Twelve thousand years ago, it was springtime on the planet. At the close of the last Ice Age, our forebears in Western Asia first began to outgrow their small, nomadic, hunter-gatherer, and pastoral societies. At the very dawn of village life, a settlement began to grow at a place in Upper Mesopotamia, presently southeastern Turkey. This center comprised an entire civilization, the earliest yet found. It might have remained lost and buried. But in 1995, a lone Kurdish shepherd stumbled upon finished stone poking from the dry terrain.
Over the next three decades, digging at Göbekli Tepe uncovered a Neolithic feasting site. In its first centuries, Stone Age people probably occupied the spot only seasonally, following or herding their grazing animals for the rest of the year. But later settled generations built remarkable, elaborate monumental structures. These included areas to gather and featured what may have been a “temple” complex.
Mysterious stone carvings endure from that era. These relics invite speculation. What kind of rituals transpired? How did they affect these pioneers? Without written records, though, we haven’t much to go on.
Solemnity or Revelry
So. The mind travels. Reflexively, we imagine that the dim past also seems dismal. We’re inclined to picture people in the ancient past huddled by torchlight against mortal threats—savage beasts and merciless invaders. But one discovery at Göbekli Tepe counters our inclinations. The digs uncovered stone troughs in which they found chemical remnants of fermented grain.
For the semi-settled people who first came in from the lonely wilderness, “civilization” meant “citification,” even if “cities” comprised only a few houses. People first gathered for the purposes of trading and grinding the newly mutated strains of plump nourishing grain that they planted. And that brings us to beer.
Looking for Connection and Intoxication
Wherever people process grain, you find a version of beer. If Neolithic people gathered for sacred celebration, we’re safe to wonder if drinking a foamy brew played a part. If we picture grave rituals in the dim and distant past, shouldn’t we also imagine bright scenes of festivity and revelry? Did gravity give way to levity?
Because ethanol affects the nervous system predictably, “suffus[ing] the world around us, this cold, indifferent planet, with the warm glow of meaning,” as the science journalist Michael Pollan put it, it is unsurprising that these psychoactive blessings of imbibing should have been pursued in the places people first congregated in larger groups. Beer lubricates parties. And parties bring us together.
Beer in the Cradle of Civilization
Skip forward 5,000 years. Move south to the once-verdant valley between the Euphrates and Tigres rivers. There you will find the thriving “Cradle of Civilization” where, by then, beer had become a dietary staple.
Sumerian poets and versifiers praised beer as a social lubricant. They venerated the goddess Ninkasi as the patron of beer-brewing. A nearly 4,000-year-old hymn in her honor features a recipe for brewing beer from barley bread and extols the brew for bringing a “blissful mood.” (And (ironically now, also a “happy liver.”) The malty drink likely had the consistency of gazpacho. Drinkers slurped it through straws.
Beer for Pyramid Builders
The Egyptians brewed a more liquid beverage strained through sieves. This beer sustained the lower orders. Hieroglyphs and murals document that those who toiled in teams under the pounding North African sun to build pyramids for soon-to-be-ex pharaohs, were issued about a gallon-and-a-half of beer per day. The ration, as both payment and incentive, spurred competition and fueled a rousing camaraderie. The happy hour buzz lasted all day long. One such labor gang called themselves the “Drunkards of Menkaure.” Today, they would have had T-shirts made.
Wine for the Greeks
Nearer to our time, but still long, long ago, Classical Age Greeks built an elaborate and nuanced mythology around drinking alcohol. Dionysus, worshiped as a god of wine-growing and winemaking and the patron of festivity, embodied both the blessings and the hazards of wine drinking. Surviving sculptures feature his dizzy, vacant expression.
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Followers venerated Dionysus as the god both of pleasure and divine madness. We moderns wrestle with the social and legal penalties of drinking. But these individuals had no difficulty reconciling joy and insanity as aspects of a sliding scale.
Bacchus, the Roman version of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus, appears with a vacant, dizzy gaze.
Source: Neapolitan fresco, c. 30 B.C./Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
By the 3rd century B.C., Dionysus had traveled to Rome as Bacchus. There he became the patron of wild, secret, smashed, co-ed parties—the “bacchanalia.” A little wine makes us more civil. A quantity makes us riotous. The Roman Senate, unamused, took these rages as their cue to assert their moral and civic authority.
Bar Hopping
A further two millennia later, the connection between civilization and “citification” persists. Vibrant bar scenes draw celebrants to neighborhood dives in Philadelphia’s Fishtown and The Flats in Cleveland, to Savannah’s easygoing River Street, to the rollicking French Quarter in New Orleans, to the inclusive Castro District in San Francisco, and to Buffalo’s Allentown where partiers will find warm hospitality and Irish fiddling on a snowy night.
Taverns drive the economy in these cheery precincts, providing jobs and spurring residential and retail development in areas that might otherwise suffer a post-industrial hollowing-out.
Selling Fun and Sex Appeal
Each fall, American brewers spend more than a quarter-billion dollars on commercials aired during televised football games. Positive vibes arrive in rousing, 30-second spots. Drinking beer offers fun, relaxation, shared fandom, belonging, and conviviality. Beer drinkers commune with nature. Beer boosts strength and athletic success. Beer delivers sharpened wit and sex appeal.
These claims are silly but not empty. As modern life can isolate us, beer and football can bring us together.
Pleasure vs. Public Health and Safety
For Americans who wear spiritual proscriptions on their sleeves, alcohol has proved a particularly thorny moral problem. A strong national religious/temperance movement took hold in the United States nearly two centuries ago. Unlike the Greeks, we Americans have special difficulty reconciling pleasure and its costs.
And so, we are of two minds about beer. We welcome the cordial evening. We enjoy the respite. We relish the feelings of liberation. We tally economic benefits. But disinhibition results in fistfights and gunfights. We fear disorder and riot. Most drink responsibly. But just shy of 7% of drinkers suffer devastating alcohol use disorder. And the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday, well, millions nurse a hangover.
