Do We Really Have Beer to Thank for the First Writing and Cities?

Humanity's love affair with beer goes *way* back: 5,000 years ago, the civilization that arose in Mesopotamia invented writing, and one of the very first things they wrote about was... beer! But where was beer itself invented? This episode, we've got the story of beer's origins, the debate over whether humanity domesticated grains for brewing or for baking, and why beer was so essential to the smooth functioning of the world's first cities and states. But the story of how we know this—how we can decipher millennia-old drinking songs written in a forgotten language and alphabet, analyze pottery to reconstruct the ingredients list for ancient brews, and even figure out that, for maximum authenticity, we need to drink the resulting beverage through a hollow reed—well, that's perhaps even more fascinating! This week, archaeologist Tate Paulette is our guide as we meet the goddess of beer, sneak a peek at the letters of beer-brewing wives left behind by merchant husbands, and enjoy a time-traveling tasting of an ancient ale, produced with the help of cutting-edge science. Fill your glass and listen in—and don't forget your straw! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  One, two, three. Beer, beer, beer, generally beer, beer, beer. A long time ago, way back in history, when all there was to drink was nothing but cups and tins. A long-haired man by the name of Charlie Mops, and he invented a wonderful drink and he made it out hot.

• 0:21Nicola Twilley?

  Charlie Mops, we love you because we love beer. Thank you, sir, for inventing this fabulous beverage.

• 0:28Cynthia Graber?

  Well, as it happens, the Clancy brothers aren't exactly getting the story just right here. I'm not making any comments about when tea was invented, but I can say that beer has been around for a lot longer than guys named Charlie Mops.

• 0:40Nicola Twilley?

  Indeed, sadly, Charlie Mops turns out to be a totally fictional character with a name that was made up to rhyme with two key beer ingredients, barley and hops.

• 0:50Cynthia Graber?

  But this episode, we are going to get to the bottom of who really invented beer. We, of course, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.

• 0:59Nicola Twilley?

  And I'm Nicola Twilley. And this episode is a detective story. We're gathering the clues and tasting the evidence, trying to figure out where beer comes from and what those very first beers would have been like.

• 1:12Cynthia Graber?

  It's a story that involves the construction of the very earliest cities and the invention of the written word. Was it all in service of beer? Stay tuned.

• 1:20Nicola Twilley?

  This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 2:14Cynthia Graber?

  The first thing we want to know is when beer was invented. And so, since the Clancy brothers are obviously not the experts here, we went to a source who should know the answer.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  Well, we definitely don't really know.

• 2:24Nicola Twilley?

  This is Tate Paulette, and he is indeed an ancient beer expert. Not only is he an archaeologist and a professor at North Carolina State, he is also the author of a new book called "In the Land of Ninkasi: A History of Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia."

• 2:39Cynthia Graber?

  Even though his book is about ancient Mesopotamia, Tate says beer probably wasn't first invented there.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  It didn't just emerge in one spot, like Mesopotamia, and then spread out from there. But we're generally in the realm of kind of speculation when it comes to how it was first invented.

• 2:57Nicola Twilley?

  One thing we can say is that beer probably wasn't the first adult beverage to show up behind humanity's bar.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  I think almost certainly wine probably came first, because there's basically an extra step required if you're going to ferment grains.

• 3:13Cynthia Graber?

  For wine, all that has to happen, really, is that the sugary fruit kind of has to start to rot. The microbes that turn sugar into alcohol just need access to sugar, and sugar in fruit is readily available. Fruit is sweet.

• 3:24Nicola Twilley?

  There is plenty of sugar in grains, too, but it's in the form of starch. And the yeasts that do the magic trick of turning sugar into booze, they can't really work with starch.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  You have to take these starches that are bound up in the grains and convert them to fermentable sugars first. And so, it could have happened first, but it seems more likely that it took a little bit longer to discover that part of the process.

• 3:47Cynthia Graber?

  Tate says there are basically three ways people discovered that could break down the starches in grain and convert them into sugars.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  There is malting, which is what most of our beers are based on today. There is the use of saliva, which has the right kind of enzymes in it. So it means chewing up grains. And the other is different kinds of molds that also have the right kind of enzymes.

• 4:08Nicola Twilley?

  The mold method was and is more popular in Asia because the mold in question is actually koji. We have made a whole episode about this all-star fungus, which you definitely should listen to if you haven't already. Koji is still used to make miso and soy sauce, and also sake, which, stay with me, folks, is actually beer.

• 4:29Cynthia Graber?

  Sake is also known as rice wine, but wine is usually a fruit beverage, and sake is made of rice, so Tate calls it beer. He says anything made of grain is a beer.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  That doesn't include things that are distilled. But it also allows for things that where you have the main component is a grain, but you're also adding some other fermentables like some fruits or syrups or something like that. So that's how I define it.

• 4:51Cynthia Graber?

  That's one of the lessons from ancient history. Beer is a way wider category than we think of today.

• 4:56Nicola Twilley?

  But coming back to the three options for making beer or for breaking down the starches and grains into sugars so that other microbes can make them into alcohol, with the koji mold method, it's pretty easy to imagine how it was invented. You just have to be lucky enough to have your stored rice infected with a little mold.

• 5:14Cynthia Graber?

  Another method Tate mentioned sounds a little odd, and it's using saliva. The theory of how this was discovered is that people were chewing on the stalks of, say, corn's ancestor before it had kernels because the stalks had starch and calories, but then they'd spit the hard part out into a container of some sort and their saliva would go to work on the starches left and convert them into something sugary and then yeast could ferment it. And maybe someone thought the resulting liquidy mush smelled good and they tasted it.

• 5:41Nicola Twilley?

  Historically, this method was pretty popular. It seems as though there were lots of beers made from saliva and millet or sorghum in Africa, and you can still get a traditional corn spit brew known as chicha in South America. Although, of course, these days it's mostly not made with saliva anymore. Once again, health and safety ruins all the fun.

• 6:02Cynthia Graber?

  And then finally, method three, which is the only one you've probably heard of if you've ever heard anything about the process of making beer, because nearly all of what we'd call beer today is made this way. It's known as malting.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  Which is basically making use of the grains' natural growth cycle, because it also has to break those starches down. And so you are wetting it for a little bit of time, which basically is a message to it saying, aha, it's time to start growing, essentially.

