Table Of ContentThe Origins and Ancient History of Wine
Food and Nutrition in History and Anthropology
A series edited by Solomon H.Katz, University of Pennsylvania
Volume 1 FOOD, ECOLOGY AND CULTURE
Readings in the Anthropology of Dietary Practices
Edited by John R.K.Robson
Volume 2 FAMINE
Its Causes, Effects and Management
Edited by John R.K.Robson
Volume 3 INFANT CARE AND FEEDING IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC
Edited by Leslie B.Marshall
Volume 4 FOOD ENERGY IN TROPICAL ECOSYSTEMS
Edited by Dorothy J.Cattle and Karl H.Schwerin
Volume 5 THE INFANT-FEEDING TRIAD
Infant, Mother, and Household
Barry M.Popkin, Tamar Lasky, Judith Litvin,
Deborah Spicer and Monica E.Yamamoto
Volume 6 THE EFFECTS OF UNDERNUTRITION ON CHILDREN’S BEHAVIOR
David E.Barren and Deborah A.Frank
Volume 7 AFRICAN FOOD SYSTEMS IN CRISIS
Part One: Microperspectives
Edited by Rebecca Huss-Ashmore and Solomon H.Katz
Part Two: Contending with Change
Edited by Rebecca Huss-Ashmore and Solomon H.Katz
Volume 8 TRADITIONAL PLANT FOODS OF CANADIAN INDIGENOUS
PEOPLES
Nutrition, Botany and Use
Harriet V.Kuhnlein and Nancy J.Turner
Volume 9 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AFRICAN FAMINE
Edited by R.E.Downs, Donna O.Kerner and Stephen P.Reyna
Volume 10 INVESTIGATIONS OF ANCIENT HUMAN TISSUE
Chemical Analyses in Anthropology
Edited by Mary K.Sandford
Volume 11 THE ORIGINS AND ANCIENT HISTORY OF WINE
Edited by Patrick E.McGovern, Stuart J.Fleming and Solomon H.Katz
Volume 12 THE ECOLOGY OF PRACTICE
Studies of Food Crop Production in Sub-Saharan West Africa
Edited by A.Endre Nyerges
This book is part of a series. The publisher will accept continuation orders which may be
canceled at any time and which provide for automatic billing and shipping of each title in
the series upon publication. Please write for details.
The Origins and Ancient
History of Wine
Edited by
Patrick E.McGovern
Stuart J.Fleming
and
Solomon H.Katz
The University of Pennsylvania Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology
Philadelphia
Gordon and Breach Publishers
Australia • Canada (cid:127) France (cid:127) Germany (cid:127) India (cid:127) Japan
Luxembourg (cid:127) Malaysia (cid:127) The Netherlands (cid:127) Russia (cid:127) Singapore
(cid:127) Switzerland
Copyright © 1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the
Gordon and Breach Publishers imprint.
All rights reserved.
First published 1996
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Origins and Ancient History of Wine.–
(Food & Nutrition in History &
Anthropology Series, ISSN 0275–5769;
Vol. 11) I. McGovern, Patrick E. II. Series 641.2209
ISBN 0-203-39283-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-39578-6 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 90-5699-552-9 (Print Edition)
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vii
Foreword viii
Patrick E.McGovern
Introduction
The Making of a Unique Conference, Its Accomplishments, and an Agenda xi
for the Future
Patrick E.McGovern
Acknowledgments xviii
List of Contributors xix
I. ANCIENT SAYINGS ABOUT WINE 1
Louis E.Grivetti
II. GRAPES AND WINE: HYPOTHESES AND SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE
1. Wine: The Food with Two Faces 6
Louis E.Grivetti
2. The Domestication of the Grapevine Vitis Vinifera L. in the Near East 21
Daniel Zohary
3. The Origin and Domestication of the Vinifera Grape 29
Harold P.Olmo
4. The Archaeological Evidence for Winemaking, Distribution, and 44
Consumption at Proto-Historic Godin Tepe, Iran
Virginia R.Badler
5. The Analytical and Archaeological Challenge of Detecting Ancient Wine: 57
Two Case Studies from the Ancient Near East
Patrick E.McGovern and Rudolph H.Michel
6. An Enologist’s Commentary on Ancient Wines 67
Vernon L.Singleton
7. The Analysis of Wine and Other Organics Inside Amphoras of the Roman 79
Period
Françoise Formenti and J.M.Duthel
vi
III. THE HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY OF WINE: THE NEAR EAST
AND EGYPT
8. Fourth Millennium B.C. Trade in Greater Mesopotamia: Did It Include 87
Wine?
