Sumerian Beer.

Occasional commenter and full-time beerologist Martyn Cornell, aka Zythophile, has a long post that begins:

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest beer recipe in history”, with a description of “the detailed brewing process” that “modern researchers have used to recreate Sumerian beer.” The Hymn to Ninkasi, according to one American publication, “served not only as spiritual homage but also as detailed brewing instructions for the beverage that came to be known as beer.”

Unfortunately, that is all total steaming nonsense.

I can’t do justice to it here, but I’ll quote a few excerpts:

Since we don’t actually know what Sumerian brewing and malting techniques were, our interpretations are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong, in part or whole, and we certainly can’t be certain of what we have got right. In particular, the various translations of the Hymn into modern languages vary considerably in what they claim the Hymn actually says, with differences that are extremely important in trying to work out from the Hymn how Sumerians brewed beer. So we cannot be certain that any given translator has got anything right at all. […]

Prince’s translation from not quite 110 years ago does not, in fact, mention beer or brewing at all. Miguel Civil, professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, who made by far the best-known translation of the Hymn into English, in 1964, described Prince’s efforts as “less than satisfactory”, which is the polite academic way of saying “absolutely fakkin dreadful”. […]

Meanwhile, Civil’s translation seems to have become the one regarded, in the English-speaking world, as the definitive, accurate and only account there is of the Hymn in modern language. It is pretty much the only one ever mentioned in accounts of the Hymn today. However, there are at least two more translations, and crucially, they differ from Civil at vitally important points. One is by Walther Sallaberger, an Austrian-born Assyriologist, and professor of Assyriology at the University of Munich. His translation was published, in German, in 2012, in a collection of 20 essays in French, German and English in different subjects in the field of Assyrology, put together to honour Pascal Attinger, a Swiss-born peofessor at the University of Bern, and leading expert in the Sumerian language. Sallaberger calls Civil’s 1964 translation of the Hymn “fundamental for all subsequent work”. However, he says, “the interpretation of the Ninkasi-Hymne offered there contradicts in some respects all other, particularly documentary, evidence on beer brewing.” In other words, Sallaberger reckoned Civil had got his account of Sumerian brewing wrong. […]

Unfortunately, Civil’s translation, like Prince’s, contains lines that are complete nonsense, with one hugely important term, “bappir”, clearly a vital ingredient in the making of Sumerian beer, left untranslated because nobody, then or now, has any good idea exactly what bappir was. […]

There is, in fact, a third modern translation of the Hymn, into Russian, by Veronica Afanasyeva, a Sumerologist and poet born in 1933 who worked for the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Again, Afanasyeva, like Civil and Sallaberger someone who had been studying the Sumerian language for decades, comes up with yet another translation differing in important places from the others. […] With the other important but disputed words in the Hymn, Afanasieva translates titab – “cooked mash” according to Civil. “spent grain cake” for Sallaberger – as сусло. This is where my complete lack of knowledge of Russian causes a big problem, because in Russian сусло can apparently mean both “wort” and “mash”, and I don’t know which one Afansieva meant. […] Finally, dida Afansieva translates as “noble beer”, very different from both Civil’s “sweetwort” and Sallaberger’s “dry beer”. […]

This considerable disagreement among experts as to how individual words, phrases and lines in the Hymn should be translated, even without the confusing and unclear description of the processes, means the Hymn to Ninkasi is, in fact, very little to no help in trying to work out how the Sumerians brewed beer, if we can’t be anywhere near sure what the Hymn actually says.

Indeed, the late Peter Damerow, of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany, who died in 2011 aged 72, queried whether the Sumerians actually made beer at all. In a paper published in 2012, after his death, he wrote: “Given our limited knowledge about the Sumerian brewing processes, we cannot say for sure whether their end product even contained alcohol.” […]

But that was only a brief touch on the problems with the Hymn, and the need to finish off another couple of projects prevented me from pulling together a complete argument against the popular view of the Hymn until a month or two ago.

And then, just as I was about to start, along came a man considerably more qualified than me to write about the Hymn to Ninkasi, and the subject of beer and brewing in ancient Mesopotamia – Tate Paulette, archaeologist, and associate professor of history at North Carolina State University.

Paulette has written In the Land of Ninkasi, subtitled “A History of Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia”, just published by Oxford University Press (at least it’s published in the US: it appears to be not due out in the UK until November). It is, undoubtedly, the most important book published in the field of beer history for some time, because it looks at the whole 2,000-year story of brewing in the land between the Euphrates and the Tigris with the sceptical eyes of a scholar who is an expert in Middle East archaeology, knowledgeable enough about the ancient languages spoken in the region to be able to explain them to a lay person, and also knowledgeable enough about brewing to have participated in an attempt with professionals to recreate Sumerian beer (not the Anchor effort, but one with Great Lakes Brewing of Cleveland, Ohio).

Paulette has invented the word “šikarologist” to describe students of Mesopotamian beer, from the Akkadian word šikaru, meaning beer, the cuneiform for which looked like one of those pointy brewing jars laid on its side: 𒁉. I will definitely be stealing that. Strangely, a cognate of šikar in another Semitic language, Hebrew, the word shekhár, meaning “intoxicating drink”, is the root of the English word “cider”, via Greek, Latin and French. Shekhár is also the root of the Yiddish word for “drunk”: I remember my Jewish ex-father-in-law, who came from Vienna, staggering around at his 70th birthday party, surrounded by his extensive family in his large garden in rural Surrey, saying: “Ich bin so shicker!”

I was relieved to find that Paulette pretty much agrees with me that the Hymn to Ninkasi is not actually very helpful in working out how Sumerians really brewed.

There is much more about all the above topics at the link, and Cornell ends with his own “suggestions as to what might have been happening in a Sumerian brewhouse.” If any of this is intriguing, click on through, and I hereby fire up the Schwa-signal in the hopes that ə de vivre will take note and appear. (I reported on Miguel Civil’s death in 2019.) Thanks, Mike!