THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: TRACING THE ORIGINS OF WINE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Luke Gorton, M.A.

Graduate Program in Greek and Latin

The Ohio State University

2014

Dissertation Committee:

Carolina López-Ruiz, Advisor

Brian Joseph

Sam Meier Copyright by

Luke A. Gorton

2014 ABSTRACT

This study examines the question of the origins and spread of wine, both comprehensively and throughout a number of regions of the Near East and the

Mediterranean. Besides the introduction and the conclusion, the study is divided into four major chapters, each of which examines evidence from different fields. The first of these chapters discusses the evidence which can be found in the tomes of classical (that is,

Greco-Roman) literature, while the second chapter examines the testimony of the diverse literature of the ancient Near East. The third chapter provides an analysis of the linguistic evidence for the spread of wine, focusing particularly on the origins of the international word for wine which is present in a number of different languages (and language families) of antiquity. The fourth chapter gives a summary of the various types of material evidence relevant to wine and the vine in antiquity, including testimony from the fields of palaeobotany, archaeology, and wine chemistry. Finally, the concluding chapter provides a synthesis of the various data adduced in the previous chapters, weaving all of the evidence together into a cohesive account of the origins and the spread of wine. It is seen that each discipline has much to contribute to the question at hand, providing critical testimony which both illuminates our understanding of the origins and the spread of wine and allows us to better understand issues pertaining to each discipline.

ii For all of my teachers, both inside and outside of the classroom

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are a number of people who deserve thanks upon the successful completion of a project so large. My advisor, Carolina López-Ruiz of Classics, stands first on the list: she inspired me to conduct my first tentative research on the question of the origins of wine, and she subsequently encouraged me to write a dissertation on the topic. Likewise, this project would not have been possible without the expertise of my other committee members, Brian Joseph of Linguistics and Sam Meier of Near Eastern Languages and

Cultures, who have brought their own invaluable insight to this dissertation. Others who have shown interest in the project and made valuable suggestions include Sarah Iles

Johnston, Jared Klein, and Will Batstone. Friends and fellow scholars Jackson Crawford and Margaret Day have also read significant portions of this work and contributed to its improvement.

More generally, I am thankful to the faculty of the Classics Department at Ohio State for all they have done to further my studies and my career, and to the Graduate School for its generous fellowship support which facilitated the completion of this project. iv VITA

2007...... B.A. Spanish and Theology, Lee University

2009...... M.A. Linguistics, University of Georgia

2009 to present ...... Distinguished University Fellow,

Department of Greek and Latin, The Ohio

State University

PUBLICATIONS

“Evidence for Adverbial Origins of Final –ς on the Medieval and Modern Greek –οντας Participle”, Journal of Greek Linguistics 13.1 (Spring 2013)

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Greek and Latin

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... ii

Dedication...... iii

Acknowledgments...... iv

Vita...... v

Table of Contents...... vi

List of Figures...... vii

Chapter 1: Introduction...... 1

Chapter 2: Greek and Roman Literature...... 20

Chapter 3: Near Eastern Literature...... 79

Chapter 4: Linguistics: Tracing the “Wine” Word...... 131

Chapter 5: Material Evidence: Palaeobotany, Archaeology, and Wine Chemistry.....194

Chapter 6: Conclusion: A Synthesis...... 265

Bibliography...... 297

vi LIST OF FIGURES

Map of the Mediterranean and the Near East...... 323

vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Wine has been a part of human civilization for thousands of years. From the earliest recorded times until the present, the fermented juice of the grape has played an oversized role in cultures from Narbonne to Napa, from Babylon to Barcelona. It is present in the earliest literatures, attested in countless archaeological finds, an indispensable part of life for billions who have lived. As such, it is not surprising to find that countless authors have set their hands to telling the tale of wine in all of its manifestations, from guides on how to produce it to accounts of its many varieties to studies of its history. As there has been no shortage of literature on the topic of wine, so also there has been no shortage of quality research. If we are said to stand on the shoulders of giants, we truly do so when the topic is one as well-discussed as wine.

Yet this study aims to approach the subject in a novel way, if that is possible.

Although our topic is “wine”, the goal of this study is not to discuss wine throughout all of its manifestations, meanings, and literary appearances. Such a work has been undertaken many times in many guises,1 as the discussion of the relevant literature

1

As a partial list, see Bacci (1596), Barry (1775), Henderson (1824), Ellis (1861), Jamain (1901), Emerson (1902), Billiard (1913), Aragon (1916), Perrin (1938), Seltman (1957), Allen (1961), Hyams (1965), Younger (1966), Enjalbert (1975), Amerine and Singleton (1977), Weinhold (1978), Johnson (1989), Unwin (1991), McGovern (1995) and (2003), Phillips (2000), Estreicher (2006), and Lukacs (2012).

1 below will show. In a sense, the present work is significantly more narrow, focusing on one particular question within the broader scope of the topic of “wine”. Specifically, it seeks to shed light on the origins of wine, simultaneously asking three questions. First, when and where did the original domestication(s) of the grapevine and the production of wine from its fruit take place? Second (and more specifically), when and how did the introduction of wine and its attendant culture take place throughout the world of the

Near East and the Mediterranean? Finally, where it is possible to ascertain, what did each culture think about the origins of wine, both in general and specifically in their culture? Related topics—the use of wine in a given society, for instance—are treated only insofar as they shed light on the question of origins. If a noted poet of ancient

Greece enumerates the virtues of wine as he understands them, this study may not feel obligated to mention him or his encomium; if a less noted author of the same place and time period remarks on a legend concerning the introduction of wine into Greece from the East, he and his contribution to the question at hand are more likely to be noted herein.

Although narrower in this sense than many treatises on wine, this study is also broader and more ambitious than the others (whether too ambitious or not must be left up to the judgment of the reader). Much of the literature on the topic of wine limits itself to evidence from certain fields: wine in literature, wine in archaeology, or palaeobotany (that is, the study of the history of plants). Some works mix one or two of these in a certain measure: the best books on the history of wine mention, at the very

2 least, both literary and archaeological evidence from ancient times.2 Yet in doing so they often treat both in passing, not giving one or the other the full weight it deserves. This is not to say that knowledge from each discipline is always worth equal weight, but in solving a riddle such as this we cannot afford to overlook any of our evidence. This study seeks to give a hearing to each of the various forms of evidence by devoting a section (or more) to each and attempting, as far as possible, to listen to what each has to say before synthesizing it all. In this sense, this study is broader than those which come before it, for it seeks to be a holistic attempt at ascertaining the origins of wine.

This study also seeks to improve upon those which have come before it not only in the questions it asks but also in the breadth of knowledge it seeks to incorporate.

