A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Chapter 1, “A Stone-Age Brew”, begins with a discussion of how agriculture developed around 12,000 years ago in an area known as the Fertile Crescent. Standage talks about how beer was discovered, rather than invented and it seems likely that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had come across alcohol in the form of fermented wild cereal grains or fruits before they ever settled down to farm. However, it was only when agricultural settlements became more widespread that the technology to grow and store grain provided the means for people to brew beer. Such settlements also led to the contamination of water supplies, which meant that people had to find a way to make the water safe to drink. Since “it was made using boiled water, beer was safer to drink than water” (21). While it is difficult to determine exactly when beer was first brewed deliberately, Standage notes that there “was almost certainly no beer before 10,000 BCE, but it was widespread in the Near East by 4,000 BCE” (10).

Standage discusses the different methods used by Mesopotamians and Egyptians to make beer and the efforts they made to ensure that they had the raw materials to brew beer. The significance of beer to these ancient cultures is evident in records showing that the Egyptians had at least 17 different types of beer, and the Mesopotamians had 20. Beer played an important social role, as well as a nutritional one, and Sumerian depictions of beer drinking typically portray two people drinking from a shared container through straws. This leads Standage to suggest that “sharing a drink with someone is a universal symbol of hospitality and friendship” (18), a tradition that continues to this day.

Ancient peoples believed that alcohol had supernatural properties and was, in fact, a gift from the gods. It is not surprising then that beer was often used in religious rituals and as a religious offering: in fact, Standage offers examples to support the fact that “the religious significance of beer seems to be common to every beer-drinking culture” (19). In early settlements, storing surplus food and religious rituals were two strategies for maintaining an adequate supply of food, strategies that became increasingly entwined. Both surplus food and sacred objects were stored in communal storehouses overseen by the community’s religious leaders; soon these storehouses became temples. Contributions to the temples were recorded using clay tokens and were used to feed the religious leaders who oversaw communal works. This, as Standage notes, was the beginning of “accountancy, writing, and bureaucracy” (23). 

Chapter 2, “Civilized Beer”, continues to consider the way beer, and the need to store the requisite ingredients as well as the finished product, shaped the development of the earliest civilizations. The world’s first cities emerged in Mesopotamia, which corresponds to modern-day Iraq. The production of surplus food meant that not everyone had to be involved in farming and enabled certain people to become craftsmen, administrators and priests. This extra grain was also used to make bread and beer that paid the wages of those who built canals, temples and pyramids in both Mesopotamia and Egypt. Different ranks in society earned different amounts and different types of beer, so even though beer was dunk by everyone, it could still be used as a tool of social distinction. As Standage notes, the “use of bread and beer as wages or currency meant that they became synonymous with prosperity and well being” (37) and beer was actually used as medicine in both Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, contributions to the store of surplus food were recorded using tokens, and this system later developed into the first form of writing in a part of Mesopotamia called Sumeria, around 3,400 BCE. The earliest written records then, are receipts for what are essentially taxes, the use of which were controlled by the temple. Not only was beer integral to the physical development of cities and the systems that allowed them to function, beer-drinking became a mark of civilization too. As writing developed from a utilitarian system of record keeping to a more flexible form of expression, it was used to record literature, another hallmark of civilization. Standage quotes from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of a great Sumerian king, whose wild friend Enkidu “turned into a human” (27) when he tasted bread and beer. He also points out that drunkenness was acceptable in Mesopotamia and that the drunkenness of the gods was often blamed for disasters like a failed harvest. Similarly, an Egyptian story credits beer with saving humankind from the wrath of the gods. The frequency of reference to beer in both Mesopotamian and Egyptian records, its appearance in literature and its association with the gods all point to its centrality to these two different cultures.