• 6:28Cynthia Graber?

  And so the plant then releases its own enzymes.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Breaking down those starches to feed itself, and you stop the process. And so then we've got these enzymes and sugars to brew with.

• 6:39Nicola Twilley?

  This is another technique where it's not super hard to imagine how someone would invent it.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  It was certainly common to take these kinds of grains, like barley, and produce porrages of different kinds. And also was probably common to soak the grains ahead of time, maybe overnight. So by doing that, you're already, in a sense, starting the malting process. So if you just sort of forget about it for a couple of extra days or something, it could start growing. Someone tastes it and says, oh, this tastes a little different. It's kind of sweet. And essentially, you can accidentally end up fermenting it. So it doesn't actually take that much to discover the process.

• 7:16Nicola Twilley?

  Given that all of these beer production methods are relatively likely to have been stumbled upon repeatedly, almost by accident, beer was probably invented in lots of places, lots of times.

• 7:27Cynthia Graber?

  The earliest evidence of beer production that's been found is in the Middle East from about 11,000 to 13,000 years ago, and it comes from a site called the Raqefet Cave in what's now Israel. The cave had been used as a cemetery for thousands of years.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  And as part of that, into the bedrock, there's a bunch of little bowls and divots and things carved. And they've also taken boulders and used those kind of like mortar and pestle. And so some recent analysis there, they've argued that basically some of those boulder bowl kind of things were being used to store grains and possibly malted grains. And then some of those little bowls cut in the bedrock were actually used for mashing and fermentation.

• 8:09Cynthia Graber?

  This was all going on at a time before archaeologists believed that domestication first began, so people were still hunting and gathering and moving around a lot, which leads to the question, did they start domesticating grain and settling down to grow it so they could make their beloved beer? Because domesticated grains produced a lot more raw product than wild grains, so you could grow it in huge amounts, dry it, store it, and make booze whenever you wanted.

• 8:32Nicola Twilley?

  This is an ongoing topic of conversation among archaeologists. It's called the beer versus bread debate. Did people become farmers in order to make booze or to make buns? Tate told us about an ancient hilltop archaeological site in what's now Turkey called Gobekli Tepe. It's been described as the world's first temple. No one seems to have lived there, but people clearly gathered there for some purpose. And there's some evidence that beer was likely consumed at those gatherings.

• 9:02Cynthia Graber?

  The people who met up at Gobekli Tepe were definitely groups of hunter-gatherers. All the plant remains are wild plants, not domesticated ones, and they were definitely gathering for feasting. It seems like it was communal and probably ritualistic.

• 9:14Nicola Twilley?

  Which Tate says favors the idea that grains were important for both food and booze. Beer and bread, not beer versus bread. But the interesting thing is that these grains were gathered and then ultimately domesticated, not so much for survival as for feasting purposes. In other words, we became farmers to have big parties. Or, as the archaeologists would probably put it, commune with the spirits and build social bonds.

• 9:42Cynthia Graber?

  It's just a theory at this point, but it is a compelling one. People certainly had a lot of huge parties and did a lot of communing with the spirits in ancient Mesopotamia. This is the place Tate focuses on in his book because Mesopotamia is one of the world's first great beer cultures.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  That's when we start getting really wonderful evidence, where the quantity and diversity of evidence just kind of explodes. It's at about that point when we can really start painting a really full picture of a particular beer culture. Before that, we just get little bits of evidence.

• 10:13Cynthia Graber?

  So while beer was, as we said, likely invented everywhere, all around the world, Mesopotamia is ground zero for beer archaeology nerds, along with ancient Egypt.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Both of these places at around that same time could claim that title of world's first great beer culture.

• 10:28Nicola Twilley?

  Ancient Egyptian food and drinks are a story for another day. Today, we are all about Mesopotamia. But before we go there, where exactly are we headed? There's no country called Mesopotamia on the map today.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we're basically talking about modern day Iraq, northeastern Syria, and essentially the region defined by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

• 10:51Cynthia Graber?

  Nobody called it Mesopotamia. At the time, it was largely split between Akadians in the north and Sumerians in the south. The word Mesopotamia comes from what Alexander the Great called it when he conquered it. It comes from Greek, meaning "the land between the two rivers."

• 11:04Nicola Twilley?

  And the time period in which Mesopotamia had a solid claim to being one of the world's great beer cultures was from about 5,000 years ago, all the way up to round about when Alexander the Great took over, roughly 2,000 years ago.

• 11:19Cynthia Graber?

  So what types of archaeological evidence did this world's first great beer culture leave behind? Were there like kegs and taps everywhere? Glass beer steins or signs strewn around archaeological sites saying, "Pub, get your beer here"?

• 11:30Nicola Twilley?

  Not exactly. Tate told us there are three major types of clues for an archaeologist wanting to understand the beer scene in ancient Mesopotamia. First, there's stuff, obviously.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Lots of architectural remains. Lots of artifactural remains where especially in this for beer ceramics, pottery is very important and we have huge amounts of pottery. And then, of course, we have artistic works.

• 11:56Cynthia Graber?

  That's drawings and paintings and then the big one is the written word.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  I feel like many people are not really aware of exactly how much written evidence we have from ancient Mesopotamia. Hundreds of thousands of documents in this writing system, cuneiform, and all different sorts.

• 12:14Cynthia Graber?

  And while we may not know exactly where beer was invented, we do know where writing first made its mark.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  So writing was invented in Mesopotamia. This is basically the first writing that we have in world history.

• 12:25Cynthia Graber?

  The first writing appears about 5,000 years ago. It has a very catchy name, proto-cuneiform.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  So they are incising images into clay tablets with basically a pointed stylus where they're drawing images. So many of them are recognizable.

• 12:41Cynthia Graber?

  At this point in history, no one was penning epic poetry or writing novels.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  At that time, we have a pretty restricted set of things that they're actually writing about. Basically two, they're writing about administration, so economic texts, that's most of them, and then a smaller set of lists. This is something that starts at the beginning of writing in Mesopotamia and lasts all the way through. They love to make lists of all different kinds. For example, lists of things made of wood or different sorts of pigs or city names or deities.

• 13:16Cynthia Graber?

  And why did these people make pictures in clay that were actually endless lists of pigs and gods and things made of wood?