Guillermo Algaze
9. Wine and the Vine in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Cuneiform Evidence 96
Marvin A.Powell
10. Searching for Wine in the Archaeological Record of Ancient 125
Mesopotamia of the Third and Second Millennia B.C.
Richard L.Zettler and Naomi F.Miller
11. Viniculture and Ancient Anatolia 135
Ronald L.Gorny
12. The Imagery of the Wine Bowl: Wine in Assyria in the Early First 181
Millennium B.C.
David Stronach
13. The Earliest History of Wine and Its Importance in Ancient Egypt 204
T.G. H.James
14. Egyptian Wine Production During the New Kingdom 222
Leonard H.Lesko
IV. THE HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY OF WINE: THE
MEDITERRANEAN
15. “Canaanite Jars” and the Late Bronze Age Aegeo-Levantine Wine Trade 240
Albert Leonard Jr.
16. Palaeoethnobotanical Finds of Vitis from Greece 264
Jane M.Renfrew
17. Wine and Viticulture in the Linear A and B Texts of the Bronze Age 278
Aegean
Ruth Palmer
18. Empty Cups and Empty Jugs: The Social Role of Wine in Minoan and 296
Mycenaean Societies
James C.Wright
19. The Beginnings of Grape Cultivation and Wine Production in Phoenician/ 321
Punic North Africa
Joseph A.Greene
20. Wine Amphoras in Ancient Greek Trade 333
Carolyn G.Koehler
Bibliography 349
Index 403
Series Editor’s Preface
The study of the origin, development and diversity of the human diet is emerging as a
coherent field that offers a much-needed integrative framework for our contemporary
knowledge of the ecology of food and nutrition. This authoritative series of monographs
and symposia volumes on the history and anthropology of food and nutrition is designed
to address this need by providing integrative approaches to the study of various problems
within the human food chain. Since the series is both methodologically and conceptually
integrative, the focus of the individual volumes spans such topics as nutrition and health,
culinary practices, prehistoric analyses of diet, and food scarcity and subsistence practices
among various societies of the world. As a series, it offers many unique opportunities for a
wide range of scientists, scholars and other professionals representing anthropology,
archaeology, food history, economics, agriculture, folklore, nutrition, medicine,
pharmacology, public health and public policy to exchange important new knowledge,
discoveries and methods involved in the study of all aspects of human foodways.
Solomon H.Katz
Foreword
Patrick E.McGovern
Since the publication of this book four years ago, several major advances have been made
in our understanding of the origins of winemaking and viticulture.
It is now known that resinated wine was being produced on a fairly large scale in the
Neolithic period (ca. 5400–5000 B.C.) at the site of Hajji Firuz Tepe in the northern
Zagros Mountains of Iran. (1)
It had already been proposed at the Mondavi conference that many centuries of
experimentation would have been needed to reach the expertise revealed at Godin Tepe,
farther south in the Zagros at the end of the 4th millennium B.C. (see chapters 4 and 5).
Indeed, if winemaking is best understood as an intentional human activity rather than a
seasonal happenstance, then the Neolithic period, from about 8500 to 4000 B.C., is the
first time in human prehistory when the necessary preconditions for this momentous
innovation came together. In the numerous villages that first appeared during this time in
upland regions of the Near East, where the wild Eurasian grapevine (Vitis vinifera sylvestris)
still grows today, other plants (in particular, wheat and barley) provided year-round food
reserves and the invention of pottery made available a range of processing, serving and
storage vessels.
It is to be expected that some enterprising individuals of the time would have
segregated out the hermaphroditic plant, with its greater productivity and other desirable
traits, from the dioecious plant, thus beginning the process toward the full domestication
of the Eurasian grapevine (Vitis vinifera vinifera). The addition of a tree resin to wine is not
as surprising as it sounds, since humans were probably already putting their anti-microbial
properties to good use in treating external injuries and disease generally, and it might thus
be inferred that tree resins would also protect the wine from turning to vinegar. The
many steps along the way to true viniculture and its ultimate origins will probably never be
known. However, archaeological, chemical, and DNA research now in progress on wine-
related artifacts and grape remains from Neolithic sites in the Caucasus Mountains,
predating the Hajji Firuz wine by more than a 1000 years, promises to shed further light
on the earliest developments. (2) Neolithic settlements in the Taurus Mountains of
eastern Turkey, where the origins of three of the eight Near Eastern ‘founder crops’ (viz.,
chickpea, better vetch, and einkorn wheat) have been located according to DNA analysis,
remain to be investigated.
