It\u2019s a claim you will find repeated in dozens \u2013 possibly hundreds \u2013 of places: that the so-called \u201cHymn to Ninkasi<\/em>\u201d, 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 \u201ceffectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer\u201d, \u201c<\/em>the oldest beer recipe in history\u201d, with a description of \u201cthe detailed brewing process\u201d that \u201cmodern researchers have used to recreate Sumerian beer.\u201d The Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em>, according to one American publication, \u201cserved not only as spiritual homage but also as detailed brewing instructions for the beverage that came to be known as beer.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that is all total steaming nonsense.<\/p>\n In fact the \u201cHymn to Ninkasi<\/em>\u201d (a name evidently first given to the poem, as \u201cDie Ninkasi-Hymnus<\/em>\u201d, by Heinrich Zimmern, professor of Egyptology at the University of Leipzig, in 1913) is no more a guide to Sumerian beer making than Robbie Burns\u2019s poem \u201cJohn Barleycorn\u201d is a guide to 18th century Scottish malting techniques \u2013 much less so, in fact, because we are not yet three centuries away from Burns, and his language is easily understood.<\/p>\n The Hymn<\/em> was written on clay tablets using reeds to make wedge-shaped \u2013 cuneiform \u2013 marks in a tongue unrelated to any other we know, with symbols that frequently have two or more possible meanings, so that, today, would-be translators have to guess at what exactly is meant. When we make those guesses at what the writer(s) of the Hymn<\/em> wanted to say, we arrive at them using our knowledge of modern brewing and modern brewing techniques: we interpret the Hymn<\/em> through modern lenses.<\/p>\n Since we don\u2019t 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\u2019t be certain of what we have got right. In particular, the various translations of the Hymn<\/em> into modern languages vary considerably in what they claim the Hymn<\/em> actually says, with differences that are extremely important in trying to work out from the Hymn<\/em> how Sumerians brewed beer. So we cannot be certain that any given translator has got anything right at all.<\/p>\n To give one small example of the sort of problems translators from Sumerian face, all the three known clay tablets with the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> inscribed in them, now in the Louvre in Paris, in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum and in the Near Eastern Museum in Berlin, also carry a drinking song written in Sumerian cuneiform, which is generally translated, in part, as \u201cdrinking beer in a merry mood, with a joyful heart and a happy liver.\u201d But all we can be certain of is that the Sumerian says something like \u201cwith a joyful [internal organ of some sort] and a happy [different internal organ of some sort]\u201d. The translators have made guesses. They could have guessed at stomach and kidneys, with as much justification.<\/p>\n A small note here to say that all three tablets are reckoned to come, in fact, from the Old Babylonian period, about 1890 BC, which is more than a century after the fall of the last Sumerian dynasty. Sumerian had been replaced by then as the general spoken language by Akkadian, the Semitic language of the Babylonians, the people who had toppled the last Sumerian rulers, though Sumerian was still used for religious and scholarly purposes, rather as Latin remained the language used by scholars long after the fall of Rome.<\/p>\n The Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> tablets were written, therefore, in Sumerian by scribes whose native language was almost certainly not Sumerian, which itself seems to have caused problems: John Dyneley Prince, professor of Semitic languages at Columbia University, who seems to have been the first person to attempt a translation of the Hymn<\/em> into English, in 1916, apparently using the tablet in Berlin, complained that \u201cThe text is extremely difficult to decipher, as it is not only mutilated in places, but the original scribe apparently in many cases wrote carelessly, making erasures and corrections.\u201d It is possible, therefore, to argue that the Hymn<\/em> should not be regarded as Sumerian at all, but Babylonian, though the circumstances under which the tablets carrying the Hymn<\/em> are known to have been found suggest that they were written as copying exercises for Babylonian scribes, who were presumably copying older Sumerian texts.