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.

In fact the “Hymn to Ninkasi” (a name evidently first given to the poem, as “Die Ninkasi-Hymnus”, 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’s poem “John Barleycorn” is a guide to 18th century Scottish malting techniques – much less so, in fact, because we are not yet three centuries away from Burns, and his language is easily understood.

The Hymn was written on clay tablets using reeds to make wedge-shaped – cuneiform – 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 wanted to say, we arrive at them using our knowledge of modern brewing and modern brewing techniques: we interpret the Hymn through modern lenses.

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.

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 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 “drinking beer in a merry mood, with a joyful heart and a happy liver.” But all we can be certain of is that the Sumerian says something like “with a joyful [internal organ of some sort] and a happy [different internal organ of some sort]”. The translators have made guesses. They could have guessed at stomach and kidneys, with as much justification.

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.

The Hymn to Ninkasi 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 into English, in 1916, apparently using the tablet in Berlin, complained that “The 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.” It is possible, therefore, to argue that the Hymn should not be regarded as Sumerian at all, but Babylonian, though the circumstances under which the tablets carrying the Hymn are known to have been found suggest that they were written as copying exercises for Babylonian scribes, who were presumably copying older Sumerian texts.

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”. Prince’s attempt at a translation of the Hymn was mostly a pile of frankly meaningless nonsense, with lines such as “O princess, in spite of the demon of the chamber, princess, thou makest glad/Ninkasi the mighty bolt, O great functionary, thou art its breaker.” It is difficult to understand how Prince felt able to present this rubbish to the editors of the American Journal of Semitic Languages, but, presumably impressed by his qualifications and scholarly standing, they duly printed it …

‘Definitive’

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.

We will come back to Sallaberger’s translation later. It was Civil’s 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 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’s English version of the Hymn. Maytag decided he wanted to try to reproduce the beer apparently described in the Hymn, and, working with Katz, Civil and the brewers at Anchor, they put together a recipe for “Ninkasi Beer” using methods and ingredients “compatible with her activities as described in the Hymn”.

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. Nor is it possible to put together a brewing regime “compatible” with the Hymn, because the order of the activities described in the poem does not seem to make much sense. Let us look at Civil’s 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):

Among the many lines that don’t make sense are “Puts in order the piles of hulled grain” – what could this possibly mean in terms of a brewing process? “You are the one who waters the earth-covered malt” – you might want to sprinkle the sprouting green malt, but why would you cover it in earth? “The waves rise, the waves fall” – pardon? “You are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats.” Why would you do that? “You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweetwort” – why would you be holding the wort in your hands? Wouldn’t it be in a jar?

In addition we have this thing called bappir, which has to be mixed with flavourings and then baked. The Sumerian logogram for bappir was the pointy jar symbol meaning “beer” plus the symbol for “bread”, leading Assyrologists to assume that the word meant “beer-bread” or “beer-loaf”  The symbol for the word “brewer” combined the symbols for “man”, “beer” and “bread”, making him “beer-bread man”  We can be pretty confident, from the evidence, that bappir 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 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’t 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 – bis cotti), very hard and dry. None of this came from the Hymn.

Maytag and Katz had already decided that the Hymn was not a good enough guide to be able to brew beer successfully. In a later interview, Katz said: “Certain 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.” Ta-da, the new translation solved the problems that Maytag and Katz had been having. In particular the line about “earth-covered malt” disappeared, to be replaced with

“You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground.”

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.

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 and, apparently, malt. So Maytag and his team mixed one third of their supposed recreation of bappir with two thirds of malt in the mash tun, “boiling” 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’s yeast. None of that is in the Hymn, either. It’s all guess upon guess.

The resultant Ninkasi Beer, 3½ per cent alcohol, dry, and described as “cider-like”, 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.

Maytag’s and Katz’s version of “Sumerian” beer and brewing methods, and Civil’s translation of the Hymn to Ninkasi, have subsequently over the past 35 years been written up perhaps hundreds of times as if they were the definitive answers to the questions “what does the Hymn to Ninkasi mean in English?” and “how did the Sumerians brew beer?”