• 13:22Nicola Twilley?

  Bureaucracy, Cynthia. It's the key to civilization.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  This period, when you get the first writing, is also when you get the first cities, the first states.

• 13:32Cynthia Graber?

  That's right. Mesopotamia is an incredibly exciting and archaeologically rich region of the world because it's not just home to the earliest writing, but also to the earliest known cities. There's Ur and Nineveh and Babylon and more, and all of these cities had bureaucrats.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  One can certainly argue that writing emerged as part of their effort to manage an increasingly complex economy in this context of urbanization. Suddenly you have huge numbers of people living together. And so that's generally considered the kind of motivation for developing.

• 14:03Speaker 04

  Writing in Mesopotamia.

• 14:04Nicola Twilley?

  Writing is really the earliest management hack, which is extremely unpoetic. But over time, writing evolved from pictograms to something a little less literal.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  One of the big shifts that happens is a few hundred years later, they changed the kind of stylus they were writing with, and they moved from incising to impressing. So instead of drawing a sort of curving line in the clay, they would start impressing individual wedges with this other stylus.

• 14:33Nicola Twilley?

  This was a new alphabet made of wedges and lines. And letters didn't correspond to just one thing anymore. They also represented sounds.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Very quickly, this becomes a much more abstract system, and you can't recognize those individual pictures anymore.

• 14:47Cynthia Graber?

  Which makes things a little hard to read. When you hear about an archaeological discovery and they find something cool on a tablet, like an ancient recipe or something, it sounds so straightforward. But then, if you stop to think about it, just like there isn't Mesopotamia anymore, there are no communities that use ancient Sumerian or Akkadian. So how in the world did they decode all this writing?

• 15:07Speaker 04

  The decipherment of cuneiform happened basically in the mid 19th century and was a major thing. One important thing to point out is that this writing system was completely forgotten. Knowledge of how to read these texts was completely forgotten. So it's a very different world than when we study texts in Greek or Latin, for example. And so, I mean, people even had to be convinced that this was a writing system at the beginning.

• 15:35Nicola Twilley?

  It's not just that the alphabet that ancient peoples in the region were using didn't look much like any alphabet in use today. It's also that people were using this incomprehensible alphabet to write things in two different forgotten languages.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Sumerian and Akkadian. And they're really densely intertwined in the writing in very confusing ways. And they're very different languages. So Akkadian is a Semitic language, so it's related to Arabic and Hebrew and others. And Sumerian is not related to any other known language. So this moment of decipherment, they were having to deal with both of these issues, figuring out the script and figuring out the languages.

• 16:14Cynthia Graber?

  What they needed was a Rosetta Stone. If you haven't heard of it, it's a stone. You can see it in the British Museum. And it was discovered a couple hundred years ago. It had the same text written three ways, in two different ways of writing in ancient Egyptian, and then one in ancient Greek. We knew ancient Greek, and the Rosetta Stone let archaeologists decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics for the very first time.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  And we have the same thing for Mesopotamia, where we had in Western Iran, there's this inscription up on the side of a mountain. You have the same text in three different languages.

• 16:45Cynthia Graber?

  There was Old Persian, and then two things written in this mysterious cuneiform alphabet, one in Akkadian and one in a related language.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  And we had some knowledge of the Old Persian. And so this, it was kind of like a little opening to be able to start figuring these out. The most important thing was being able to identify things like a king's name that was repeated over and over. So the king here is Darius. Seeing his name in the text that was better known, and then gradually figuring out where you could identify that in the other ones, and then moving outwards from there to try to understand what kind of sounds the different signs represented to make up that name.

• 17:25Cynthia Graber?

  This initial breakthrough took place in the 1800s, but Tate said deciphering cuneiform is still a work in progress.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  It wasn't as if we discovered some kind of code, that we, we sort of cracked it, and then from then on, we understood these, this writing system and the languages. It's very much ongoing.

• 17:42Cynthia Graber?

  And that's because it's really hard to figure out what a word might mean, just by finding the same word in lots of different sentences. To get an idea of the challenge, Tate did a little experiment. He's interested in beer words. So he went around his house, looking for all the printed documents that have the word malt. He found a label with the ingredients of malted milk balls. There's a beer label that says it's a people-pleasing blend of smooth malt and crisp hop flavors. There's a book of poetry that has an old word for malt, malt, in it.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  Okay, what if you were, you know, an archaeologist of the future, and you found these things, and you didn't know what this word malt meant in English? How would you go about approaching these, this, this challenge of figuring out what this word meant?

• 18:24Cynthia Graber?

  Tate's point is, without context, malt can mean a lot of things. So there's definitely an element of guesswork involved in figuring out what the ancient Mesopotamians were going on about when they write about beer. But we do have a lot of writing to work with.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  We have these things called the archaic texts that were in this proto-Cuneiform script, this sort of precursor to Cuneiform, these pictographs. And we have in the vicinity of 5,000 of these, and that's the ones that are either economic documents or lists. And a decent number of the economic documents are about beer. So basically, you get the first writing in world history, and already one of the things they are writing about a lot is beer.

• 19:08Cynthia Graber?

  What do all these ancient texts have to say about this glorious beverage? That's coming up after the break.

• 19:15Speaker 05

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• 19:49Nicola Twilley?

  Imagine it's 5,000 years ago and you're in Uruk, which at the time was the largest city in the world with a population of about 40,000 people. So basically, picture Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, but the buildings are made of mud bricks and it's in the Middle East.

• 20:04Cynthia Graber?

  One of your neighbors in Uruk might have been a guy named Kushim. Tate walked us through what one of his days might have been like.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  And he shows up at work and it's a brewery.

• 20:12Nicola Twilley?

  Kushim is actually a big boss. He's the supervisor at the brewery.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  So we see he comes in and there are his workers going about their tasks. And he goes over into a little side room, which is his office, and he picks up a few Cuneiform tablets to examine because he's basically been worrying about them the whole night before.

• 20:28Cynthia Graber?

  But phew, everything is fine. Nobody's messed with any of his records. After he spends some time going over his tablets, he heads out, probably to run some errands. Maybe he decides to grab lunch with a friend.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  He ends up staying there for hours. He comes back and his brewery is on fire.

• 20:43Nicola Twilley?