<\/p>\n Prince\u2019s 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\u2019s Oriental Institute, who made by far the best-known translation of the Hymn<\/em> into English, in 1964, described Prince\u2019s efforts as \u201cless than satisfactory\u201d, which is the polite academic way of saying \u201cabsolutely fakkin dreadful\u201d. Prince\u2019s attempt at a translation of the Hymn <\/em>was mostly a pile of frankly meaningless nonsense, with lines such as \u201cO princess, in spite of the demon of the chamber, princess, thou makest glad\/Ninkasi the mighty bolt, O great functionary, thou art its breaker.\u201d It is difficult to understand how Prince felt able to present this rubbish to the editors of the American Journal of Semitic Languages<\/em>, but, presumably impressed by his qualifications and scholarly standing, they duly printed it \u2026<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Civil\u2019s 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<\/em> in modern language. It is pretty much the only one ever mentioned in accounts of the Hymn<\/em> 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\u2019s 1964 translation of the Hymn<\/em> \u201cfundamental for all subsequent work\u201d. However, he says, \u201cthe interpretation of the Ninkasi-Hymne<\/em> offered there contradicts in some respects all other, particularly documentary, evidence on beer brewing.\u201d In other words, Sallaberger reckoned Civil had got his account of Sumerian brewing wrong.<\/p>\n We will come back to Sallaberger\u2019s translation later. It was Civil\u2019s translation from 1964 that came to the attention in 1989 of Fritz Maytag, then owner of the Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, when he read about the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> in an article by Solomon Katz, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on the anthropology of food. Katz was arguing that gathering cereal grains to make beer was a major driver of the Middle East agricultural revolution. and he cited Civil\u2019s English version of the Hymn<\/em>. Maytag decided he wanted to try to reproduce the beer apparently described in the Hymn<\/em>, and, working with Katz, Civil and the brewers at Anchor, they put together a recipe for \u201cNinkasi Beer\u201d using methods and ingredients \u201ccompatible with her activities as described in the Hymn<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Civil\u2019s translation, like Prince\u2019s, contains lines that are complete nonsense, with one hugely important term, \u201cbappir<\/em>\u201d, clearly a vital ingredient in the making of Sumerian beer, left untranslated because nobody, then or now, has any good idea exactly what bappir<\/em> was. Nor is it possible to put together a brewing regime \u201ccompatible\u201d with the Hymn<\/em>, because the order of the activities described in the poem does not seem to make much sense. Let us look at Civil\u2019s 1964 translation of the lines at the heart of the apparent description of the brewing process (I have taken out the duplication of lines present in the original: ellipses indicate missing words in all three known versions of the Hymn):<\/em><\/p>\n Ninkasi, your father is Enki, the lord Nudimmud. You are the one who handles dough [and]\u2026 with a big shovel, You are the one who bakes the <\/em>bappir in the big oven, You are the one who waters the earth-covered malt; You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar; You are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats; You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweetwort, You \u2026 the sweetwort to the vessel. You place appropriately on [top of] a large collector vat. Among the many lines that don\u2019t make sense are \u201cPuts in order the piles of hulled grain\u201d \u2013 what could this possibly mean in terms of a brewing process? \u201cYou are the one who waters the earth-covered malt\u201d \u2013 you might want to sprinkle the sprouting green malt, but why would you cover it in earth? \u201cThe waves rise, the waves fall\u201d \u2013 pardon? \u201cYou are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats.\u201d Why would you do that? \u201cYou are the one who holds with both hands the great sweetwort\u201d \u2013 why would you be holding the wort in your hands? Wouldn\u2019t it be in a jar?