Literature and material evidence are two indispensable witnesses to the past, and they have much to tell us about the origins of wine. For a long time, they were really the only two witnesses to the past, and as such many of the previous works on wine have dealt primarily with these. However, the past three decades have seen a remarkable leap forward in the amount and quality of knowledge which can be contributed to the question of the origins of wine from two other fields, palaeobotany and linguistics. The great works on wine of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries were simply written too early to benefit from recent research, while many newer treatises have backed away from making intensive use of it. This study rectifies this by giving all of these witnesses a voice, allowing them to present their evidence, and then encouraging them to take part

2 See especially Billiard (1913), Seltman (1957), Hyams (1965), Younger (1966), Phillips (2000), and McGovern (1995 and 2003).

3 in a colloquium—a symposium, we might say—in which an up-to-date synthesis is reached which takes into account all of our modern sources of knowledge. The structure of this dissertation is thus an outgrowth of this approach.

The interdisciplinary nature of the dissertation notwithstanding, the primary and original contributions herein to the question at hand will be found largely in the chapters on linguistics and on literature. In linguistics, in particular, there is much to be said which has not yet been said, although new insight into the literary evidence is needed as well.

In other chapters—those on material evidence and palaeobotany—a synthesis of the data as provided by other researchers will be presented, along with an original analysis.

The final chapter, in which all witnesses are brought into communication with each other, is a synthesis which will attempt to provide a coherent and cohesive narrative about the origins of wine and its subsequent growth as a culture and as an industry.

In a work as segmented as this one, the bibliography is easily divided into concomitant segments, and authors and works which deal specifically with the question of the origins of wine in only one particular discipline will be noted where appropriate.

However, there are a number of books which purport to be encyclopedic histories of wine, discussing the history (and often more) of wine from as many angles as possible.

Before beginning to examine the question of the origins of wine as answered by various disciplines, therefore, it is fitting to begin this study with a general overview of some of the most important contributors to the great body of wine literature, as well as their contributions to the topic of origins.

4 Wine plays a prominent role in the literature of antiquity, and several authors from the ancient Mediterranean write extensively about types of wine, techniques for planting, and the like. These authors are discussed more fully in the chapter on Greco-

Roman literature, but they should be kept in mind as the foundation upon which authors of the modern era have stood as they have gone about writing their own contribution to the literature of wine. The first modern work of note on wine was Bacci's De naturali vinorum historia, which appeared in Latin in 1596. A product of the Renaissance, Bacci's work was primarily focused on the very topics in which the ancients were interested, especially the various types of wine. Predating the modern sciences of linguistics and palaeobotany and even the less-modern science of archaeology, Bacci makes only a few brief comments on the origins of wine indicative of what could be known on the topic in the late 16th century:

“The first mention occurs in the sacred books, [which say that] Noah planted a vine in the lands of Assyria: and after that [are] the mentions which are made in the histories, [which say that] Saturn planted vines in Crete, and Janus with him in Latium, Bacchus in India, Osiris in Egypt, and (as some think) the very ancient king Geryon in Spain. These individuals perhaps provided certain common foundations to so great a task.”3

Bacci briefly alludes to the various myths of wine-founders in various countries. Yet it should not be thought that he actually believes these myths; rather, he holds them to be fables:

3 Bacci (1596) 1: “Primae quidem memoriae est in sacris litteris, plantasse Vineam Noe in terris Assyriae: postea quicumque legantur in historiis, Saturnum coluisse vineas in Creta, et Ianum cum eo in Latio, Bacchum in India, Osyriam in Aegypto, et Geryonem, ut putant, antiquissimum Regem in Hispania; hi forte communia quaedam dederunt tanti muneris rudimenta.” All translations throughout this dissertation, unless noted otherwise, are the author's own.

5 “Therefore, if as we go along some censure should be placed on certain authors, I leave aside the amusements of the ancient poets and of the Egyptians (who called themselves 'Theologi') on the topic of wine. They were the first who spread mere fables about wine- creating Bacchus, Lyaeus and Liber who was born from Jove and from fire- since they handed down all things through fables and metaphors.”4

For Bacci, therefore, there seems to be little that can be known with certainty about the origins of wine. Yet he is able to make one observation germane to the topic:

“Thus truly the best piece of evidence, and always the most important one, is that the possession of wine was desirable; since, according to the mentions made in literature and the Scriptures, there were no nations, or any authors, who did not have some idea about wine, or even wrote about it.”5

Thus, Bacci gleans what he can from the resources he has and notes the following: according to the literature handed down to the modern age, wine was ubiquitous in the ancient world. For a man of the Renaissance, this conclusion would have to suffice.

Over the next couple of hundred years, other works on wine appeared, the most notable being Edward Barry's 1775 Observations, Historical, Critical, and Medical on the

Wines of the Ancients. Barry's work represents an encyclopedic discussion of wine in the classical world, focusing on the presence of the beverage in all aspects of ancient life.

Barry, like his scholarly forebears and contemporaries, has relatively little to say on the topic of the origins of wine, devoting only a few pages to it at the beginning of his work.

His musings are general in nature:

4 Bacci (1596) 2: “Quare si habenda obiter quorundam auctorum censura est, relinquo poetarum antiquorum, ac Aegyptiorum, qui se Theologos apellarunt, oblectamenta in vinis, qui primi, ut res omnes in fabulis ac figuris tradiderunt, et de vino meras consperserunt fabulas, Bacchum fingentes, Lyaeum et Liberum a Iove, et ab igne natum...” 5 Bacci (1596) 1: “Optimum vero hinc argumentum est, magni semper momenti, desiderabilemque fuisse hanc de Vinis tractationem; quod post litterarum et Scripturae memoriam, nullae fuerint nationes, nec ulli auctores, qui non aliquam de Vinis habuerint opinionem, aut etiam scripserint.”