  That probably was a major bummer for Khushim, but it was a total win for beer archaeologists like Tate because the flames basically fired the clay tablets. Normally, clay is soft, so you come right in it and then wet it, scrape it flat, and use your tablet again. But Khushim's tablets were accidentally baked into pottery in the fire, and that pottery is still legible today.

• 21:06Cynthia Graber?

  That's how we know that Khushim existed. His name was written on the tablets. But Tate did point out that maybe it wasn't actually his name.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  It might have been like an administrative office or some kind of institutional office or title. We don't even really know that the signs that we read as Khushim would have been pronounced "Koo" and "Shim." We're reading backwards, basically, from a later time.

• 21:27Nicola Twilley?

  We also don't know for sure that the tablets came from Uruk. They were bought at auction 30 years ago by the British Museum and the Met and some others from a collection put together by a Swiss professor. And Tate says they were likely looted originally, which means we don't know exactly where they came from or very much about Khushim's brewery.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  We don't even know how many people might have worked in it, what the layout would have been, et cetera. Actually, we don't even really know that Khushim was in charge of a brewery. It might have been more like a storehouse for brewing ingredients.

• 21:59Cynthia Graber?

  But what's amazing about these tablets is that they are some of the very earliest writing in the world, and they are also the very earliest writing about beer.

• 22:07Nicola Twilley?

  In this collection of 85 tablets total, one in five concern beer in some way, which helps give you a sense of how important beer was in ancient Mesopotamia.

• 22:18Cynthia Graber?

  And several of the tablets had the word or the name Khushim on them.

• 22:21Speaker 04

  And allow us to sort of peek into his realms of responsibility, which especially involved ingredients that were used in brewing and then also, in a number of cases, the distribution of the finished product.

• 22:34Cynthia Graber?

  One whole side of a tablet is a delivery list, and it's not like there's just one thing he was shipping around town.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  So you have four different kinds of beer that show up on this one tablet. And on the front of the tablet, each of those cases says X number of jars of this kind of beer. And then the next one says Y number of jars of this other kind of beer, Z number of jars of this other kind of beer.

• 22:54Nicola Twilley?

  So already, this is exciting information because now we know that ancient Mesopotamians didn't just have one drink called beer. There were at least four different kinds of beer available to quench your thirst in ancient Uruk. And then the other side of the tablet has even more clues.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  If you flip the tablet over, you figure out what was really the purpose of it, which is where, as an administrator, Khushen was accounting for all of the ingredients that he used to brew that beer. Almost certainly because he had been sent those ingredients by someone else and was basically accounting to them for what he had done with all those ingredients. And so there's two key kinds. There's malted barley and there's basically cracked or ground barley, barley groats. So what he does on the back is he, in one column, he tabulates the total number of jars of each of the four types of beer that were delivered. And then he breaks each of those down and says, okay, for this number of jars of that type of beer,

• 23:56Speaker 04

  we used this quantity of malted barley and this quantity of barley groats. So he does that for each of the four types.

• 24:02Nicola Twilley?

  This isn't a full recipe list yet, but it's starting to give a clue about what was in the beers and at least some of the differences between the different kinds.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  So it's really interesting info in these very earliest tablets about beer production. We don't know exactly what those types of beer were, at least at the moment. These texts are still very much in the process of decipherment, but it's really great information about the difference between these different types of beer.

• 24:27Nicola Twilley?

  Khushen's lists differentiate between four types of beer, like we said, but in Mesopotamia as a whole, there were a bunch of different varieties.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  In those earliest proto-Cuneiform documents, there's maybe nine different types, but we don't know exactly what they were. If you fast forward a little bit into what's called the early dynastic period. There's basically five types: golden beer, dark beer, sweet dark beer, reddish brown beer, and strained beer. So they're paying attention to things like color and sweetness. If you fast forward a little bit, the O3 period, you get ordinary beer, good beer, and very good beer. Maybe ordinary strong and very strong beer.

• 25:08Nicola Twilley?

  The Mesopotamian fetish for lists is really helpful when it comes to figuring out all the varieties of beer available to drink, but it doesn't really give us much of a sense of what beer meant to people. We know it was important, but we don't know why. For that, we have to wait until writing evolved to become more abstract and less literal, and people started using this new technology to record their poems and myths.

• 25:32Cynthia Graber?

  And some of those, Tate says, were drinking songs or poems. I mean, we don't really know if they were sung or not, but they probably were.

• 25:39Nicola Twilley?

  One of the earliest drinking songs that has survived is often referred to as the hymn to Ninkasi.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  It's often called a recipe for making beer, but it is definitely not a recipe for making beer. It is some kind of song that is praising the goddess of beer, Ninkasi. And the way to praise her, because she is mainly, when you see Ninkasi mentioned, she is mainly a brewer. And so to praise her, it gives us this depiction of these little images of her at work in the brewery, doing some of the key tasks of the brewer.

• 26:11Cynthia Graber?

  The poem goes through the steps of making beer pretty clearly, and it ends with these lines. "Ninkasi, you're the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat. It is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates."

• 26:23Nicola Twilley?

  Stirring stuff. But I have to say, one of the other Mesopotamian drinking songs archaeologists have found has better lyrics. It's just called "The Drinking Song", and the singer is enjoying, quote, "an abundance of beer." It includes the immortal lines, "I feel wonderful drinking beer in a blissful mood." Or, as the Clancy Brothers put it several thousand years later, "Beer fills us up with cheer."

• 26:56Speaker 04

  The drinking song in particular really gives us insight into the positive sides of beer consumption from their perspective. There are some famous lines from it. For example, "Our liver is happy, our heart is joyful." And so it's celebrating the joys of drinking beer.

• 27:14Cynthia Graber?

  There's still a lot we don't know about these songs. There are words in the songs that still haven't been translated. We don't know what the second song was for. Tate says maybe it was meant to be sung at the opening of a brewery, but we do know that people in Mesopotamia really loved their beer.

• 27:28Nicola Twilley?

  And they weren't just drinking it for hydration purposes. They clearly enjoyed the buzz. They weren't necessarily getting absolutely hammered, but the literature does suggest they sometimes drank enough to be under the influence.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  I think a lot of the descriptions sound more like tipsy, some version of tipsy.

• 27:48Cynthia Graber?

