinking beer, you know, in all different kinds of contexts. I think almost certainly there there would have been, you know, gendered practices surrounding beer drinking, but I don't think we currently have a good understanding of those. This was a patriarchal society where there were major marked differences between genders and so I think we should expect it. But um there's plenty of cases where men and women are drinking together in different contexts like an artistic record. Those banquet uh scenes that I showed you, sometimes they show only men, some sometimes they show only women, often they show both. Um we have plenty of literary texts that depict uh men and

50:45 women drinking together. It's um I think it's a Yes. So I think it's a good question. I don't think we yet really know the answer. You're saying in special places, people drink beer in all kinds of different um places. Uh I think at home, the evidence for that is is scanter. But at home, in taverns, um sometimes at least at work, um in temples, in big in feasts of all different kinds from very small intimate ones up to very, you know, huge community level ones um all different sorts of contexts where beer was being consumed. Yeah.

51:24 Uh so this one is from Ethan Dubro. Is there any evidence for inner city trade of beer? So trade of beer between the cities.

51:31 It's a good question. Uh once again my answer is going to be I don't know of good evidence for that. I think so definitely the assumption has generally been that beer would have been basically consumed while it was still fermenting and that it was not really a trade item. Um, but there are certainly periods where you have particular vessels that that are beer vessels that I feel like were being used to at least move beer across some kind of distance. The answer is I don't know. Um, I don't know yet, but it's another of those that's on my list of things to try to to try to actually address because again, I think it's kind of like our assumption has been that wine wine was traded over distance in Mesopotamia, but probably not beer, but I think that's not something that's really been um carefully explored.

52:24 Great. We we have another one from Melissa Heler Booth. Uh she's asking about the the inferior beer versus the very fine beer and if we know kind of what made the distinctions between them.

52:36 Um well the answer is not really. I mean the I sort of mentioned it when I was talking about those beer types. The the strongest sense we have is that um the fancier beers generally seem to have had a higher proportion of malt in them. So more fermentable sugars meaning at least up to a point a higher alcohol beer. Um, so I suspect that that's probably one of the main differences, but there's there's so much that we're not seeing. Um, I think because when we just get these sort of base, we we get these terms that they're using to describe them, but they're not giving us an actual description of the beers. This is just their sort of names. And so I think it could be other things like degree of filtering. Um there certainly they have filtered beers and others presumably then that were not filtered.

53:26 Um but uh and another thing that we have a really poor understanding of is what kind of additional kind of aromatics or other flavorings they might have been using if any. Um there's there's one um kind of uh plant that called kasu that is eventually used but there's lots of debate over what it actually was. Um, and so that's a point where you could certainly have substantial differences that the, you know, the the king, the beer for the king had all kinds of expensive things that have been come in from afar or something, but uh, but we don't have good evidence for that.

54:02 So, here's a question from Carol Noman Degbar. Uh, was beer used in performing libations and so in religious rituals?

54:11 Yes, great question. Interestingly, I um uh I felt once I finished the book, I kind of realized that I didn't actually spend as much time on the religious dimensions um of of beer, whether consumption or libations in the book. And I was invited to give a um a keynote lecture at a a conference uh this summer that was all about um divine drinks. And so it gave me a chance to actually start doing that. And yeah, the answer is beer was a one of their major kinds of libations. And so we have all sorts of artistic scenes showing us libations.

54:46 That is probably often beer. I mean, they were also libating water and other things, but um and plenty of written evidence for the libation of beer and all kinds of different rituals, whether you're talking about um rituals against field pests out that where you conducted them out in an agricultural field and and libations were a part of that or you know in the fanciest um temple contexts, that sort of thing. Yeah,

55:13 we have one from Matthew T. Any ununiform references to the day after or hangover cures?

55:20 Uh, other than I not really. I think that um that text that I showed you about Inana and Inky, that's one case where we see it's not quite about what you're asking, but we where we see him kind of like coming out of a sort of fog after drinking, but not that I know of. Um, it is an important point. So even though I want I am you know I do push back against the idea that all their beer was really low in alcohol content. They also don't talk about being super drunk all the time. It beer beer is something that does things to people.