6 “From the most early ages, Wine is mentioned by the Historians and Poets, and seems to be almost coeval with the first productions from vegetables [...] In these times they certainly drank their Wine recent and pure, soon after the Fermentation had ceased; but observing that by acquiring a greater age, it became more generous, they with art and industry endeavoured to prepare, and preserve it for future use. This probably was the first origin and progress of Wine: It is mentioned that Noah first planted the Vine...”6

Barry's observations become somewhat less speculative as he moves on to discuss the origins of wine in the Mediterranean:

“The Poets, who were inspired by it, celebrate its praise; and not satisfied with allowing it to be a most useful human invention, ascribe it to the Gods, to Osyris, Saturn, and Bacchus, and called it their ambrosial nectar. Homer distinguishes it by the name πῶτον θεῖον, a divine beverage. In his time the vine flourished, and various Wines were well known...”7

Like Bacci, Barry astutely notes the connection between wine and divinity, a cross- cultural phenomenon which through a series of historical accidents would come to find its fulfillment in the name of Dionysos. After his mention of the ubiquity of wine in

Homer, he goes on to detail its widespread presence in other genres of ancient literature before concluding with a notable statement on the origins of wine:

“It appears from the best, and most ancient Historians, that the rules for the culture, and preparation of the Wine and grapes, were delivered down from the Aegyptians, to the Asiatics and Greeks, who chiefly improved them, and carried this art to greater perfection. The Italians received it from them, and endeavoured to pursue their rules...”8

Barry gives no citations for his conclusions; although, living as he was in a time before the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mesopotamian cuneiform, we can be sure that he has drawn his ideas from the great body of classical literature as handed down

6 Barry (1775) 27-28. 7 Barry (1775) 28. 8 Barry (1775) 29-30.

7 from antiquity. It should be clearly noted that Barry here is not purporting to trace wine, per se—he has already pronounced himself on that topic—but rather to trace wine culture, or the customs and norms that come along with the creation and preparation of this beverage from vine to table. This is an important distinction, and one which will be returned to again later on. For Barry, wine culture finds its home in Egypt, whence it was transmitted northward to the Levant, Asia Minor, and thence on to Greece.9 Even if wine is omnipresent and untraceable, wine culture has a definite home and a line of transmission. Such was the state of the question of the origins of wine in the latter half of the 18th century.

The 19th century was a time of increased learning in all disciplines. Archaeology gained steadily in scholarly rigor, linguistics began to become a matter of science and not just of speculation, and the botanical sciences developed as well. In this atmosphere, many more scholarly authors undertook to pen their own tomes on the history of wine.

One of the earliest notable works was Alexander Henderson's 1824 book The History of

Ancient and Modern Wine. In his first hundred pages, Henderson does much the same as

Barry, treating wine in the classical world in all its various aspects. He, too, is able to do little more than conjecture on the origins of wine in the opening paragraph of his first chapter:

“The invention of Wine, like the origin of many other important arts, is enveloped in the obscurity of the earliest ages of the world; but, in the history of ancient nations, it has generally been ascribed to those heroes who contributed

9 This idea may ultimately derive from the sentiment held by some ancient authors, most notably the historian Herodotus, that Egypt was the source of much of the substance of Greek civilization. This idea, in turn, likely was fueled by the conviction that Egypt was the oldest of civilizations.

8 most to civilize their respective countries, and to whom divine honours were often rendered, in return for the benefits which they had conferred upon mankind.”10

Henderson thus subscribes to something of a Euhemerist view of the origins of wine and the divinities associated with its discovery, calling such stories “fabulous traditions”. Like

Barry, Henderson assumes that wine was discovered accidentally at various places and by various peoples, while the art itself spread outward from one or a few centralized sources. Henderson sees the story of Dionysos as proof of this process: “BACCHUS, after his education by the Nysean nymphs, is reported to have traversed nearly the whole globe, introducing the culture of the grape, and diffusing refinement wherever he went.”11

After Henderson, many of the great works on wine for the next hundred years would be written by the French. For our purposes, the most notable of these efforts was

Billiard's 1913 book La Vigne dans l'Antiquité, a massive tome detailing the history of wine in the ancient world. Unlike his predecessors, Billiard was able to take advantage of the scholarly and intellectual advancements made during the 19th century as he wrote his book. Not surprisingly, then, Billiard has much more to say on the topic of the origins of wine. Citing archaeological evidence of collected grape pips, he notes that viticulture was likely present in the Aegean by 2500 BCE.12 Beyond the material evidence, Billiard states that we are at the mercy of myths to discover the origins of wine, and as such he provides a survey of classical stories (largely those surrounding Dionysos) which help

10 Henderson (1824) 1. 11 Henderson (1824) 2. 12 Billiard (1913) 28.

9 shed light on the topic. Yet he concludes that, quite apart from myths, we know the following: although the vine was already present throughout the entire Mediterranean basin at an early date, we can also be sure of “l'origine orientale de la viticulture, et de sa dissémination en Occident lors des grandes migrations aryennes.”13 Thus, Billiard says that there is much we cannot know, but a few things we can. We can know from the science of plants that the vine did not come from just one place, but has been widespread from time immemorial. From our written sources, we can ascertain that wine culture (here we see the already-familiar dichotomy between beverage and customs) came from the East, and, as he says, was brought west by what we would today call the migrations of the Indo-Europeans (or, in his less modern parlance, the

“Aryans”). And the ultimate source? That is more difficult to say.

Henderson and Billiard had said what could be said about wine and its origins given the knowledge possessed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.14 Yet as the 20th century proceeded, so did the steady drumbeat of human inquiry. The sciences of archaeology and linguistics progressed apace, and even the body of literature handed down from antiquity was augmented as heretofore unknown languages were decoded and their stories told. Akkadian, Hittite, and Mycenaean Greek were among them, and all took their place in the annals of world literature. Yet again, the world had changed, and much more could now be said about wine and its origins than ever before. This fact

13 Billiard (1913) 40. 14 Speculation could nonetheless still run rampant. See, for example, Hehn (1888) 72-73, who in a broad- based book dealing with the origins of many different plants and animals avers that wine was first made by Semitic peoples who lived adjacent to “the true home of the vine..., the luxuriant country south of the Caspian.”

10 led to the publication of several new studies on the topic, books which are even today still cited with some degree of authority.

In 1957 Charles Seltman published Wine in the Ancient World, a work primarily on wine in the classical world. Like his predecessors, he briefly touches on the question of origins near the beginning of his work; unlike them, he is drawing on more precise data:

“The wild grape-vine appears to have flourished over a well-wooded territory of no great width from north to south but of considerable length from east to west, extending from Turkestan, deep in Asia, along Armenia, the southern slopes of the Caucasus range, the northern section of Asia Minor, and, as far as Europe is concerned, well into Thrace. Evidence fairly recently assembled points to these regions, and especially to the Caucasus, as the plant's original home. More than that, the very name “wine” is already present at the dawn of history. At least as far back as 1500 B.C. the Hittites, whose language was dominant in Asia Minor and adjoining regions, referred to it in their cuneiform script as uiian...”15

Although Seltman makes no great pronouncements on the origins of wine, his work reflects an awareness of new knowledge in both the sciences and the humanities. But primarily literature-based histories of wine were still being produced and adding impressively to the scholarly discourse. One of these was Allen's 1961 work History of