  One place where these descriptions of tipsy people can be found is in ancient medical documents.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  There's a whole body of diagnostic texts where they say, "If you see the following symptoms, then this is the cause and here's what you should do about it." And sometimes beer is involved as part of the remedy for other things, but then there are a small number of these where it seems to be related to the drinking of beer and some effects. So slurring of speech, blurring of vision, unsteadiness while walking.

• 28:22Nicola Twilley?

  This certainly sounds like the medical advice of a culture that does truly love beer, sometimes too much.

• 28:29Cynthia Graber?

  And it's not just the doctors who thought, "Maybe you could sometimes overdo it on the beer."

• 28:33Speaker 04

  We have also some wonderful pieces of literature. There's this classic piece of literature about the god Enki and the goddess Inanna.

• 28:43Cynthia Graber?

  Inanna was the goddess of love and war, and Enki was the god of water, wisdom, crafts, and creation. He had a bunch of powers that were considered kind of the arts of civilization, all the special qualities that made civilization what it was.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  He's in charge of all these different things. And we have this great story where Inanna seems potentially to intentionally be going to visit him.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  In order to take some of these away from him. She gets all dressed up and then especially they sit down and they start drinking together. And then we get a break in the text. And when we come back, it's basically Enki is giving Anana a whole series of these powers. You see another break and then you basically get Enki waking up from his sort of drunken stupor. And he has this minister who's standing there behind him and he says, what's happening? Where's all my stuff? And the minister says, well, you just gave it all away to Nana.

• 29:35Nicola Twilley?

  Ouch. Sorry, Enki. 10 out of 10 can relate. I have not been put in charge of the arts of civilization, but I have definitely said things I later regretted after a beer or two too many. The gods, they're just like us.

• 29:49Cynthia Graber?

  These are some clues that excessive drinking could lead to some regrettable behavior, but also there are plenty of descriptions of just how important beer was every day.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  There's lots of evidence for beer as a part of feasts of all different kinds, from very small intimate kind of occasions to big feasts. People were drinking beer in neighborhood taverns. We learned a lot about that. We have evidence for workers being given beer. It's not part of the regular rations that were given to workers. Often that was probably raw grain, but we have plenty of evidence for cases of giving them beer. And in some rarer cases, tablets that seem to actually say they drank the beer on the job essentially.

• 30:31Nicola Twilley?

  What's intriguing about this is that beer seems to have played a lot of different roles in Mesopotamian life. It clearly could serve as rations, as food, but at the same time, all this mention of the gods gets at something else.

• 30:45Cynthia Graber?

  Beer was central to how people related to the gods. They had beer that they brewed and gave to the gods. They drank beer at celebrations for the gods. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is a Mesopotamian poem you might have heard of, one of the gods learns how to become human by drinking beer. The gods were a unifying force in Mesopotamia and beer was one of the things that helped bridge the gap between us and the gods.

• 31:06Nicola Twilley?

  Tate says it's really not a coincidence that beer was so important at the very same time that the first cities and states were emerging. Just like writing was the bureaucratic tool to keep track of all the new complexities of urban life, beer was the glue that held large groups of humans together.

• 31:25Cynthia Graber?

  But like we've said, there were different kinds and qualities of beer, different alcohol levels. There's evidence that beer was sometimes given to kids, like two pints a day. So that'd probably have been pretty low ABB. And then there'd have been a slightly punchier variety for celebrating. That might also lead Anki to give up his special powers.

• 31:42Nicola Twilley?

  And all of these different texts tell us something about the different roles beer played in Mesopotamian life. And there's another kind of text that tells us a little bit about how people's relationship with beer differed along gender lines. At the larger scale brewery level, it seems like men, like Kushim, were the ones in charge. But in the taverns, women were the bosses.

• 32:04Speaker 04

  If you look, for example, at literature, I think it seems to be a quintessentially female role. Usually when a tavern keeper shows up, it's a woman.

• 32:14Cynthia Graber?

  And as for who was in charge of doing all the brewing at home, there are letters. There are eight surviving letters between a woman and her merchant, traveling husband. And she complains that he didn't leave her a single shekel of silver, no grain. And the key ingredient that she needs for brewing her beer has gone rancid.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  The letters in general are about the nitty gritty details of their business, really detailed business records. And they're really interesting. But occasionally, you get sort of home life, domestic affairs slipping in there. And interestingly, when that happens, brewing ingredients show up. And it's, for example, a wife saying, "We've run out of money at home. Please send more because we don't have enough to make the bapir, to brew the beer."

• 32:58Nicola Twilley?

  Bapir is a Sumerian word, and archaeologists know from the texts that bapir was essential for beer brewing, but they aren't sure exactly what it was.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  People have very differing opinions. There has been a long-running discussion of it. Early on, the assumption was that it was a kind of bread. And this is partly related to the way that the signs that they used to actually write this word seemed to indicate a connection with bread, so it's often been called beer bread. But we don't really know exactly what it was. We get lots of little hints. It was made out of barley, maybe malted barley, maybe not malted barley. It seems to have at least sometimes been a dry, crumbly kind of product.

• 33:38Cynthia Graber?

  People don't know if it's meant to contribute flavors and sugars, or if it's something to kick off the fermentation, like a dried-out sourdough starter. Tate leans towards the latter explanation.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Cross-culturally, there are all sorts of different dried-out fermentation starters that, to me at least, make sense as analogues for Bapier.

• 33:57Cynthia Graber?

  That's the other thing that textual evidence can give us, some clues as to how the beer was made, and thus hints about what we all want to know. What did this ancient Mesopotamian beer taste like? That's coming up after the break.

• 34:13Speaker 06

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• 34:45Cynthia Graber?

  Tate mentioned that another piece of the puzzle, another way to try to find out about beer in Mesopotamia, is through pictures.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  In Mesopotamia, we have lots and lots of images of beer consumption, very few images of beer production.

• 34:57Cynthia Graber?

  Too bad, because it'd be nice to have a lovely, clear diagram with like, a step-by-step series of instructions for how to make Mesopotamian beer. Apparently, in Egypt, they have more depictions of the process, but they didn't record that in ancient Mesopotamia, at least not that we've found.

• 35:12Nicola Twilley?