<\/p>\n In addition we have this thing called bappir<\/em>, which has to be mixed with flavourings and then baked. The Sumerian logogram for bappir <\/em>was the pointy jar symbol meaning \u201cbeer\u201d plus the symbol for \u201cbread\u201d, leading Assyrologists to assume that the word meant \u201cbeer-bread\u201d or \u201cbeer-loaf\u201d \u00a0The symbol for the word \u201cbrewer\u201d combined the symbols for \u201cman\u201d, \u201cbeer\u201d and \u201cbread\u201d, making him \u201cbeer-bread man\u201d \u00a0We can be pretty confident, from the evidence, that bappir<\/em> was made from barley. But no one can agree on how it was made, how it was used and what its purpose was. All sorts of guesses have been made. Maytag, Katz and the Anchor brewers decided, seemingly for no apparent reason, that bappir<\/em> was a mix of dates, or date syrup, and malted, unmalted and roasted barley flour. Legal restrictions on what could go into beer in California, apparently, meant that honey had to be substituted for the dates in the mixture, which they baked. The 100-plus loaves they baked didn\u2019t dry out properly, so they baked them again, ending up with something like Italian biscotti, also twice-baked (which is the meaning of the word \u2013 bis cotti<\/em>), very hard and dry. None of this came from the Hymn<\/em>.<\/p>\n Maytag and Katz had already decided that the Hymn<\/em> was not a good enough guide to be able to brew beer successfully. In a later interview, Katz said: \u201cCertain aspects of the recipe seemed wrong based on what we know of modern brewing techniques. So we located Miguel Civil and had him re-translate a portion of the text.\u201d Ta-da, the new translation solved the problems that Maytag and Katz had been having. In particular the line about \u201cearth-covered malt\u201d disappeared, to be replaced with<\/p>\n \u201cYou are the one who waters the malt set on the ground.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n That does not actually make sense either, however, because if this is a reference to sun-drying malt, which everybody seems to have decided it is, then you would not be watering it.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, nobody seems to have considered that tweaking your translation to have it say what you think it ought to say, to match modern brewing methods, was not a very good idea, not least because on the archaeological evidence we have, it is very unlikely that Sumerian brewing techniques were the same as modern ones. The hymn mentioned both bappir<\/em> and, apparently, malt. So Maytag and his team mixed one third of their supposed recreation of bappir <\/em>with two thirds of malt in the mash tun, \u201cboiling\u201d it (I suspect they actually merely added water at a temperature that would bring about maximum saccharification, rather than boiling it), and then letting it cool before adding standard brewer\u2019s yeast. None of that is in the Hymn<\/em>, either. It\u2019s all guess upon guess.<\/p>\n The resultant Ninkasi Beer, 3\u00bd per cent alcohol, dry, and described as \u201ccider-like\u201d, was served to at the National Microbrewers Conference in San Francisco in 1989 from huge jars into which drinkers dipped straws, just as Sumerian drinkers are depicted doing in ancient seals. Whether a Sumerian, or a Babylonian, would have recognised it, we have no idea.<\/p>\n Maytag\u2019s and Katz\u2019s version of \u201cSumerian\u201d beer and brewing methods, and Civil\u2019s translation of the Hymn to Ninkasi, <\/em>have subsequently over the past 35 years been written up perhaps hundreds of times as if they were the definitive answers to the questions \u201cwhat does the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> mean in English?\u201d and \u201chow did the Sumerians brew beer?\u201d<\/p>\n However returning to the Sallaberger translation from 2012, there are vital differences in the translations, which underline just how much we cannot claim to understand Sumerian beer production at all. Sallaberger translates the important word \u201cbappir<\/em>\u201d as \u201csauerteig<\/em>\u201d, \u201csourdough\u201d, a suggestion first put forward by the Dutch scholar Marten Stol, professor of ancient near eastern history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in 1971 and believes this was how yeast was introduced into the Sumerian brewing process.