Another ‘discovery’ that the Eurasian grapevine can be propagated (‘cloned’) by
transplanting cuttings from one region to another led to the expansion of winemaking and
viticulture to other parts of the Near East. In the lowland region of the Jordan Valley,
where the wild vine probably never grew, domesticated grapevines had been planted
there by at least the Chalcolithic period (ca. 4000–3000 B.C.). These vineyards eventually
ix
supported a thriving winemaking industry, extending east and west to the upland regions
of Jordan and Palestine, that produced wine for export. One of the earliest rulers of
Egypt, Scorpion I of Dynasty 0, was buried with some 700 jars of resinated wine in a
tomb at Abydos, hundreds of miles up the Nile River, around 3150 B.C. (3) These jars,
containing as much as 4500 liters of wine for the king’s afterlife, were made in the same
regions of the Levant where the wine was produced, and had been laboriously transported
by donkeys and perhaps boat. Once the pharaohs had a taste for the new beverage, they
took the obvious step of transplanting the grapevine to the Nile Delta where a royal
industry, probably under the tutelage of foreign specialists, was in full swing by ca. 3000
B.C.
On the eastern flanks of the Fertile Crescent, the grapevine had also been successively
transplanted to the southern Zagros Mountains of Iran by at least the mid-3rd millennium
B.C. Archaeobotanical remains of numerous grape seeds (pips) and, most significantly,
grapevine wood were excavated at the ancient Elamite capital of Anshan (modern Tepe
Malyan). This industry was probably developed to supply local demands as well as an
export market in the neighboring city-states of ancient Sumer. Piriform-shaped and long-
spouted jars, which have been chemically confirmed to have held wine, have been
recovered from both regions.
Much remains to be elucidated about the later history of viniculture, which eventually
extended out to include Greece, Italy, northern Africa and central Europe. As just one
example of the kind of research that can and is being done, this writer recently published
an article on chemical analyses of amphoras from the palace of the New Kingdom
pharaoh, Amenhotep III, at Thebes. (4) These jars, dated to around 1350 B.C., are
unusual in having very detailed descriptions of their contents written in black-inked
hieratic inscriptions on their shoulders. Many of the latter were ‘wine labels,’ and were
sometimes as detailed as any connoisseur might expect today, providing the year of the
pharaoh’s reign, the name of the vineyard where the wine was made and its location
(most often, in the Delta), the vintner’s name, the kind or quality of the wine (e.g.,
‘good,’ ‘very good,’ ‘very, very good,’ etc.), and the quantity. With such precise
information about a group of wine jars, which had evidently been used only once at a
major festival of the king and then disposed of in refuse heaps behind the palace, the
chemical analyses could provide an unparalleled analytical touchstone for other ancient,
uninscribed wine vessels, beside extending and refining the understanding of the actual
contents of the Theban jars. Thus, a tree resin had been added to the wine, although this
went unmentioned in the inscriptions. Analysis of the clay from which jars had been made
indicated that they had probably been produced in local royal workshops, although the
wine is generally stated to be from estates in the Delta. Apparently, the wine had been
imported to Thebes and then rebottled and labelled according to set formulae for the special
royal festivities and ceremony.
One can hardly do justice to the recent literature on a subject as vast as that of ancient
wine, and many references are scattered through specialized archaeological and scientific
journals. But, the proceedings of three recently published conferences should be noted.
They provide new data and perspectives on winemaking installations, viticulture, and the
multifarious cultural significances of wine, viz., La Production du vin et de l’huile an
Méditerranée, eds. M.-C.Amouretti and J. P.Brun, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique
suppl. 26, Athens: Ecole française d’Athènes, 1993, held in Aix-en-Provence and Toulon
in 1991; Drinking in Ancient Societies, ed. L.Milano, Padua: Sargon, 1994, held in Rome in