  The images that do exist are often found on seals. So these are like small stone or metal cylinders that you roll onto wet clay to create a relief picture. They were used kind of like a signature, or a notary stamp, or like a logo to show who made something. And often, they're truly exquisite. Some show tiny little hunting scenes with gazelles and trees, for example, or little birds or monsters.

• 35:37Cynthia Graber?

  Quite a few depict beer drinking.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  I think they're showing us a very specific kind of event, almost certainly a sort of elite level event, where people are typically sitting around, kind of in a very prim and proper way, either drinking from cups that they hold in their hand, or especially drinking from a communal vessel through long straws.

• 36:01Cynthia Graber?

  It's really clear when you look at them. We'll have images on our website. There are these shapes that are clearly meant to be human. They're sitting on recognizable chairs, and there are vessels in between them with long arching things coming out that are obviously straws that they're drinking from.

• 36:14Nicola Twilley?

  I will confess that the only alcoholic beverages I drink through a straw are cocktail slushies. I've never tried beer through a straw. I'm a little confused as to why you would even want to do that.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  The general assumption is that they used straws because the beer needed to be filtered. That is, it had some amount of solid matter in it. So these straws, they would almost certainly have mostly been made out of reeds, which was available in abundance in Mesopotamia, but they don't survive well archaeologically. So those are not generally preserved. What we have is a few really super fancy metal straws. They're kind of finger-length little metal filters that are sort of cone-shaped with holes poked in them that would have been attached to the end of a straw, and that would have then been submerged down into the beer and functioning as a filter.

• 37:06Cynthia Graber?

  Because the final fermented beer wasn't as fully strained as our beautiful, clear beer today. Tate said it would have had grain husks and other kind of chunky bits. And so filtering straws would have been useful.

• 37:16Nicola Twilley?

  But that isn't the only reason Mesopotamians like to slurp their beer from one big jug using a straw.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  I think it's also the communal element of it, almost certainly one of the motivations, because that's a very different experience, drinking from an individual cup. You know, each person has one, and drinking from this shared vessel.

• 37:35Cynthia Graber?

  Remember, these are some of the earliest cities and urban areas, and the social component, creating a society, that was critical. And as we said, beer was a social glue. So it makes sense you'd sit around and drink it communally from a big jug.

• 37:48Nicola Twilley?

  So archaeologists have built up a really detailed picture of ancient beer using texts and images, but the other thing they typically use to help them understand how our ancestors lived is stuff: buildings, objects, the tools and artifacts that they excavate.

• 38:05Nicola Twilley?

  And lots of stuff has been dug up in the area that was Mesopotamia. But for a culture that pretty much ran on beer, there is a weird gap in the archaeological record. Breweries.

• 38:17Cynthia Graber?

  We asked Tate how many clearly identifiable breweries archaeologists have uncovered.

• 38:21Speaker 04

  Not very many.

• 38:22Cynthia Graber?

  Tate told us that so far, the best example is from a city called Lagash.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  This is a particularly interesting example, partly because there's a cuneiform tablet that was found in that building that mentions a particular named brewer, and it mentions the word for brewery, and it seems to be partly about the distribution of beer to consumers. And then the building includes other things, like a huge oven, different sorts of vats, several fireplaces, that people have said, well, that makes sense. This could have been used for brewing. It's also really interesting because it's right next to a major temple in the city. So it was almost certainly brewing beer for this temple complex.

• 39:03Nicola Twilley?

  But I'm sorry, one brewery does not a civilization make. Where are all the others?

• 39:09Speaker 04

  We have a few other cases, but none of them are perfect examples where we could definitely say this was a brewery, which is amazing because in this society, they were brewing and drinking a lot of beer over several thousand years.

• 39:21Cynthia Graber?

  So why is it so hard to identify those breweries? In theory, that seems like it'd be pretty obvious.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  It's difficult. I think partly my answer is that we don't really know what a brewery looked like then. And so it's that we don't have a good model where that we can sort of apply to our excavations. Like, what are we looking for if we want to identify a brewery? I think it's entirely possible that there are already excavated structures that would have been breweries that we have not identified as breweries, but I'm not sure.

• 39:53Nicola Twilley?

  Part of the problem is that these breweries that we're looking for, they might just be a single room in another bigger building.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  If we actually look at particular archives from particular breweries, for example, and say, well, how much beer were they actually producing on a day by day basis? It ends up not being that much. So if we go in thinking that we are looking for a massive building, analogous to breweries of today, that's maybe the wrong kind of scale. And the kind of brewing that these, say, palace breweries were doing. Might have only required a pretty small space with a few large vessels.

• 40:31Nicola Twilley?

  And the issue with the vessels is that they might not have been used just for beer.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  A lot of the vessels that might have been functioning in a brewery, similar vessels could also be doing all kinds of other things in just a kitchen. You know, if they're needing to heat up liquid in a brewery, well, you also need to heat up liquid to make soups and things, which we know they consumed.

• 40:49Nicola Twilley?

  Tate said the problem is not a shortage of pots. There are shed loads of pots and also lots of lists of pots. You know, the Mesopotamians loved lists.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  One of the big challenges here is that we have this wonderful written evidence. And a lot of that is all kinds of different words for different kinds of vessels. Lots and lots of terminology related to this. We don't know exactly what all of those vessels were used for or what they would have looked like. So a big challenge is, well, how do you take that and link it up with the huge numbers of ceramic vessels that we find archaeologically to try to figure out which ones might have been used in brewing?

• 41:27Nicola Twilley?

  But there's one kind of pot that archaeologists feel pretty confident was used to brew beer.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  There's a whole class in the written record of different terms that refer to these types of vessels. One of those terms, nigg durbur, it actually means a vessel with a hole in its base. So the term tells us what, you know, what kind of vessel this was. And in general, or in the written record, when they talk about that vessel, they often like to talk about a pair of vessels. So there was the one with the hole in the base and it's set above another one that they call a collecting or receiving vessel. That's the kind of iconic pair of brewing vessels. They love to talk about the sound that they make, a pleasant sound. Or there's this wonderful onomatopoeia where they say they make a double double sound. So like double double, double double, double double. Liquid, I guess, dripping or running from one into the other one.

• 42:17Nicola Twilley?