55:51 But you both don't get you don't get lots of depictions of people who are just falling over drunk. And as far as I know I don't want to misstate this. There might be some proverbs that obliquely reference hangovers. I'm not I can't quite remember. So, there might be a little bit of evidence, but it's not extensive.

56:13 So, we have had a number of different questions in the Q&A about your preferences in the uh the beer versus the traditional versus the um the sort of modern equipment brewed um and sort of what the differences between those were sort of and how they how they were. So,

56:29 Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So, with that project with Great Lakes Brewing, um the the one that we brewed uh on the more authentic equipment, um I I I said it was basically the same ingredients as the other, but it wasn't quite. The one other difference is that we used our version of Bapier um to brew that also with the same kind of interpretation as this more recent brewing I've done that it might have been a kind of fermentation starter. Uh and that gave it the beer a very different taste. So it in it meant that we were fermenting it not with just a pure yeast culture, but also bacteria and things. And so all of our um all of our experimental beers had a tart element to them from sort of mildly tart to pretty sour. Um and they differed because we did this over several years in color. They were sometimes kind of milky white to sort of yellowish. Um they we were using I said we don't really know what ingredients

57:22 they might have added for flavoring but we tried different things like juniper and coriander and cardamom. I basically let the brewers choose and they mostly chose things that they were at least somewhat familiar with. Um but that that added an interesting element to it. The one that we brewed on the modern equipment was maybe something like um a saison something like that. Um, we because it was also interestingly herbal and it just didn't have that it didn't have that kind of that sour element to it. When we would ask people which one they preferred, usually we get about half would say they preferred the authentic one, but you know, it's like a sort of um biased a biased um sample or some audience because they were coming to to try that beer.

58:06 Well, I I have another one that has been asked in in quite a few times in quite a few different ways, which is, do we think that we're talking about the origins of beer here? Can you speak to the origins of beer? Uh there's a lot of curiosity about, you know, where first.

58:20 Yes, great question. I I did skate over that very quickly and I do talk about it some in the book, but as I mentioned here, my focus is really it's this period where we start getting really rich evidence. So there are a few there's there's some evidence thousands of years earlier from um the sort of not exactly Mesopotamia but the surrounding region for some very early beer in the sort of maybe 10,000 BC range. Um it's um it's debated um but I think it's very likely that when we're talking about the origins of beer in this region it's at least back then. And so it's fascinating that we have we get these little hints about those very early origins, but then there's several thousands of years where we don't actually know what was going on uh with beer. And so when I pick up the story here, we're talking about a very com complex brewing tradition that's probably, you know, been developing for

59:16 thousands of years. So if anybody ever says like, "Oh, this beer was just nasty and they probably just they just brewed it using the basic steps." I would say, "No, no, no. this had like thousands of years behind it probably and so we should expect sophistication uh etc. And so I think that's like wide open territory for learning more about that that in between period. And I should also say I always want to emphasize that I think people sometimes like to think is this where beer was invented first and then it sort of spread out. And I really try to emphasize that beer made from different sorts of grains was definitely discovered independently in different parts of the world at different times. There could be elements of a spread um maybe as part of like the spread of the Neolithic out of the Near East. Um but I like to always emphasize that we're not this is not a story of like a single origin point and then beer

1:00:09 spreading out from there. All right. Excellent. So we have come to time. So I want to take a moment again to thank you Tate for your talk and answering all these questions but also thank all the AIA staff for helping put this together as well as our wonderful translators who have been working so hard throughout this discussion. So thank you all so much and uh we hope to see you at the next event. Thank you.

1:00:37 Thank you.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia with Tate Paulette"?

In order: 0:00 In the Land of Nasi, College of the Holy Cross, Jacob Dom, Makunta Voules Merinudia; 10:00 Hamukar; 20:00 Ningeru; 30:00 Talbazi, Talbazi; 40:00 Ninkasi, Talbazi, Talbazi.

What is mentioned in this ArchaeologyTV episode?

15 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including In the Land of Nasi, Talbazi, Talbazi, Ninkasi, Jacob Dom, College of the Holy Cross. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia with Tate Paulette"?

The episode runs 1 h 1 min; the transcript is about 11,455 words in 85 timestamped sections.

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