Wine, which deals with wine not just in the ancient but also the modern worlds. Unlike other authors, Allen specifically abjures any discussion on the prehistoric origins of wine, stating at the beginning of his first chapter that “for the purpose of this book, I have taken the Homeric Age as the earliest date in the history of wine”.16 All the same, he proceeds to give an excellent account of wine's early years as gleaned from the relevant

15 Seltman (1957) 15. 16 Allen (1961) 17.

11 literature. Yet a few years later, Edward Hyams would undertake the very task Allen refused, devoting the entire first chapter of his 1965 work Dionysus to the origins of wine and the vine. Tracing wine east across the Mediterranean, he arrives at the Near

East, suggesting that viticulture must have begun between 8000 and 6000 BCE. As to where this occurred, he believes that Transcaucasia is the logical choice. However, he is not entirely comfortable with this conclusion:

“Obviously, there is a good deal of improbability in the idea of a barbarous, Early Neolithic people such as this [sc., the Transcaucasians] cultivating the vine at all. The occupation is a relatively sophisticated one. Yet we have to account for the fact that Mesopotamia and Egypt, far from any habitat of the wild vines, apparently practised viticulture long before 3000 B.C. and probably as early as 4000 B.C. or even before that. […] ...One would feel a good deal more comfortable if, while recognizing that the collection of wild grapes and the making of wine originated in Transcaucasia, it were possible to attribute the actual cultivation of the vine to a people more advanced in the arts of settled, village living than any Transcaucasian folk seem likely to have been at a period sufficiently early to account for the advanced state of viticulture in the cities of the Tigris-Euphrates system in 4000 B.C. or thereabouts.”17

It was only one year later, in 1966, that a truly magnum opus was published on the topic of the history of wine, namely William Younger's Gods, Men, and Wine. Almost 500 pages long, this work represents a wide-ranging attempt to catalog the history of wine in all of its different times and places, with separate detailed chapters on the Near East, the

Aegean, and the Roman Empire (to name only those that pertain directly to the present work; the remainder of the book concerns itself with wine in Europe and the rest of the world up until the modern era). More than any of his predecessors, Younger integrates a large amount of material evidence, especially paintings, engravings, steles, and the like.

17 Hyams (1965) 30-31.

12 Yet like his predecessors, he is restrained in his discussion of the ultimate origins of wine.

His comments are primarily restricted to one paragraph:

“Owing to the approximate nature of these early datings [i.e., those of the earliest Egyptian dynasties], we cannot be sure whether viticulture began first in Mesopotamia or in Egypt. For that matter we cannot be sure whether it began in either. It has frequently been maintained that the homeland of Vitis vinifera was south of the Caucasus and south of the Caspian, but one writer suggests that its homeland may originally have been the Mediterranean and that it travelled by Egypt into the Middle East. It is probable, indeed, that the vine existed all around the Mediterranean as well as in Asia Minor and viticulture could thus have begun in the south of France or in northern or central Italy. It is unlikely that it did. Another view is that it began in Armenia and spread thence into Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt and this is the view that is usually taken. But I believe it reasonable to suggest another theory. If we accept the probability that viticulture began in Asia Minor, may we not also accept the probability that it began in Syria rather than Armenia?”18

Hyams and Younger give us an excellent glimpse into the state of the discipline in the

1960s. While scholarly consensus is largely focused on Armenia as the ultimate birthplace of wine—“the view that is usually taken”—room exists for a number of divergent views. Indeed, Younger himself sees fit to introduce his own view which differs somewhat from the theory of Armenian origins. Thus, we see that, while progress was being made on the question of the origins of wine, debate was still taking place. And while ultimate origins in Armenia were starting to look more likely, the question was still wide open as to what path wine took from its birthplace to the various parts of the world in which it could be found at the dawn of recorded history. Much work still remained to be done.

Knowledge continued to progress through the 1970s and 1980s. Archaeological

18 Younger (1966) 32.

13 finds proceeded apace, and in Hugh Johnson's 1989 book The Story of Wine, another wide-ranging history on the topic, we find evidence that both the when and where of the origins of wine are beginning to become clearer:

“Archaeologists accept accumulations of grape pips as evidence (of the likelihood at least) of winemaking. Excavations in Turkey (at Catal Hüyuk, perhaps the first of all cities), at Damascus in Syria, Byblos in the Lebanon and in Jordan have produced grape pips from the Stone Age known as Neolithic B, about 8000 BC. But the oldest pips of cultivated vines so far discovered and carbon dated—at least to the satisfaction of their finders—were found in Soviet Georgia, and belong to the period 7000-5000 BC.”19

Yet while this discussion about archaeology and even palaeobotany is interesting to

Johnson, he goes on to say:

“Compared with such shifting sands, legends have a reassuring solidity. There are plenty about where wine was first made—starting, of course, with Noah. […] The Bible...supports the thesis that the general area of the Caucasus was the original home of wine. […] A crazy but entertaining speculation is that Noah was one of many refugees from the drowning of Atlantis.”20

Thus, Johnson uses both science and myth to attempt to reconstruct the homeland of wine. Neither witness is conclusive, but each helps to cast light on the question.

Writing around the same time was Tim Unwin, whose 1991 work Wine and the

Vine: A Historical Geography of Viticulture and the Wine Trade presents a well- researched and cogent discussion of the history of wine as a product and a cultural symbol. He notes,

“At a global scale, the development of viticulture in Eurasia, and the observation that none of the other Vitis species became used at all widely for wine production, suggests that the cultivation of vines and the origin of wine was not

19 Johnson (1989) 17. 20 Johnson (1989) 20-22. This theory of Atlantis places the famous lost island in the vicinity of the Black Sea, and connects the legend to a putative Black Sea flood (see below).

14 purely a result of the natural distribution of this particular genus. Instead, it is likely that it was closely related to the social, economic, and ideological structures that emerged in the Caucasus and northern Mesopotamia in prehistoric times.”21

For Unwin, the facts of wine production suggest that the beverage had a unique birth at a specific time and place. He makes that time and place more explicit later: “The cultivation of vines for the making of wine originated some time before 4000 BC and possibly as early as 6000 BC in the mountainous region between the Black Sea and the

Caspian Sea.”22 Scholarship at the beginning of the 1990's thus seems to be coalescing around a rather definite answer for the “where” of the origins of wine, and a general answer for its “when”.