Sourdough

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 “bappir” as “sauerteig”, “sourdough”, 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.

Stol made his proposal in a review in the journal Bibliotheca Orientalis of a book written by Wolfgang Röllig, professor of ancient oriental studies at the University of Tübingen, in 1970 called Das Bier im alten Mesopotamien in which Röllig translated the Akkadian word sikkatu as “yeast”  Stol insisted that far from meaning “yeast”, sikkatu was “evidently a plant”  Nothing, Stol declared, “in the handbooks on the ancient oriental, rabbinical and classical literatures, indicates that pure yeast was known in ancient times. Instead, he said: “The only fermentation agent known to the ancients was sourdough.” It was for this reason Stol proposed that in ancient Mesopotamia, “beer fermentation was achieved using leavened bread,” and the ingredient called bappir, evidently made from barley, was this sourdough, this leavened bread, that initiated fermentation. Clearly Röllig and Stol, both feted Sumerologists, came to utterly dissimilar conclusions from the same evidence.

Stol later changed his mind about bappir, and by 1987 was describing it as “Malzbrot”, “malt bread”, made from malted barley. Sallaberger wasn’t impressed with this interpretation, saying “such a bread dough would be too liquid”. Another big problem with making bappir a malted product is that the Hymn seems to first talk about malt after talking about bappir, malt being watered on the ground and then soaked in a jar. (The word for malt in Sumerian was munu – this is one of the very few terms everybody agrees upon.)

Civil says honey and wine were added to the brew: Sallaberger insists that

“This 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.”

Sallaberger also rejects Civil’s translation of the word “titab” as “cooked mash”, saying:

“the 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.”

Civil, who died in 2019, seems to have changed his mind about the meaning of titab, 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 “a dried ingredient made from green malt (munu).” My personal suspicion – see later – is that this is the wrong way round, and titab was the green malt, munu the dried version.

Cold-mashing

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, whatever that was, instead cold-mashing their malt. In 2005 Martin Zarnkow of the Technical University of Munich’s 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), capable of holding up to up to 200 litres.

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 “base-tapped” vessels, Zarnkow and his team found, were very suitable for steeping and germinating barley. “Kilning” of the malt was done by Zarnkow et al on a terracotta rooftop, where in the Syrian summer, the temperature easily reached 60℃. The malt was ground on a saddle quern and mashed in water at 34℃ – 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℃.

The resultant beer was highly fermented, with a pleasant and lively character, and capable of remaining drinkable for more than two months. (See “Cold mashing process – a technology possibly used in ancient times in the Orient”, Brauwelt International, 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’s chosen methods of brewing were nearly as much guesswork as Maytag and Katz’s. But what he did was entirely plausible, and also fits what the Sumerians might have been doing.

Sallaberger insists that titab means “spent grain cake”, (Treberkuchen in Sallaberger’s German original), left behind when the wort is run off the mash, and not “cooked mash”  His translation runs:

Your spent grain cake is spread out on a stately mat
It is the cool heart that has seized the God

Nor does he agree with Civil that dida means “sweetwort”. Instead, he says, it means Trockenbier, “dry beer”, “with which one could mix a fresh beer at any time.” I have absolutely no idea what that is meant to mean, what “dry beer” is meant to be or how you could “mix a fresh beer at any time with it”. Sallaberger’s translation of the dida couplet goes:

Your large dry beer, it is ready processed
It is honey and wine that together produce juice.

with the one whole line in the broken and partial couplet that follows translated as

is the dry beer that you took in your hand.

Both that and the preceding “spent grain cake” 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’s a by-product, generally sold off, by modern brewers, as animal feed. Why would you spread it on a mat? What is a “stately” mat? And God knows what the line about a cool heart seizing the God is meant to mean. Nor does the “Trockenbier” couplet, as translated by Sallaberger, seem to say anything understandable. Here I would like to introduce Cornell’s Law of Translation, which looks to apply to so many attempts to put the Hymn to Ninkasi into a modern language: if your translation doesn’t appear to make sense, that is because your translation is wrong.