<\/p>\n Stol made his proposal in a review in the journal Bibliotheca Orientalis<\/a><\/em> of a book written by Wolfgang R\u00f6llig, professor of ancient oriental studies at the University of T\u00fcbingen, in 1970 called Das Bier im alten Mesopotamien<\/em> in which R\u00f6llig translated the Akkadian word sikkatu<\/em> as \u201cyeast\u201d \u00a0Stol insisted that far from meaning \u201cyeast\u201d, sikkatu<\/em> was \u201cevidently a plant\u201d \u00a0Nothing, Stol declared, \u201cin the handbooks on the ancient oriental, rabbinical and classical literatures, indicates that pure yeast was known in ancient times. Instead, he said: \u201cThe only fermentation agent known to the ancients was sourdough.\u201d It was for this reason Stol proposed that in ancient Mesopotamia, \u201cbeer fermentation was achieved using leavened bread,\u201d and the ingredient called bappir, <\/em>evidently made from barley, was this sourdough, this leavened bread, that initiated fermentation. Clearly R\u00f6llig and Stol, both feted Sumerologists, came to utterly dissimilar conclusions from the same evidence.<\/p>\n Stol later changed his mind about bappir<\/em>, and by 1987 was describing it as \u201cMalzbrot<\/em>\u201d, \u201cmalt bread\u201d, made from malted barley. Sallaberger wasn\u2019t impressed with this interpretation, saying \u201csuch a bread dough would be too liquid\u201d. Another big problem with making bappir<\/em> a malted product is that the Hymn<\/em> seems to first talk about malt after<\/em> talking about bappir<\/em>, malt being watered on the ground and then soaked in a jar. (The word for malt in Sumerian was munu<\/em> \u2013 this is one of the very few terms everybody agrees upon.)<\/p>\n Civil says honey and wine were added to the brew: Sallaberger insists that<\/p>\n \u201cThis contradicts the testimony of the numerous administrative documents from the ancient Sumerian to the ancient Babylonian period, which note only barley, sometimes also emmer, as the raw material for beer preparation and which, given the often large quantities used in beer preparation, should have noted every other spice or honey, expensive imported products.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Sallaberger also rejects Civil\u2019s translation of the word \u201ctitab<\/em>\u201d as \u201ccooked mash\u201d, saying:<\/p>\n \u201cthe beer vessels that are well known from textual sources do not include cooking kettles, neither vessels nor devices for this can be proven archaeologically, and in addition the necessary fuel would be scarce in Babylonia.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Civil, who died in 2019, seems to have changed his mind about the meaning of titab<\/em>, describing it in 2005 when discussing a cuneiform tablet from the late first millennium BC listing food and drink terms, today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as \u201ca dried ingredient made from green malt (munu<\/em>).\u201d My personal suspicion \u2013 see later \u2013 is that this is the wrong way round, and titab<\/em> was the green malt, munu<\/em> the dried version.<\/p>\n Indeed, there is good evidence that the Sumerians and\/or the Babylonians may have made beer without any heating of any ingredient, except probably the bappir<\/em>, whatever that was, instead cold-mashing their malt. In 2005 Martin Zarnkow of the Technical University of Munich\u2019s Research Centre Weihenstephan for Brewing and Food Quality and a group of colleagues conducted experiments based on findings at Tall Bazi in northern Syria, where around 1999, archaeologists discovered large, barrel-shaped vessels half buried in the floor of many of the houses they excavated, dating to around the 1200s BC (ie 600 years later than the Hymn<\/em>), capable of holding up to up to 200 litres.<\/p>\n Residues on the inner ceramic surface of these vessels showed they were exclusively used to produce and store beer. There were other vessels found with holes in their bottoms, capable of holding 100 litres, which also had evidence of being used to handle both beer and wine. These \u201cbase-tapped\u201d vessels, Zarnkow and his team found, were very suitable for steeping and germinating barley. \u201cKilning\u201d of the malt was done by Zarnkow et al<\/em> on a terracotta rooftop, where in the Syrian summer, the temperature easily reached 60\u2103. The malt was ground on a saddle quern and mashed in water at 34\u2103 \u2013 ambient temperature for that time and place. Yeast and lactobacillus were added to the mash, which was left to stand for 36 hours at 24\u2103.