Yet as the 1990s progressed, the questions surrounding the origins of wine would begin to be guided much more firmly by hard data instead of speculation, however informed. In 1990, what was considered to be the earliest solid evidence yet for the consumption of wine was found in the form of residue from a jar unearthed at Godin

Tepe, Iran, dating to around 3400 BCE. This find inspired a conference on the origins of wine, whose proceedings were published in 1995 under the title The Origins and

Ancient History of Wine. This book represents the efforts of a number of scholars eminent in their fields, which include archaeology, palaeobotany, and the chemistry of wine. The results are impressive, and by its intensive multidisciplinary study the book does much to make a dent in the question of the origins of wine. As the editor Patrick

McGovern says,

21 Unwin (1991) 59. 22 Unwin (1991) 62.

15 “A book devoted solely to the origins and ancient history of wine is a first, like the Godin Tepe discoveries, but hopefully it will inspire and foster many more firsts in the years to come, and contribute in some small way to the appreciation and better understanding of the ancient 'culture of the vine'.”23

Yet for all that is accomplished, McGovern calls for more to be done:

“The Godin discovery raised more questions than it answered. Were the wine jars, which are of a type that is not known elsewhere, imported from a region that has not been explored archaeologically or at least that has not been reported on in the literature? Or were the unique jars, in which wine apparently was stored in stoppered vessels laid on their sides (greatly anticipating our modern wine rack!) rather evidence of local wine production...? […] In light of the enological, archaeobotanical, and scientific findings reported on in this volume, a much more intensive reexamination of the available archaeological, textual, and artistic data in historical periods is called for.”24

The nearly two decades since the publication of The Origins and Ancient History of Wine have seen further exciting progress in the more scientific fields which can shed light on the question of the origins of wine, including new finds and research by McGovern himself which push the date for the earliest known wine further still into prehistory. In the meantime, a number of histories of wine have been published which tend to be overviews rather than the in-depth research called for by McGovern. These histories, such as Rod Phillips' A Short History of Wine (2000), nonetheless incorporate the research being done in other fields. In fact, Phillips mentions such research on the first page of his book:

“The most persuasive evidence of early wine has been obtained by a combination of chemical analysis and archaeological inferences. At a number of Neolithic sites in the Zagros Mountains, in what is now western Iran, archaeologists have located jars that have reddish and yellowish deposits on their interior walls. […] Future discoveries might well push the date of the earliest

23 McGovern (1995) xv. 24 McGovern (1995) x-xiv.

16 known wine back even further or, more likely, broaden the known geographical range of early viticulture. Even so, we will never know who first made wine or the circumstances under which it was made. This has not deterred scholars from speculating about possible scenarios.”25

Phillips goes on to mention an interesting hypothesis already in some ways anticipated above by Johnson:

“The notion that the origin of wine production can be traced to a single location is sometimes called the 'Noah hypothesis', after the account of Noah and wine in the first book of the Old Testament. There the intriguing suggestion is made that viticulture and wine production began on Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark finally came to rest after the waters of the Great Flood receded. […] The notion of a Great Flood, a cataclysmic event that is recounted not only in the Bible but in texts such as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, has led two American scientists26 to suggest a scenario that might explain some aspects of the early history of wine. Investigations have shown that until about 5600 BC the area now covered by the Black Sea was a fresh-water lake, with a much smaller surface area than today's. […] This fresh-water lake had a much lower elevation than the Mediterranean Sea and was separated from it (technically from the Sea of Marmara, an arm of the Aegean Sea) by a thin strip of land about twenty miles wide. In about 5600 BC, however, the Mediterranean burst through this natural dam and created what are now the Bosphorus straits. […] Those who survived the inundation, it is suggested, migrated in all directions as they fanned out from the new sea. […] They took with them memories of the inundation, which was translated into accounts of the flood in many traditions. They also took with them the knowledge of wine.”27

The theory of the Black Sea flood has been alternately confirmed and criticized since it was first published, and it is unclear exactly what role if any it may have played in the history and spread of wine.28 All the same, ideas like this exemplify the positive

25 Phillips (2000) 1-3. 26 This theory was first put forth in 1998 by William Ryan and Walter Pitman in a book entitled Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History. 27 Phillips (2000) 8-9. 28 For an extensive treatment of the topic, see Yanko-Hombach and Gilbert, The Black Sea Flood Question, 2007. Regardless of the status of this question, it should be noted that the record of a Flood as found in Near Eastern literature (including in the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.) is thought to ultimately reflect a flood which occurred in Mesopotamia, not on the shores of the Black Sea.

17 “ferment” of innovative scholarship on the question of the origins of wine within the past two decades. In fact, McGovern took this very idea up in his 2003 book Ancient

Wine, a work which focuses most of all on material evidence and the laboratory studies which are his specialty but which attempts to bring together evidence from other fields.

Basing his conclusions on all of these fields but most of all on palaeobotany, he says,

“I have tentatively projected the very limited, current knowledge of the familial DNA relationships between Vitis vinifera varietals back in time and have proposed that a single domestication area in the eastern Taurus Mountains or Transcaucasia will eventually be delimited. I propose that, from there, the domesticated Eurasian grapevine was transplanted to other parts of the world, interbreeding with wild Vitis as it went, and sometimes producing even more exciting gustatory pleasures in the fruit and wine than what had gone before. I have tied this “Noah Hypothesis” to the gradual spread of the domesticated vine, winemaking, and wine drinking from the northern mountainous regions of the Near East to the south, east, and west. I have invoked modern proto-Indo- European linguistic analysis and a dramatic geological event of the in-filling of the Black Sea around 5600 B.C. to bolster a scenario that is consistent with the presently available evidence.”29

McGovern's work represents the first serious attempt to bring together all of the fields we have mentioned—literature, linguistics, archaeology, palaeobotany, and wine chemistry—to weave a narrative of the birth and the spread of wine. One must keep in mind, however, that McGovern is a scientist, not a philologist. His ideas about the Noah

Hypothesis and about the spread of Indo-European language and culture rely on the ideas of others, just as in the following pages our conclusions in the more scientific fields will rely on research done by experts. We will have much more to say about the philological aspects of the history of wine, and we will pay especially close attention to linguistic analysis, a field McGovern alludes to above.

29 McGovern (2003) 301.

18 Today, we stand at a crossroads as we attempt to answer the question of the origins of wine. Much is being done in many fields, and it seems certain that we are closer than ever before to answering the pertinent questions: where and when was wine first produced? Who produced it? What path did it take to reach other regions, and when did it arrive in each of them? What did the peoples of each time and place think about these matters? To answer these questions, a multidisciplinary approach is necessary: literature and linguistics, palaeobotany and chemistry, archaeology and anthropology all have a crucial part of the story to tell. It only remains for the relevant scholarship to be brought into communication with knowledge from other fields to yield up something approaching a definite answer.

