Pair Test the Cornerstone of Civilization: Beer

The recipe was part of a Sumerian hymn to the goddess Ninkasi, written in cuneiform on a clay tablet that dates back to 1800 BC. It calls for ingredients you might not think of, but it makes a smooth, mild beer--with a little fruity taste.

“It’s very good,” Professor Solomon Katz of the University of Pennsylvania said as he opened a bottle. “They used dates to make it taste that way.”

The bottle’s label had cuneiform characters calling Ninkasi, the goddess of beer, “the lady who fills the vessel with beer.” The label also showed one of the earliest known tablets, showing two men using straws to sip beer from a narrow-necked jar.

The beer was the culmination of two years of research by Katz and Fritz Maytag, owner of San Francisco-based Anchor Brewing Co.

They sampled some of the last bottles of the beer recently in Philadelphia. They had brewed about 100 barrels in August, but said they were forced to use it up quickly since it contained no preservatives.

“The Sumerians didn’t use hops, which help to keep beer from going sour,” Maytag said in a telephone interview from San Francisco.

Modern beer makers usually use malted, or sprouted, grain, but the Sumerians used baked bread, which adds to the mild taste, Katz said.

“They did that because the bread was almost magical to them,” Katz said. “You could eat it for dinner or you could brew with it.”

The cuneiform tablet, originally translated in 1964, records a brewing process interspersed with praises to the goddess.

“You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar, the waves rise, the waves fall,” starts one verse.

“That’s a brewing process,” Katz said. “That’s exactly what brewers do today to turn the grains into malt.”

“Real brewing is very simple,” Maytag said. “And we know that the brewers 5,000 years ago were extremely skilled. We ought to assume that these guys were just as good at brewing as we are.”

By the time the Ninkasi hymn was written, brewing was at least 5,000 years old, Katz said. By 2000 BC, Sumerians had 55 words describing different varieties of beer.

“Beer recipes are the oldest we have,” Katz said.

Katz, an anthropologist specializing in nutrition, believes that beer may be the cornerstone of civilization and has argued that ancient man turned from hunting to farming to raise grain for beer.

Barley and wheat--the two main ingredients of ancient beer--were among the first grains man began to harvest.

“Why did people go out and domesticate a cereal grain that doesn’t have much nutrition?” Katz asked. “They had plenty of other resources . . . why would they go through the effort? Could it be because it was a source of fermented sugar?”