The Russian version

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. Take Stanza V, the “bappir baked in the oven” stanza. Civil gives this as

It is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven,
And put in order the piles of hulled grain.

Sallaberger translates that as

Deine Sauerteig (klumpen), wurden sie im stattlichen Ofen gebacken,
Sind sie sauber angeordnete Garben von gunida-Emmer

which Google Translate tells me means “Your sourdough (lumps), they were baked in the stately oven, They are neatly arranged sheaves of gunida emmer”, gunida being, Sallaberger says, “A variety of emmer, tentatively identified as naked emmer, ie free-threshing.”

Afanasieva translates the same couplet as

Ты зерно проросшее большой лопатой сгребаешь,
С травами душистыми закваску в чане мешаешь.

This, Google Translate says, means “You bake that sourdough in a big oven,/The grain for malt is collected and cleaned in heaps.”

So: all three agree that something was baked in an oven – 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, “put in order”, whatever that means. Sallaberger says it was sheaves of emmer, neatly arranged. Afanasieva calls it “grain for malt”, “cleaned”, whatever that means in context, and in heaps.

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. That gives us two choices for translating Afansieva’s Russian version of Stanza VIII of the Hymn:

You throw the wort on the bedding of reeds,
You pour coolness over the baked wort.
O Ninkasi, you throw the wort on the bedding of reeds,
You cool the baked wort.

Or alternatively:

You throw the mash on the bedding of reeds,
You pour coolness over the baked mash.
O Ninkasi, you throw the mash on the bedding of reeds,
You cool the baked mash.

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 сусло being “mash”  But for what it’s worth, the Russian Wikipedia page for Пивное сусло – “Beer wort” – has a picture captioned simply “Сусло” that clearly shows wort flowing from a pipe into a vessel. Still, сусло as “mash” makes more sense in the context of the Hymn, 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. Also – “baked wort”?

Finally, dida Afansieva translates as “noble beer”, very different from both Civil’s “sweetwort” and Sallaberger’s “dry beer”. Her translation into Russian of the couplet in stanza IX is

Ох, и знатное пиво готовишь ты,
Мед, вино смешав, ты по капле льешь

which Google Translate renders in English as

Oh, and you prepare noble beer,
Mixing honey and wine and pour it in drop by drop.

 again, very different from Sallaberger’s

Your large dry beer, if it is processed and ready
It is honey and wine that together give juice.

and Civil’s

You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweetwort,
Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine.

– and that’s ignoring the fact that none of those renditions makes much sense in terms of how to make Sumerian beer.

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 “potentates” – Afansieva’s version goes:

You cover the grain for malt with earth, water it with water,
Trust the watchdogs to guard it.

Sallaberger’s translation is almost completely different, with only malt and water in common:

Your malt, the semolina was prepared, water was poured into it,
It is vermin of the kind that bends and curls.

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.

Was it even beer?

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.”

Damerow’s 12,000-word essay in the Cuneiform Digital Library Journal is essential reading for anyone pondering the subject of Sumerian brewing. The Hymn to Ninkasi 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’s 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 contains “detailed brewing instructions”: the Hymn, Damerow says, is

“difficult to unambiguously read, understand, and translate … due to our limited knowledge of the context of beer brewing in the Sumerian culture and, in particular, of the terminology relating to it.”

The same, he says, is true of the many other tablets mentioning beer and brewing:

“This 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.

“But while this assumption is necessarily true for the basic chemical reactions involved—the 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—the 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.

“Moreover, 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.”

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, 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.

Along comes Tate

I have been thinking for some time about the problems with the Hymn to Ninkasi, 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, 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, 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. The examples he gives of possible equivalents in English are, again, John Barleycorn, and also the Irish quartet the Clancy Brothers’ great song Beer, Beer, Beer, in which the brewing process is described as

A barrel of malt, a bushel of hops, you stir it around with a stick

If, in four thousand years’ 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 … (Incidentally, that phrase “a barrel of malt” 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.)

