Summary

- 1,000,000 glasses ago…
- Egypt of the Pharaohs
- Ethylic Babylonia
- Chinese mental food
- Greek temperance
- The Christian dawn
- Rome, fallen in a cup of wine?


1,000,000 glasses ago…
It could sound strange, but alcohol has not always been there. Or maybe…
Actually alcohol is one of those things half between a discovery and an invention. While its preparation into a liquid form obviously requires certain skills, the path that brings toward it surely has a natural starting point. We can get this certainty by the observation of many higher primates, such as chimpanzees. These animals understand the difference between a ripe fruit and a rotten one, so it could be not understandable at once their habit of letting the fruits rot in the upper levels of the forests they live in. This happens because those fruits are highly exposed to the sun and at the end of their ripening the sugars contained in them ferment enough to let them become alcoholic. Another certainty we get by observing the primates' behaviour is that they really enjoy these fruits: it is weird while funny to see them completely stoned, flying liana by liana, often missing them and ruining on the floor after a several metres' fall, and then laughing like stupid blokes.
We can suppose that something very similar happened tens of thousands of years ago to men - or what they were.
Anyway, the earliest findings of objects or clues related to intentional fermentation of a drink date back to cir. 10,000 B.C., in the Neolithic Age. Remains of beer jugs dating back to the late Stone Age have been found in different places, but maybe the very first is the one discovered in an ancient village site in northern China. An international team of researchers leaded by Patrick E. McGovern (University of Pennsylvania), in an excavation held last year in an archaeological site in the village of Jiahu in Henan province, found that Chinese people of 9,000 years ago were already able to produce wine with a scientific approach. McGovern has long tracked the earliest beginnings of wine-making: he was the same man that 10 years ago found the (ex-)earliest signs of wine and barley beer in long-necked pottery jugs, dug up from an Iranian village called Hajii Firuz Tepe. McGovern found into the wine traces of millet, the same kind of grain he found in Iran. "That tells us it's quite probable that there was an exchange of ideas across broad reaches of Central Asia thousands of years ago", said McGovern. Wine too, of course, an indispensable ingredient for ideas.


Egypt of the Pharaohs
The presence of alcohol and related practices is witnessed by ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs too. Already around 4,000 B.C. we have evidence of wine and beer: the former was called yrp, while the latter was called hqt and written . The last symbol stayed for "jug" and it was often associated with beer in order to define a whole range of meanings such as "beer", "to be drunk", "eating and drinking", and also "tribute to the gods". In fact, while most of the gods were local in ancient Egypt, Osiris was one of the few to be adored everywhere: Osiris, the god of wine…
For these ancient times as well as for those we will discuss later on, we could afford a major question: why. We found many proofs of the different uses that peoples have made of alcoholic beverages in thousands of years - religious, nutritious, to gain courage, etc. - but we decided not to advance any hypothesis. The fact is that, probably, to look for a reason why people drink alcohol is like to look for the sex of the angels. Alcohol has in it all the above mentioned features, and moreover, it accomplishes the goal of producing oblivion, ecstasy and shelter from every day's difficulties. All together, these features render alcohol something difficultly separable from man's life itself: another proof is that alcohol has almost surely preceded bread as a staple!
Even if it maybe came earlier, beer, traditionally regarded as a female activity in Egypt, was an off-shoot of bread making - the basis of the beer were loaves of specially made bread. Beer was depicted on the walls of the tombs, as were scenes of the ancient Egyptian brewery. It was probably very similar to the way beer is still produced in Sudan today.
Wine in Egypt was destined to wealthy layers of society, as it was very expansive: pharaohs were even recognized as those "who drink wine". On the other hand, beer was destined also to the poorest casts: workers at the pyramids were given beer thrice a day, and beer was commonly used as a payment, something that rarely happened with wine.
Drunkenness was not seen as a bad habit, and we have witnesses of its social acceptance on many mural scenes. We said that wine was an acceptable offering to the gods, and the Eye of Ra was often celebrated with sumptuous drinks, in which many litres of wine coming from the vineyards of the Nile delta's region were consumed.




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