  And these days archaeologists have a new tool up their sleeves for figuring out what that liquid dripping between the double double pots actually was.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  The big shift that's been taking place over the last couple of decades is the introduction of organic residue analysis. So that increasingly you can take a particular vessel, analyze residues that are basically preserved in the fabric of that vessel. And then say, this vessel once contained beer. There hasn't been a lot of that done yet in Mesopotamia, but that's going to almost certainly change in the coming years.

• 42:52Cynthia Graber?

  The way scientists do organic residue analysis is they scrape at pottery to get at the stuff that really sunk into it. And then that gunk gets analyzed. You can't see any ingredients with your naked eye. It all has to be examined through a microscope.

• 43:04Nicola Twilley?

  But one thing that's super cool, if you do look through a microscope, you can see individual starch granules in this gunk. Not the grains themselves, of course, but you can tell from the granules what species of grain they came from. So like barley or oats. But even more importantly, you can see if they've been processed in some beer-related way. You can tell from how swollen or pitted or hollowed out the starch granules are, exactly what has happened to those grains, whether, for example, they've been malted or fermented.

• 43:36Cynthia Graber?

  Because otherwise, the only evidence we have of grains are charred ones. When they're charred, the Maillard reaction completely transforms the grain.

• 43:44Nicola Twilley?

  A charred grain doesn't decompose like a normal one, so they can last thousands of years. But the internal transformation is so extreme, it's impossible to tell what they've been used for. Like, they could have been porridge for food, not malted for beer. Residue analysis gives a whole different understanding of grains.

• 44:03Cynthia Graber?

  Archaeologists are also trying to find signs of ancient yeasts because that would help us understand the flavor profile of the drinks. But so far, that hasn't been super successful.

• 44:11Nicola Twilley?

  But where this kind of pottery residue analysis has been really fun is in helping archaeologists and brewers come up with an ingredient list to be able to recreate some of these ancient brews.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  There have been a lot of efforts lately. So archaeologist Pat McGovern, for example, who does a lot of this organic residue analysis, he worked for a long time with Dogfish Head Brewing, and they made this whole series of ancient ales where they would... Focus especially on figuring out what ingredients might have been involved in these ancient beverages. And then they basically brewed them on their modern brewing equipment. They bottled them and sold them.

• 44:47Nicola Twilley?

  They haven't made a Mesopotamian one sadly, because that organic residue analysis hadn't been done.

• 44:53Cynthia Graber?

  But they did make a whole series of ancient ales. They did a Chinese one and an Egyptian one, and they did one called Midas Touch, like King Midas. He was a king in what's now Turkey about 2,700 years ago. Pat McGovern talked about it in an interview he did with the newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, where he's a professor.

• 45:10Speaker 07

  So inside the drinking set, in the tumulus of Midas, was residue. And it was excavated by the Penn Museum, get the samples, and we started doing the analysis.

• 45:21Cynthia Graber?

  And then, once he had the ingredients list, he called up one of America's most interesting craft brewers, Sam Caligoni of Dogfish Head, and Sam got to work on recreating it. A process that he talked about with none other than Martha Stewart.

• 45:36Speaker 08

  This beer's based on evidence found in King Midas's tomb, a 2,700-year-old recipe. King Midas. Yep. It's got white musket grapes, saffron, and thyme honey in it. Let me know what you think of this one. Cheers, cheers.

• 45:47Cynthia Graber?

  We know this wasn't from Mesopotamia, but we really did want to taste at least some kind of ancient beer. This beer unfortunately isn't available in the stores right now, but they did make a few cans recently, and they were able to send us each one.

• 45:59Nicola Twilley?

  So once again, we roped our partners into the tasting fun. And this time, we have a recreation of an ancient beer.

• 46:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'm excited about it. Yeah, I feel like some people think that these sorts of beers or ancient recreations are a little gimmicky, but I think it's pretty fun, actually. It's a good way to explore archaeology in the past and imagine what people were eating or drinking, literally thousands of years ago.

• 46:21Cynthia Graber?

  Tim and I were also pretty excited, and we took the can out of the fridge.

• 46:24Speaker 10

  Okay, let's pour this into a glass.

• 46:29Speaker 10

  Pretty nice golden wheat sort of color.

• 46:33Nicola Twilley?

  It's got a nice bubble on it, which I must say, just initially, I am kind of surprised about because they didn't really have a way of not having beer go flat in those days. But, you know, maybe for a modern audience, you want a little bubble. Flat beer isn't all their age anymore. I also noted that the carbonation might not be strictly authentic. Then we each stuck our noses into the glass and sniffed.

• 46:56Speaker 09

  So the smell is, off the top of my head, if this was just given to me at a bar, I would think it might even be a cider. It's got a kind of, it's got a smell that isn't very beer-like. And yeah, I'd say cider going over toward mead.

• 47:11Cynthia Graber?

  Smells a little sweet.

• 47:15Cynthia Graber?

  Oh, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on there.

• 47:18Speaker 10

  Certainly is.

• 47:21Speaker 10

  Yeah, it almost has a little of that, like Belgian ale, kind of soft yeast, kind of taste going, I think.

• 47:30Cynthia Graber?

  But then there's all this sweetness, like it tastes like honey to me and like very sweet spices, but I get a lot of like honey in it.

• 47:37Nicola Twilley?

  Jeff and I made a toast to King Midas and took a sip each, too.

• 47:43Speaker 09

  Oh, funny. It definitely, it actually does taste like beer.

• 47:46Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, but the taste actually is quite refreshing, really quite good, actually. I was afraid it was gonna be, I felt like it was gonna be like a spiced, kind of ye olde Renaissance beer kind of thing going on. And it's actually, I mean, if I was served a cup of this by King Midas, I would happily drink to his continued good health or success in the afterlife or whatever they were supposed to do.

• 48:11Cynthia Graber?

  I like it. I don't know if I feel transported to ancient times. It definitely tastes different than anything that I would usually drink today. There's got a lot, a lot of the herbs and the flavors in it. The herbs and spices are very different from what I would usually have in beer.

• 48:24Speaker 10

  And it doesn't have that hoppy bitterness, though. It's, it's got a bitter note, but it's not hops.

• 48:29Nicola Twilley?

  Weird but good was the verdict.

• 48:31Speaker 09

  But then also it occurs to me that we're drinking it basically straight out of the refrigerator.

• 48:35Nicola Twilley?