Probably the most important sentence in the whole of Paulette’s book is: “The fact is that we do not currently know exactly how beer was brewed in Mesopotamia.” So why read In the Land of Ninkasi if it cannot answer the big question everyone is interested in? Well, because it’s an excellently written book that pulls together everything we DO currently know about brewing in Mesopotamia – which is quite a lot, actually – in an easy-to-understand fashion, and tells us exactly what we know for sure and what we are only guessing at.

Paulette is also very good on the question of why we can’t use the Hymn to Ninkasi 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 – or an apparent description – of something that was without a doubt very different from the modern Western method of making beer.

In the Land of Ninkasi covers much more than the Hymn to Ninkasi, however: it starts with a chapter called “Beer in world history”, then takes in the history of Mesopotamia, the “land between two rivers” (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, the clay “vessel with a hole in the base” found on sites associated with beer brewing right across Mesopotamia, and which was probably the gakkul mentioned at the start of the “Drinking beer in a merry mood” poem found on the same clay tablets as the Hymn to Ninkasi. (Astonishingly, nobody is sure exactly how Lochbodengefässer were used in brewing – 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’t know how it was used, or for what purpose.)

A discussion of brewers and brewing spaces, looking at archaeological sites we know were once breweries, is followed by a fascinating chapter on drinkers and drinking practices, in particular the Sumerian habit of drinking beer (or, to be exact, what was probably beer) communally through long straws or reeds from a clay vase set on a stand, or on the floor. (Disappointingly, for me, Paulette fails to point out that just such communal beer drinking from large pots through straws is still common in East Africa.) And what was it with the surprisingly large number of plaques found by archaeologists – at least 18 are known – showing a naked man having sex with a naked woman from behind, while she sucks up (presumably) beer through a straw from a pot?

The last chapter is titled “The beer-drinking experience”, and it covers the tavern, drinking at work, banquets, “drinking with the dead” – funerary feasts – and how Sumerians saw the effects of beer, from promoting togetherness to provoking fights and arguments. Beer, Paulette says, helped make the Sumerian social world – just as, he points out, it helps make our social worlds today.

The book ends with an epilogue describing three modern attempts to make a Mesopotamian beer, Anchor Brewing’s Ninkasi Sumerian beer, the Zarnkow/Tall Bazi experiment in 2005 and the joint venture in 2011-13 between the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, where Paulette was a grad student, and Great Lakes Brewing of Cleveland, which began in 1988 as the first microbrewery in Ohio and grew to be a top-30 US brewer. Paulette describes how Pat Conway, co-founder of Great Lakes, came to the Institute with the idea of making an ancient beer, and how Paulette and his colleagues put together

“a summary of our best understanding of how brewing might have worked in Mesopotamia. This summary was woefully insufficient. The brewers of Great Lakes responded with a list of perhaps thirty questions – questions that were, from their perspective, absolutely essential and, from ours, very difficult (some definitely unanswerable).”

That about sums up the difficulty – the impossibility, probably – of brewing an authentic Sumerian beer based on the Hymn to Ninkasi. Still, the Institute and Great Lakes had a stab. They malted barley by soaking the grain for a few days, letting it sprout and then air-drying it on the roof of the brewery. They decided bappir was sourdough, slow-baked to leave viable yeast in it that would ferment the wort. They brewed in ceramic vessels that were recreations of actual Sumerian pots found on expeditions to Iraq in the 1930s by the Institute’s archaeologists. They made educated guesses about mashing and fermentation, and also tried adding dates to some of the brews.

The resulting beer, over several brewings, Paulette says

“ranged from mildly tart to puckeringly sour, from mildly alcoholic (3.5%) to no joke (8%), from milky white to an opaque, yellowish brown, from slightly effervescent to flat as can be.”

So even if you try to make authentic Sumerian beer, you don’t know which beer you end up with might be the most authentic: the mildly tart yellowish brown strong one, or the sour white weak one. Or maybe the tart white strong one, or the yellow weak one, or …  Finally, however, Paulette gives a recipe for “brew-it-yourself” Sumerian beer, so that readers can have a go themselves at trying to brew like a Babylonian.