<\/p>\n The resultant beer was highly fermented, with a pleasant and lively character, and capable of remaining drinkable for more than two months. (See \u201cCold mashing process \u2013 a technology possibly used in ancient times in the Orient<\/em>\u201d, Brauwelt International<\/em>, vol 24, issue 5, October 2006, pp306-9.) There is, as far as I am aware, no evidence at all, archaeologically or in the known surviving documents from the time, that the Sumerians were using the sorts of vessels and techniques being used by the people of Tall Bazi six centuries later, and in any case Zarnow\u2019s chosen methods of brewing were nearly as much guesswork as Maytag and Katz\u2019s. But what he did was entirely plausible, and also fits what the Sumerians might have been doing.<\/p>\n Sallaberger insists that titab<\/em> means \u201cspent grain cake\u201d, (Treberkuchen<\/em> in Sallaberger\u2019s German original), left behind when the wort is run off the mash, and not \u201ccooked mash\u201d \u00a0His translation runs:<\/p>\n Your spent grain cake is spread out on a stately mat Nor does he agree with Civil that dida<\/em> means \u201csweetwort\u201d. Instead, he says, it means Trockenbier<\/em>, \u201cdry beer\u201d, \u201cwith which one could mix a fresh beer at any time.\u201d I have absolutely no idea what that is meant to mean, what \u201cdry beer\u201d is meant to be or how you could \u201cmix a fresh beer at any time with it\u201d. Sallaberger\u2019s translation of the dida<\/em> couplet goes:<\/p>\n Your large dry beer, it is ready processed with the one whole line in the broken and partial couplet that follows translated as<\/p>\n is the dry beer that you took in your hand.<\/em><\/p>\n Both that and the preceding \u201cspent grain cake\u201d couplet seem to me to be as nonsensical as anything Civil or Prince wrote. I cannot see what spent grain cake has to do with the actual production of beer: it\u2019s a by-product, generally sold off, by modern brewers, as animal feed. Why would you spread it on a mat? What is a \u201cstately\u201d mat? And God knows what the line about a cool heart seizing the God is meant to mean. Nor does the \u201cTrockenbier<\/em>\u201d couplet, as translated by Sallaberger, seem to say anything understandable. Here I would like to introduce Cornell\u2019s Law of Translation, which looks to apply to so many attempts to put the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> into a modern language: if your translation doesn\u2019t appear to make sense, that is because your translation is wrong.<\/p>\n There is, in fact, a third modern translation of the Hymn<\/em>, into Russian<\/a>, 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. Take Stanza V, the \u201cbappir baked in the oven\u201d stanza. Civil gives this as<\/p>\n It is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, Sallaberger translates that as<\/p>\n Deine Sauerteig (klumpen), wurden sie im stattlichen Ofen gebacken, which Google Translate tells me means \u201cYour sourdough (lumps), they were baked in the stately oven, They are neatly arranged sheaves of gunida emmer\u201d, gunida being, Sallaberger says, \u201cA variety of emmer, tentatively identified as naked emmer, ie free-threshing.\u201d<\/p>\n Afanasieva translates the same couplet as<\/p>\n \u0422\u044b \u0437\u0435\u0440\u043d\u043e \u043f\u0440\u043e\u0440\u043e\u0441\u0448\u0435\u0435 \u0431\u043e\u043b\u044c\u0448\u043e\u0439 \u043b\u043e\u043f\u0430\u0442\u043e\u0439 \u0441\u0433\u0440\u0435\u0431\u0430\u0435\u0448\u044c, This, Google Translate says, means \u201cYou bake that sourdough in a big oven,\/The grain for malt is collected and cleaned in heaps.\u201d<\/p>\n So: all three agree that something was baked in an oven \u2013 but was it beerbread, whatever that is, or sourdough, as claimed by both Sallaberger and Afanasieva? And what was happening next? Some kind of arrangement or tidying up of grain, certainly, but what, and why? The three translators cannot agree. Civil says it was hulled (ie dehusked) grain, \u201cput in order\u201d, whatever that means. Sallaberger says it was sheaves of emmer, neatly arranged. Afanasieva calls it \u201cgrain for malt\u201d, \u201ccleaned\u201d, whatever that means in context, and in heaps.