Such, then, is the state of the question near the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Much has already been done, and much of that recently, yet work remains. This study attempts to contribute to the field by making advances where it can, by doing the service of cogently summarizing elsewhere, and then by bringing all of the information at hand together into a coherent narrative. No doubt further advances will continue to be made in the future, and seemingly at rapid speed. Yet it is to be hoped that the advances made up until this point have reached a critical mass sufficient to begin the process of positing definite conclusions. This dissertation will make the attempt.

19 CHAPTER 2: GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE

The classical world was also the classical locus of wine culture. The Greeks and

Romans, together with their competitors and sometimes-collaborators the Phoenicians, did more to popularize and democratize the drinking of wine than any other civilization.

Thus, it is appropriate that we begin this work with a study of what the literature left behind by these classical cultures might tell us about the origins of wine.

It is, of course, a bit unrealistic to think that the answer to the ultimate question of the origins of wine lies in the tomes of Greek and Latin literature, written between

2800 and, for our purposes, about 1600 years ago. (If we include the Mycenaean texts written in Linear B, which we will, then our horizon stretches back the better part of a millennium further.) Yet that did not stop some from claiming that they knew the birthplace of wine. Several legends on the subject are contained within the

Deipnosophistae, or Dinner-Table Philosophers, a sprawling 15-volume series of stories about food, drink and many other topics collected by a man named Athenaeus in the 3rd century CE. As the characters in the book drink wine, they often talk about it, and in doing so they mention a number of myths about its origins. In fact, it seems that more than a few locales around the Aegean were rumored to be the home of the vine and of wine:

20 Θεόπομπος δέ φησι παρὰ Χίοις πρώτοις γενέσθαι τὸν μέλανα οἶνον, καὶ τὸ φυτεύειν δὲ καὶ θεραπεύειν ἀμπέλους Χίους πρώτους μαθόντας παρ᾽ Οἰνοπίωνος τοῦ Διονύσου, ὃς καὶ συνῴκισε τὴν νῆσον, τοῖς ἄλλοις ἀνθρώποις μεταδοῦναι.

But Theopompus says that black wine first came from the Chians, that the Chians were the first to plant and tend vines after they learned the art from Oinopion the son of Dionysos (who also colonized the island), and that they then gave this knowledge to other peoples.30 (Deipnosophists 1.26)

Chios, an island in the eastern Aegean, was the home of Homer, the earliest Greek author and a man whose works show much knowledge of wine. Thus, the idea that

Chios might have been the birthplace of wine makes a certain amount of sense. But there were other candidates as well:

ὁ Θεόπομπος ὁ Χῖος τὴν ἄμπελον ἱστορεῖ εὑρεθῆναι ἐν Ὀλυμπίᾳ παρὰ τὸν Ἀλφειόν …

Theopompus the Chian records that the vine was discovered in Olympia, on the banks of the Alpheius... (Deipnosophists 1.34)

If we are to take it that this is the same Theopompus from the last passage, we might try to harmonize these two stories of origin by saying that the vine was discovered in

Olympia but first planted on Chios. Yet there are other myths which cannot be reconciled:

Ἑκαταῖος δ᾽ ὁ Μιλήσιος τὴν ἄμπελον ἐν Αἰτωλίᾳ λέγων εὑρεθῆναί φησι καὶ τάδε: ‘Ὀρεσθεὺς ὁ Δευκαλίωνος ἦλθεν εἰς Αἰτωλίαν ἐπὶ βασιλείᾳ, καὶ κύων αὐτοῦ στέλεχος ἔτεκε: καὶ ὃς ἐκέλευσεν αὐτὸ κατορυχθῆναι, καὶ ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἔφυ ἄμπελος πολυστάφυλος, διὸ καὶ τὸν αὑτοῦ παῖδα Φύτιον ἐκάλεσε. τούτου δ᾽ Οἰνεὺς ἐγένετο κληθεὶς ἀπὸ τῶν ἀμπέλων.’

Hecataeus of Miletus says that the vine was discovered in Aetolia, and adds this:

30 All translations of Greek and Latin works are the author's own.

21 “Orestheus the son of Deucalion came to Aetolia to become king, and his dog gave birth to a branch. He commanded that it be buried, and from it there grew a vine full of grapes. For this reason, he called his own son Phytius, and Phytius's son was named Oineus after the vines.” (Deipnosophistae 2.35)

Olympia and Aetolia comprise two definitively different parts of Greece, and thus it seems that this is indeed a different myth of origins. Hecataeus's story traces the discovery of the vine from the generation immediately following Deucalion, the man who in Greek mythology built a boat and was thus saved from a great flood. Such a story echoes the tale in the Bible (Genesis 9) of Noah's planting of a vine shortly after being saved from his own great flood. The biggest difference, of course, is the location: while

Noah plants his vine near Mount Ararat in eastern Anatolia, Orestheus discovers his vine within the borders of Greece.31

Yet the Greeks were not entirely partial to their own land as the home of wine and the vine. There were other theories, such as the one recorded by Hellanicus:

Ἑλλάνικος δέ φησιν ἐν τῇ Πλινθίνῃ πόλει Αἰγύπτου πρώτῃ εὑρεθῆναι τὴν ἄμπελον. διὸ καὶ Δίων ὁ ἐξ Ἀκαδημίας φιλοίνους καὶ φιλοπότας τοὺς Αἰγυπτίους γενέσθαι...

But Hellanicus says that the vine was first discovered in Plinthine, a city in Egypt. For the same reason Dion the Academician [says] that the Egyptians were lovers of wine and of drinking... (Deipnosophists 1.34)

Thus, some Greeks believed that the vine and wine were not native to Greece at all, despite the many stories to the contrary. In any case, we can learn at least one thing from these myths: the Greeks had no agreed-upon account as to where wine was born.

31 See Wilson (2003) for an excellent discussion of such wine myths, focusing on later Christian stories but also with reference to Greco-Roman myths.

22 Many of them thought they knew, but it seems certain that they did not. And what about the antiquity of wine? The myths indicate above all that the Greeks believed that a significant amount of time had passed since it was discovered, with ancient characters such as Dionysos's son Oinopion or Deucalion's son Orestheus directly involved in the discovery.32 Along the same lines, a character from Athenaeus makes the following remark based upon an episode in Homer:

ἔνιοι δὲ καὶ τὴν Διονύσου φυγὴν εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν οἰνοποιίαν σημαίνειν φασὶ πάλαι γνωριζομένην.

And some say that the flight of Dionysos into the sea shows that winemaking has been known for a long time. (Deipnosophists 1.26)

Thus, the Greeks seem to be aware that wine has been present in their culture for no small amount of time.

