HISTORY OF BEER PART 1 SUMERIAN BEER

Ninkasi, Sumerian goddess of Beer and Fertility

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Whatever Happened to Sumerian Beer?

Horst Dornbusch on Beer and Civilization #11

Feature Article by HorstDornbusch / 07-13-2007

Anthropologists and archaeologists believe that the first humans ever to make the great leap from a nomadic and tribal into a civilized and sedentary existence were the Sumerians, some eight to ten thousand years ago. The place was Mesopotamia (now the southern portion of present-day Iraq). Apparently the Sumarians had migrated there all the way from India. Once settled in the Middle East, they build elaborate communities, grouped in prosperous city-states, and surrounded by fertile fields, which they kept lush by communal irrigation from the waters of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. The most magnificent of their urban centers was Babylon on the banks of the lower Euphrates. The Sumerians are considered the world's first builders, farmers, and writers - and, as we know from archaeological finds, probably the first brewers, too. Beer was at the center of their religious rituals. Their highest deity was the goddess of beer and fertility. It is a measure of the importance of beer in Sumerian society that eventually about half their grain ended up in their brews.

The Official Story of the Sumerian Exit from History
The Sumerians' ingenuity and wealth soon became a magnet for other, non-brewing, people around them. Newcomers, mostly Semitic tribes from the north and west, began to move into Mesopotamia - sometimes commingling peacefully with the Sumerians, sometimes fighting wars against them for supremacy. As a result, the Sumerians eventually began to be absorbed by their numerous neighbors and gradually disappeared as a distinct culture. By the start of the third millennium BC, Sumeria had faded almost completely into oblivion. In its place arose a new culture, which historians call Babylonian.

The new masters of Mesopotamia centralized power away from the many scattered city-states ruled by kings, queens, and priestesses, to just one center, Babylon, and they unified the loose cluster of Sumerian settlements into a territorial state and government. This new, broad regional organization, Babylonia, was, in essence, the first sovereign country in history.

Once the Babylonians consolidated their power internally, they turned their attention to external conquest. They poured their resources into building a mighty army, which they marched westward to the shores of the Mediterranean, northward into Armenia, eastward into Persia, and southward into Arabia and the islands of the Persian Gulf. In the process, they amassed the first true empire in history - with the king of Babylon known as the King of the Totality, or the King of the Four Regions. He ruled an empire that spanned the four corners of the then-known world.

This is the official story of the demise of the Sumerians and the Babylonian take-over of their lands, at least as it is written in the history books. However, the common narrative of history always seems to focus on political and military events, while the less transient forces of social evolution often receive only scant attention. What we do not learn from the shifting sands of military power in Mesopotamia is what happened to the all-important Sumerian beer as Sumerian society changed under the burden of conquest! Born out of the mist of prehistory as the twin of society itself, did beer survive in the new order? That's a question historians rarely address.