<\/p>\n With the other important but disputed words in the Hymn<\/em>, Afanasieva translates titab<\/em> \u2013 \u201ccooked mash\u201d according to Civil. \u201cspent grain cake\u201d for Sallaberger \u2013 as \u0441\u0443\u0441\u043b\u043e. This is where my complete lack of knowledge of Russian causes a big problem, because in Russian \u0441\u0443\u0441\u043b\u043e can apparently mean both \u201cwort\u201d and \u201cmash\u201d, and I don\u2019t know which one Afansieva meant. That gives us two choices for translating Afansieva\u2019s Russian version of Stanza VIII of the Hymn<\/em>:<\/p>\n You throw the wort on the bedding of reeds, Or alternatively:<\/p>\n You throw the mash on the bedding of reeds, Now, you throw wort over your reed mat and it is just going to flow through the reeds and soak into the ground below. That surely points to \u0441\u0443\u0441\u043b\u043e being \u201cmash\u201d \u00a0But for what it\u2019s worth, the Russian Wikipedia page for \u041f\u0438\u0432\u043d\u043e\u0435 \u0441\u0443\u0441\u043b\u043e \u2013 \u201cBeer wort\u201d \u2013 has a picture captioned simply \u201c\u0421\u0443\u0441\u043b\u043e\u201d that clearly shows wort flowing from a pipe into a vessel. Still, \u0441\u0443\u0441\u043b\u043e as \u201cmash\u201d makes more sense in the context of the Hymn<\/em>, mash being something that could actually be thrown onto a bed of reeds, and it also means Afansieva agrees with Civil over the meaning of titab<\/em>. Also \u2013 \u201cbaked wort\u201d?<\/p>\n Finally, dida<\/em> Afansieva translates as \u201cnoble beer\u201d, very different from both Civil\u2019s \u201csweetwort\u201d and Sallaberger\u2019s \u201cdry beer\u201d. Her translation into Russian of the couplet in stanza IX is<\/p>\n \u041e\u0445, \u0438 \u0437\u043d\u0430\u0442\u043d\u043e\u0435 \u043f\u0438\u0432\u043e \u0433\u043e\u0442\u043e\u0432\u0438\u0448\u044c \u0442\u044b, which Google Translate renders in English as<\/p>\n Oh, and you prepare noble beer, \u00a0again, very different from Sallaberger\u2019s<\/p>\n Your large dry beer, if it is processed and ready and Civil\u2019s<\/p>\n You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweetwort, \u2013 and that\u2019s ignoring the fact that none of those renditions makes much sense in terms of how to make Sumerian beer.<\/p>\n So we have three scholars, and three very different takes on what the Sumerian text actually means. Sometimes the differences in the translations are staggering. In stanza VI, for example, both Civil and Afansieva talk about water, malt, earth and dogs, though only Civil mentions \u201cpotentates\u201d \u2013 Afansieva\u2019s version goes:<\/p>\n You cover the grain for malt with earth, water it with water, Sallaberger\u2019s translation is almost completely different, with only malt and water in common:<\/p>\n Your malt, the semolina was prepared, water was poured into it, This considerable disagreement among experts as to how individual words, phrases and lines in the Hymn<\/em> should be translated, even without the confusing and unclear description of the processes, means the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> is, in fact, very little to no help in trying to work out how the Sumerians brewed beer, if we can\u2019t be anywhere near sure what the Hymn<\/em> actually says.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cGiven our limited knowledge about the Sumerian brewing processes, we cannot say for sure whether their end product even contained alcohol.\u201d<\/p>\n Damerow\u2019s 12,000-word essay<\/a> in the Cuneiform Digital Library Journal<\/em> is essential reading for anyone pondering the subject of Sumerian brewing. The Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> is certainly not the only source we have for Sumerian brewing: there are hundreds of surviving administrative documents (ie clay tablets) touching on the subject. Damerow\u2019s essay is too long to do anything more here than pull out a couple of points, but this one in particular should be stuffed up the nostrils of anyone who tries to claim that the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> contains \u201cdetailed brewing instructions\u201d: the Hymn<\/em>, Damerow says, is<\/p>\n \u201cdifficult to unambiguously read, understand, and translate \u2026 due to our limited knowledge of the context of beer brewing in the Sumerian culture and, in particular, of the terminology relating to it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The same, he says, is true of the many other tablets mentioning beer and brewing:<\/p>\n \u201cThis difficulty of interpreting the numerous administrative documents concerning beer brewing has impelled scholars to reconstruct the meaning of the ancient terms by applying modern knowledge about fermentation chemistry and brewing technology. Thus, most of the translations and interpretations of these terms assume that the process of beer brewing and the raw materials and products involved are known to us, so that the only problem lies in attributing the correct modern terms to the ancient ones.