Such speculations are interesting, at the very least. More than likely, they simply reflect the need that every ancient culture seems to have to explain and localize everything that is of any importance. Going along with this need is the need to personify and anthropomorphize the disparate and uncontrollable phenomena found in nature.

Wine, of course, had its own face, that of Dionysos or Bacchus, among other names. In due course, we will discuss the legends surrounding this divinity in an attempt to tease out what we can say about what these legends might reveal about the origins of wine.

But a more precise question also concerns us in this chapter: when did wine arrive in

Greece and Italy, and who brought it? Should those writing in ancient Greece and Italy

32 Herodotus (2.145) believes Dionysos to have lived sometime around 2000 BCE. Deucalion would have been many generations earlier.

23 seem unqualified to inform us on the ultimate origins of wine, perhaps they might have some more authoritative information about the particulars of wine's arrival in their own lands. This is especially the case for Italy and points west, where wine seems to have been something of a latecomer in comparison with its certain presence at a very early date further east. We will discuss the literary evidence for the “who” and “when” of the introduction of wine into Italy below. For other parts of the western Mediterranean—

France, Spain, and North Africa—our literary evidence is scarce to non-existent, and so we will only briefly discuss those areas in this chapter. But we will begin the process of interrogating literature further east, namely in the Aegean.

Greek Literature

If we wish to answer the question of the origins of wine in Greece, we should begin by examining the region's earliest literature. We must do this for two reasons: first, because of the facts which that literature explicitly gives us about wine, and second, because of what we can infer from the literature about what its authors thought on the topic of wine and its history. In fact, inference is the primary task of one attempting to trace the history of wine in Greece strictly through its literature.

Unfortunately for our purposes, wine was introduced into Greece before the period in which its erstwhile absence and subsequent presence could be commented on by authors whose works have been handed down to us. Nonetheless, wine traces a strong crimson thread throughout all of Greek literature, from the present day all the way back to the earliest times. Wine was indisputably there from the very beginning of Greek

24 civilization, and we know this precisely because they wrote about it so much. Therein lies a silver lining, and indeed the very reason for us to even examine early Greek literature on the question of the origins of wine: with so much said about wine, surely we can find something worthwhile to say as well on its putative arrival into the Greek consciousness.33

Wine in the Greek Language

Before we discuss what the literature has to say about wine in Greece, we will begin by briefly discussing the wine-related vocabulary found in the Greek language.34

The primary word for wine is οἶνος, a term which is used consistently from the time of the earliest literature on into the classical and Hellenistic periods.35 From dialects which did not lose initial w-, we know that the original form of this word was ϝοῖνος.36 This root off of which this word is built is extremely productive in Greek, creating a large number of compounds (see below for a survey of those found in Homer). Furthermore, various terms for “vine” (the most notable of which is οἴνη) are closely connected to this root as

33 Most scholars avoid making firm pronouncements on this issue, but a few stake claims to greater knowledge based on a mixture of literary and archaeological evidence and simple conjecture. Hyams (1965) 70 holds that the Pelasgians, the native inhabitants of the Aegean prior to the prehistorical Greek invasion, were already cultivating the vine and making wine. Younger (1966) 79 states that wine did not enter Greece in any substantial measure until the 16th century BCE, before which time Greeks were beer drinkers. Johnson (1989) 35 takes for granted that those living in the Aegean were cultivating the vine as early as 3000 BCE. Phillips (2000) suggests that the Mycenaeans imported wine production from Crete, which had received it from Egypt as early as 2500 BCE. 34 The following entries are taken primarily from Liddell and Scott (1940), with reference to the etymological dictionaries by Chantraine (1977) and Beekes (2010). 35 The modern Greek word for wine is κρασί, a word which ultimately derives from the Ancient Greek word for “mixed drink”. Wine was often a “mixed drink” in ancient Greece, being traditionally mixed (diluted) with water. 36 Via a process of regular sound change, inherited word-initial [w] was lost in most Greek dialects. It remains, however, in the earliest Greek dialect of which we have record (Mycenaean; see below) and in scattered dialects of the classical era.

25 well. The relationship between these terms will be discussed more fully in the chapter on linguistics.

Another word, μέθυ, exists which is also generally translated as ‘wine’. This word is often interchangeable with οἶνος, as is the case in Iliad 4.467-471 (to give just one example). However, while οἶνος refers strictly to wine made from grapes unless specified otherwise, the semantic scope of μέθυ is more general, referring to any sort of alcoholic beverage or “strong drink”. While derivatives of the root οἶν- deal specifically with wine or the vine, derivatives of the root μέθ- deal with intoxication or drunkenness (e.g., μέθη

‘strong drink’ or ‘drunkenness’ and μεθύω ‘to be drunk’). Inasmuch as wine was the most notable alcoholic drink of ancient Greece, it could be referred to as μέθυ without further comment; however, the two words appear to have been as different to ancient

Greeks as ‘alcohol’ and ‘wine’ are to us. Indeed, the term μέθυ can be derived from an

Indo-European root which ultimately means something like ‘an intoxicating drink’.37

Two words exist which mean “grape(s)” or “cluster of grapes”, βότρυς and

σταφυλή. These terms are neither connected to each other nor definitively to much else except to the compounds which each of them spawn. The fact that some compounds of

βότρυς carry the meaning “curly” (as in “curly-haired”) suggests that this root may ultimately have adjectival connotations which were later applied to the cluster-like

37 See Watkins (2000). While not defining the root explicitly as such, Watkins provides alcohol-related cognates such as “mead” in Germanic; the Sanskrit cognate (madh-) is also used to refer to the primary alcoholic drink of the region, soma. The term may have originally meant “strong sweet drink”, but alcoholic connotations likely entered early.