  I cannot actually believe that Jeff thought about refrigeration and not me, but yes, in ancient times, this beer would have mostly been consumed on the warmish side, which despite being British and thus coming from the home of warm, flat Caisgales, I do draw the line at room temperature beer. So maybe I wouldn't have been such a huge fan of ancient beer.

• 48:59Cynthia Graber?

  Tate also did a recreation with a local brewer, not of King Midas's beer, but of a Mesopotamian type, and he said it's not as simple as Pat made it sound. First, there are these organic residues, sure, but a lot of the ingredients that were in there originally could well be totally lost. And an ingredients list doesn't tell you how the beer was made, which has a big influence on the final product, too.

• 49:19Nicola Twilley?

  When Tate started working on his recreation with the Great Lakes Brewing Company, he realized right away exactly how much he didn't know. Everything from what kinds of brewing vessels to use to when to add various ingredients.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  So a huge amount of educated guesswork was involved here in us trying to figure out how we think they brewed, which vessels they might have used. So that was the sort of trying to be authentic in terms of the equipment. And then we also tried to be as authentic as we could in terms of the process, but there are huge gaps in our knowledge about how they brewed beer.

• 49:52Cynthia Graber?

  As Tate told us earlier, one ingredient called bapier was clearly essential in making beer, but also people aren't exactly sure what it was.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  We debated a lot and eventually decided to try out this version of treating bapier as basically a fermentation starter. And we collaborated with a local baker in Cleveland to try to help us figure out how to make this.

• 50:13Nicola Twilley?

  One of the things that does get mentioned in the written evidence is that bapier was typically made using a special oven.

• 50:19Speaker 04

  Which suggests some kind of baking was involved. And so we talked to them about it and said, well, what if we, if we bake a bread, is that going to function as a fermentation starter? And they said, no. So we had to experiment a lot to figure out what kind of baking would be involved here that would still maintain this as a functioning starter. And we, we tried a lot of different versions, but eventually we did come down with what was essentially a sort of dried out sourdough starter. And it actually functioned very well for us.

• 50:49Cynthia Graber?

  The Saramas Soster made modern versions of the double double jar. But then, okay, so there's malted barley, there's bapier, but like in Midas Touch, they used saffron as a flavor and as a bittering agent. What other ingredients were in this beer?

• 50:59Speaker 04

  The big uncertainty we have is what they might have flavored the beer with what are often called aromatics. And that is frustratingly difficult topic.

• 51:09Nicola Twilley?

  Like we've said, they didn't have hops. So what did they use as sort of the backbone flavor wise?

• 51:15Speaker 04

  There's been a lot of discussion of one particular ingredient called kasu, which certainly, especially in later periods, was used as a flavoring ingredient. But we don't know exactly what it was. There's been all kinds of different suggestions about exactly what kind of plant this was.

• 51:31Nicola Twilley?

  This is one of the Akkadian words where decipherment is still ongoing. Tate said, depending on who you consult, kasu could be cassia, which is like cinnamon, or it could be mustard, beet, carob, or wild licorice. So quite a range there.

• 51:47Cynthia Graber?

  So what they did instead was they gave the brewers a list of herbs and spices that would have been available at the time, like coriander, cardamom, fennel, juniper berries, and dates. It was pretty clear that date syrup was regularly used in making beer, but it wasn't so clear how it was used.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  They could have added it early in the process to boost the alcohol content, maybe add some flavor, or they could add it at the end to add basically sweetness. We did both of those things for different events. And I think people trying it were perfectly happy with the ones where we added it early in the process with the higher alcohol content. Not so happy about the ones where we added it after fermentation to sweeten it. I think people did not generally enjoy that.

• 52:25Nicola Twilley?

  Sadly, these experiments weren't available for us to taste. But overall, Tate's beer recreations seemed to have also been a hit.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  Were they good? I think generally the consensus was yes. They did vary pretty significantly across our different tasting events. And they varied in alcohol content, I think from about 3% to 8% because of various decisions that we made. They were generally pretty opaque, but sometimes a kind of milky-looking opaque, sometimes more yellowish. We were not doing anything to carbonate them, so they were generally pretty flat. They certainly were either tart or pretty sour, depending, again, on specific decisions we made.

• 53:06Cynthia Graber?

  This was certainly a fun experiment for Tate, but it also demonstrated just how much there still is for archaeologists who love beer to figure out.

• 53:13Nicola Twilley?

  There are so many more pots to analyze and holes to dig.

• 53:17Cynthia Graber?

  Tate has a dream of what the perfect find would be, somewhere in the Middle East.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  I guess personally, I would love a really good brewery that's just got everything sitting there in place. You know, maybe it would be nicely split up by, you know, one activity was happening over here in this room and a different one over here. That's probably not likely, but I would love something like that.

• 53:40Nicola Twilley?

  But the real fantasy would be to find multiple breweries from different time periods. That way archaeologists like Tate could start to see changes in brewing techniques and beer culture over time. Like the way in the US, we've gone from homebrew to mega corporate breweries to today's explosion of craft breweries.

• 53:59Speaker 04

  I wish we could address those kinds of questions in Mesopotamia, but as is probably clear, there are still a lot of fundamental questions. So we are not at that point yet. But that's the kind of big picture questions about the sort of development of the brewing industry that I would personally be interested in.

• 54:19Cynthia Graber?

  For our special supporters, we've saved more about the story of the Epic of Gilgamesh and what it has to do with beer. That'll be in our newsletter, which you can get by going to gastropod.com/support. And speaking of supporters, a very happy birthday to one of our supreme supporters, Alice Quo. Happy birthday, Alice.

• 54:35Nicola Twilley?

  We say it all the time, but we really couldn't make the show without such generous listeners. Thanks also this episode to Tate Paulette. His new book is called In the Land of Ninkasi, and we have a link to it on our website.

• 54:48Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks, as always, to our fantastic producer, Claudia Geib. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.

• 54:56Speaker 06

  If you've got an insurance question, you could talk to your nana, but she'd probably just tell you how she insured her couch from stains by covering it with plastic. Or you could talk to your local GEICO agent. They'll give you a different kind of warm and fuzzy with personalized assistance for all your insurance needs, like how you could be saving on your policies. So let your nana cover her couch in plastic and let a local GEICO agent help cover you, but not in plastic. To find a GEICO agent near you, visit geico.com-local.