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cBut while this assumption is necessarily true for the basic chemical reactions involved\u2014the decomposition of starch by means of enzymes produced in the process of malting grains and by later fermenting the resulting product by means of yeast bacteria\u2014the variety of possible techniques to realize these reactions is too great to allow any reliable identification of the specific ancient procedures used and products attained.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cMoreover, these chemical reactions have been realized in the brewing process by practitioners to whom they were essentially unknown. Their understanding of the brewing process and consequently the meaning of the terms they used necessarily differed from modern brewing terminology. Translations of the terms ignoring this difference attribute anachronistically modern knowledge to the ancient brewers and ascribe to the ancient terminology questionable meanings. In fact, even crucial questions, such as which raw materials used in the brewing process were malted before they were processed, remain controversial.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Damerow complains, rightly, that another big problem with trying to work out the processes of Sumerian beer brewing is that the philologists, who study the clay tablets such as the ones that gave us the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em>, have not been speaking to the archaeologists, who have made some fascinating discoveries of remains pretty unambiguously directly concerned with Sumerian brewing. Indeed, the whole Maytag\/Katz\/Civil\/Anchor experiment totally ignores the archaeological finds from ancient Sumer concerning brewing.<\/p>\n I have been thinking for some time about the problems with the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em>, and the myths that now surround it, so that almost everyone who writes about it seems to take without question the idea that it is a recipe we can use to brew authentic Sumerian beer. I voiced my serious doubts about the accepted story in the chapter on brewing in Iraq in Around the World in 80 Beers<\/em>, which was finished at the end of last year (and published in July). But that was only a brief touch on the problems with the Hymn<\/em>, 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<\/em> until a month or two ago.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, and the subject of beer and brewing in ancient Mesopotamia \u2013 Tate Paulette, archaeologist, and associate professor of history at North Carolina State University.<\/a><\/p>\n Paulette has written In the Land of Ninkasi<\/em>, subtitled \u201cA History of Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia\u201d, just published by Oxford University Press (at least it\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n Paulette has invented the word \u201c\u0161ikarologist\u201d to describe students of Mesopotamian beer, from the Akkadian word \u0161ikaru<\/em><\/a>, meaning beer, the cuneiform for which looked like one of those pointy brewing jars laid on its side: \ud808\udc49<\/a>. I will definitely be stealing that. Strangely, a cognate of \u0161ikar<\/em> in another Semitic language, Hebrew, the word shekh\u00e1r<\/em>, meaning \u201cintoxicating drink\u201d, is the root of the English word \u201ccider\u201d, via Greek, Latin and French. Shekh\u00e1r<\/em> is also the root of the Yiddish word for \u201cdrunk\u201d: 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: \u201cIch bin so shicker<\/em>!\u201d<\/p>\n I was relieved to find that Paulette pretty much agrees with me that the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> is not actually very helpful in working out how Sumerians really brewed. The examples he gives of possible equivalents in English are, again, John Barleycorn<\/em>, and also the Irish quartet the Clancy Brothers\u2019 great song Beer, Beer, Beer<\/a><\/em>, in which the brewing process is described as<\/p>\n A barrel of malt, a bushel of hops, you stir it around with a stick<\/em><\/p>\n If, in four thousand years\u2019 time, a future historian only had that song to form theories of how ancient Europeans made beer, I, and Paulette, suggest she is unlikely to come up with anything very accurate \u2026 (Incidentally, that phrase \u201ca barrel of malt\u201d clearly shows this to be an Irish song, since the Irish traditionally measured malt by the barrel, rather than in quarters, as the English did.)