Overall, In the Land of Ninkasi, is an excellent study of what Paulette calls “the world’s first great beer culture”, enumerating everything we know and, more importantly, don’t know. It is easily understandable for the non-specialist, and takes time to explain some of the otherwise puzzling aspects of Sumerological literature that articles on the subject, written for experts, assume the reader already knows: why, for example, words in Sumerian are sometimes written in English with subscript number, such as munu₂ (it means the original cuneiform was the second symbol discovered by Assyrologists to have the meaning “munu“), or sometimes written in CAPITALS: this means the sign is a Sumerian word, eg KAŠ, pronounced to rhyme with cosh rather than cash, which normally should be read as the Sumerian for “beer” but is written in caps when it should be read as an ideogram for  the Akkadian word for beer, šikaru, or as a syllable in a longer word.

This is, I think, a book anybody with a serious interest in beer can read with pleasure, and it is essential reading if you wish to talk about beer in the ancient past. It is certainly the best book on the subject so far. Paulette must be congratulated for writing an instant entrant to any “Ten Books About Beer History You Must Read” list. However, will it stop people claiming the Hymn to Ninkasi is a Sumerian beer recipe? Alas, I fear not …

My thoughts

I am not a Sumerologist, and anything I am about to say is likely, therefore, to fall down for all sorts of etymological reasons. Not am I a brewer, and it is very likely that my knowledge of brewing processes is not good enough to comment meaningfully on what might have been going on. But I have a few suggestions as to what might have been happening in a Sumerian brewhouse, based on what few and confusing clues the Hymn to Ninkasi gives us, and what little knowledge I have about malting and brewing.

One thing I think we can be pretty certain of is that Sumerian brewing involved using sun-dried malt. The thing about sun-dried malt is that it is highly diastasic, that is, there are enough enzymes in it to convert large quantities of grain starch into fermentable sugars. The task of converting that starch into sugars is made a lot easier if the starch is gelatinised, which is achieved by heating it. I suggest, therefore that bappir was barley grain, heated – probably in an oven – to gelatinise its starches. If its name involved the term “bread”, then this was most likely because like bread it was grain baked in an oven, but it did not have to be made into loaves first: it would have been easier to bake the grain laid out in trays. But as the logogram for bappir includes the logogram for “bread”, then it seems most likely bappir was indeed bread loaves.

The bappir now needs mixing with air-dried malt to convert those gelatinised starches in the bappir to sugars. I suggest that “titab” actually means “green malt” rather than Civil’s first reading, “cooked mash” or his second reading, “dried malt”, or Sallaberger’s “spent grain cake”, which if true means we have a line in the Hymn reading.

You are the one who spreads the green malt on large reed mats

which precisely described air-drying malt, the dried malt being munu (which Civil claimed in his 2005 treatise was the word meaning “green malt”).

The mixture of bappir and munu from which, after starch conversion, a sweet wort can be extracted was, surely, I suggest, what dida was. Why use bappir, why not instead make an all-malt brew? Because malting was troublesome – you had to guard against birds and vermin eating your drying malt – and the less you needed to make, the better. Easier to use a small amount of sun-dried malt to convert a load of gelatinised barley starches into sugars. Dida was solid, which is why Ninkasi could hold it in her hand, and when mashed in water it produced a sweet “juice”, like honey and wine …

I am not at all convinced by the idea that it was yeast remaining in the bappir that then fermented the wort. If bappir was sourdough, it would need very careful baking to ensure that the yeast inside that raised the bread was not then killed. It is much easier to suppose that the wort was fermented by yeasts living in the vessels that the Sumerian brewers to mash and ferment. This appears to be the way that many “traditional” beers are fermented today: I have read several accounts of the home-brewing of sorghum beer in Southern Africa, for example, and none of them mention pitching or adding yeast, implying that the yeast was already present in the brewing vessels.

So there we are: a method of making Sumerian beer derived from the Hymn to Ninkasi that I suggest is at least plausible. Please feel free to defend Civil, Maytag, Sallaberger and Paulette, and tell me where I have gone wrong.