Babylonian Girls Gone Wild

People have been boozing for as far back as anyone can discover. Traces of alcoholic beverages are present on the oldest shards of pottery that have been found. Many historians argue that agriculture, the prerequisite of civilization, was invented not for food (hunter-gatherers eat better than primitive farmers, and for less labor) but to guarantee a steady supply of grains for beer.

The human liver is specifically adapted to metabolizing ethanol, utilizing the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase, which is not much good for anything else. This suggests people tippled before, strictly speaking, they were people. Dr. Robert Dudley of UC Berkeley thinks so; he has proposed the “Drunken Monkey Hypothesis.” He notes that fruits in the wild, especially in tropical environments, ferment on their own without intervention. The juice of overripe fruit can be as much as 5% alcohol, about as strong as beer. The diet of wild chimpanzees, the closest living human relatives, consists mostly of fruit, and they love the spiked kind. Isn’t drunkenness a potential danger for critters that swing through the trees? Yes, but Dudley argues this is more than outweighed by the health benefits of mildly fermented fruit. Among monkeys, apes, and humans, moderate drinkers are healthier than teetotalers, and outlive them; counter-intuitively, even hardcore drunks outlive teetotalers, though they do worse than moderate drinkers – see a study by Charles Holahan in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Though it is possible to drink oneself to death, this requires more dedication than most heavy drinkers have – at least without a large admixture of other drugs. The damage suffered by and inflicted by drunks more typically is to quality of life rather than quantity. (Disclosure: I’m not quite a teetotaler, but near enough to one to be at hazard.)

Alcohol was intimately associated with the rise of civilization. Brewing was one of the first chemical industries – perhaps it was the very first. Taverns were among the first retail establishments, often run by women in ancient times. Hammurabi’s Code (c. 1780 BC) contains regulations about them:

108. If a tavern-keeper does not accept grain according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the grain, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water.
109. If conspirators meet in the house of a tavern-keeper, and these conspirators are not captured and delivered to the court, the tavern-keeper shall be put to death.
110. If a sister of a god [sic] open a tavern, or enter a tavern to drink, then shall this woman be burned to death.
111. If an inn-keeper furnish 60 ka of usakani-drink to [illegible] she shall receive 50 ka of grain at the harvest.

The Babylonians obviously wanted to pay for their drinks in grain – gold and silver must have been hard to come by. Well, they still are. The concern about conspirators was not paranoia. Boozing and conspiracies always have gone together. Virginian leaders, for example, stirred themselves up in Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern early in the American Revolution. I guess sisters of gods had to sneak their drinks. I don’t know what usakani was  –  possibly mead  or beer laced with some additive  – but I’d like to know who deserved 60 ka of it. It wasn't a hard liquor because spirits were not distilled until Medieval times. It isn't clear why. The ancients distilled fresh water from salt, so they were familiar with the idea; it just doesn't seem to have occurred to them to try it with alcohol. The Code nowhere mentions drunkenness as an offense, so apparently Babylon was the place to go for Spring Break.

Nearly four thousand years later, our affection for ethyl shows no sign of diminishing. With all the pharmacopeia available to modern folk, alcohol by far remains our prime drug of choice. Eliot Ness never stood a chance.

[ Note: a short story of mine involving stone age drinking is at http://richardbellush2.blogspot.com/2010/12/neander-valley-girl-or-cavemen-behaving.html ]