<\/p>\n Probably the most important sentence in the whole of Paulette\u2019s book is: \u201cThe fact is that we do not currently know exactly how beer was brewed in Mesopotamia.\u201d So why read In the Land of Ninkasi<\/em> if it cannot answer the big question everyone is interested in? Well, because it\u2019s an excellently written book that pulls together everything we DO currently know about brewing in Mesopotamia \u2013 which is quite a lot, actually \u2013 in an easy-to-understand fashion, and tells us exactly what we know for sure and what we are only guessing at.<\/p>\n Paulette is also very good on the question of why we can\u2019t use the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em> to work out exactly how the Sumerians brewed beer, and in particular on the dangers of the unconscious biases we bring to our interpretations of the poem, imposing our modern knowledge of brewing and brewing processes, and brewing terminology, on a description \u2013 or an apparent description \u2013 of something that was without a doubt very different from the modern Western method of making beer.<\/p>\n In the Land of Ninkasi<\/em> covers much more than the Hymn to Ninkasi<\/em>, however: it starts with a chapter called \u201cBeer in world history\u201d, then takes in the history of Mesopotamia, the \u201cland between two rivers\u201d (which is what Mesopotamia means, of course), looks at what we know from Sumerian and Akkadian records about beers and brewing ingredients between 3000BC and 1600BC, and surveys what we know about brewing technologies and techniques both from the surviving literature and the archaeological remains, such as the Lochbodengefass<\/em>, <\/a>the clay \u201cvessel with a hole in the base\u201d found on sites associated with beer brewing right across Mesopotamia, and which was probably the gakkul<\/em> mentioned at the start of the \u201cDrinking beer in a merry mood\u201d poem found on the same clay tablets as the Hymn to Ninkasi.<\/em> (Astonishingly, nobody is sure exactly how Lochbodengef\u00e4sser<\/em> were used in brewing \u2013 were they filtering vessels, or fermentation vessels, or something else? This is another good example of how woefully ignorant we actually are about Sumerian brewing, when we know that a particular piece of kit was almost certainly used during the brewing process, but we don\u2019t know ![\"Sumerian](\"https:\/\/zythophile.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Sumerian-tablet-3100-3000BC.jpg\")
\u2018Definitive\u2019<\/h3>\n
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the abzu.<\/em><\/p>\n
Mixing, in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics.<\/em><\/p>\n
Puts in order the piles of hulled grain.<\/em><\/p>\n
The noble dogs guard [it even] from the potentates,<\/em><\/p>\n
The waves rise, the waves fall.<\/em><\/p>\n
Coolness overcomes \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n
Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine.<\/em><\/p>\n
The fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound,<\/em><\/p>\n
You are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat,
It is [like] the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\nSourdough<\/h3>\n
Cold-mashing<\/h3>\n
It is the cool heart that has seized the God<\/em><\/p>\n
It is honey and wine that together produce juice.<\/em><\/p>\nThe Russian version<\/h3>\n
And put in order the piles of hulled grain.<\/em><\/p>\n
Sind sie sauber angeordnete Garben von gunida-Emmer<\/em><\/p>\n
\u0421 \u0442\u0440\u0430\u0432\u0430\u043c\u0438 \u0434\u0443\u0448\u0438\u0441\u0442\u044b\u043c\u0438 \u0437\u0430\u043a\u0432\u0430\u0441\u043a\u0443 \u0432 \u0447\u0430\u043d\u0435 \u043c\u0435\u0448\u0430\u0435\u0448\u044c.<\/em><\/p>\n
You pour coolness over the baked wort.
O Ninkasi, you throw the wort on the bedding of reeds,
You cool the baked wort.<\/em><\/p>\n
You pour coolness over the baked mash.
O Ninkasi, you throw the mash on the bedding of reeds,
You cool the baked mash<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\u041c\u0435\u0434, \u0432\u0438\u043d\u043e \u0441\u043c\u0435\u0448\u0430\u0432, \u0442\u044b \u043f\u043e \u043a\u0430\u043f\u043b\u0435 \u043b\u044c\u0435\u0448\u044c<\/em><\/p>\n
Mixing honey and wine and pour it in drop by drop.<\/em><\/p>\n
It is honey and wine that together give juice.<\/em><\/p>\n
Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine.<\/em><\/p>\n
Trust the watchdogs to guard it.<\/em><\/p>\n
It is vermin of the kind that bends and curls.<\/em><\/p>\nWas it even beer?<\/h3>\n
Along comes Tate<\/h3>\n