26 quality of grapes.38 Finally, no discussion of wine terminology in Greek would be complete without mentioning the word ἀμπελών, the most common term for

‘vineyard’.39 This term has no connection to the οἶν- root, despite its close semantic and cultural connections to wine and the vine. In fact, this word is itself closely connected to

(and plausibly derived from) another word ἄμπελος, which means ‘vine’. Much like the

οἶν- root, a number of compounds are formed from a base in ἀμπελ-, although the latter are more limited in quantity. Nonetheless, this family of words provides healthy competition to the front-runner οἶνος. While etymologies within Greek have been suggested, there is no clear Indo-European provenance for ἀμπελών, and in all likelihood we must look to a substrate for its origins.40

Wine in Mycenaean Greek

These, then, are the primary linguistic pieces of Ancient Greek which form the semantic space inhabited by wine and the vine. But if we are to begin to seek the origins of wine in Greek society strictly according to the written record, we must start even before the dawn of what we traditionally call literature. Through a happy accident, we have preserved for us today a plethora of tablets from an era of Greece which would otherwise be nearly forgotten, consigned to the realm of prehistory. This was what is

38 Chantraine (1977) 187 on the term: “Comme οἶνος, ἄμπελος, et d'autres termes relatifs a la culture de la vigne, βότρυς n'a pas d'etymologie et peut été avoir emprunté a une langue méditerranéenne.” 39 Also used to mean 'vineyard' is the term ἀλωή, although this is a fairly transparent piece of poetic metonymy, generally meaning as it does “threshing-floor” and being connected to the root for “to grind”. 40 See Chantraine (1977) and Beekes (2010). As the latter says, the word “cannot be explained in IE terms, and [is] generally considered to be a substrate word (although there are no further indications for this)”. Still, Georgiev (1981) 339 proposes an etymology from ἀμφιπέλομαι 'to go around', hence 'the plant that goes around or twists'.

27 now conventionally called the Mycenaean period, an era of rather centralized government in Greece which began around 1600 BCE and ended around 1200 BCE. It would be at least another four centuries before the alphabet would make its way to the

Aegean, but palace scribes used a syllabary now known as Linear B to write down records of various kinds. As these records were written on clay tablets (and often wiped and re-used), the vast majority simply faded into the sands of time (or, more literally, into the sands of Greece). As alluded to above, it was only a chance—or a mischance— which delivered even a tiny fraction of these tablets intact to the present day. Although it is not entirely clear what happened, a series of catastrophes affected cultures all around the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE, and many palaces of the

Mycenaean culture appear to have been burnt to the ground.41 Any clay tablets

(un)lucky enough to be in a burning palace were baked, causing the writing on them to become permanently engraved. These would not be unearthed for millennia, and so it is that we find ourselves in possession of select records of an ancient civilization we know relatively little about.42 This is not the place to focus on the finer points of that civilization; in fact, we will pass over the whole matter except for one little item mentioned in the tablets. That item is, of course, wine.

Unfortunately, the nature of the written evidence which composes what we call

Mycenaean Greek is such that we should not expect to find a discourse on wine or any exegesis thereof in the Linear B tablets. The extant tablets are nearly all composed of

41 See Drews (1993) for a summary of what took place and why it might have happened. 42 The tablets were deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris. See Chadwick (1958).

28 palace records which lay out the tax receipts and subsequent distributions of various towns and cities in the Aegean. Thus, our sources can tell us only one thing with clarity: wine was a widespread and important commodity in the Mycenaean world whose production and distribution was of significant import to the economy and to the powers- that-be of the era. Yet this is itself an important thing to note as we attempt to learn what we can about the origins of wine in Greece: already by c. 1400 BCE, wine was flourishing in the Aegean.

Although the Linear B tablets do little to help us gain a cultural perspective on wine in Bronze Age Greece, they do provide us with a few other important pieces of information pertaining to wine, including a window into the linguistic situation of wine and its terminology. This is somewhat ironic, as Linear B is written in a syllabary whose hieroglyph-like symbols are not generally conceded to be up to the task of conveying the

Greek language, with its consonant clusters and complex syllables, in an entirely phonetically accurate way. Even worse, the script makes heavy use of ideograms for common objects, of which wine is one. As an ideogram represents an idea rather than a series of sounds, the “wine” ideogram (originally a drawing of a vine propped up on two poles)43 conveys little linguistic knowledge about the actual word in question. Yet the use of ideograms itself allows us to discover something about wine which we might not otherwise know. As its name suggests, Linear B was not a script that arose from nothing, but was rather adapted from an earlier version, known somewhat uncreatively as Linear

A. Unlike Linear B, Linear A has not been decoded, and so we are unable to read the 43 See Palmer (1995) 273.

29 tablets we have found or even to identify the language in which they are written.

However, the uncompromising ideogram here actually aids us, as Linear B took over many ideograms without change from Linear A. We are thus able to scan the Linear A texts and, without even knowing what they say, know that wine has a presence therein.

Linear A, in turn, has connections to a form of writing known as Cretan Hieroglyphic which also contains a similar ideogram for wine. This last ideogram may have its own roots in a very early Egyptian hieroglyph which means “wine”, although this connection is not as certain as the chain of transmission from Cretan Hieroglyphic to Linear A to

Linear B.44 In any case, the two older Aegean scripts go back more than four centuries further than Linear B, to about 1800 BCE. Thus, as we follow the written documents of the Aegean back to their last (or rather, first) tenuous gasps, we find wine staring back at us even when much else is incomprehensible.

Although the wine ideogram was an easy shorthand method for the Linear B scribes to record this commodity, we are fortunate insofar as they did not always use this ideogram. On one tablet, we read an actual phonetic representation of the word for wine:

o-a2 e-pi-de-de-to pa-ra-we-wo wo-no (Tablet Vn 01, found at Pylos)45

The nature of the Linear B writing system makes translation a less-than-obvious affair.

44 See the discussion in Best and Woudhuizen (1988). Palmer (1995) leans against a connection between the Egyptian and the Aegean ideograms. 45 All Mycenaean tablets are quoted from Ventris and Chadwick (1973), confirmed and updated by Palmer (1995) 276-77.

30 Context is important, however, and these lines stand at the beginning of a tablet which goes on to list cities to which some commodity has been distributed. That commodity would seem to be named in the second line of this tablet. The whole tablet reads something like this in normalized Greek:

ὧσα ἐπιδεδέατοι Παραϝέϝου ϝοῖνος...

The wine of Parawewos (?) Has been distributed as follows…

This tablet gives us a priceless glimpse into the actual word for “wine” being used by the

Mycenaeans at Pylos. The Linear B writing system customarily leaves off syllable-final consonants, and so we would expect the traditional word for wine in Greek, ϝοῖνος, to appear as wo-no, just as it seems to do here.

The appearance of this word does not offer a great degree of linguistic enlightenment, however, for it simply confirms the earlier existence of a term whose attestation is not in question. Yet if we range a bit further afield semantically, we come across two other terms connected to wine and the vine which are extremely rare in later literary Greek.

]qa-ra, / jo-e-ke-to-qo, wo-na-si, si[ ]we-je-we SEEDLINGS (?) 420 su TREES 104[ (Tablet GV 863, found at Knossos)

The normalization is in some doubt for this tablet, but appears to be something like what follows:

... ὅς ἔχει τόπος, ϝοίνασι ...... υἱήϝες … 420 συκαί 104…

31 Which place has in its vineyards… Trained shoots… 420 seedlings (?), 104 fig trees…

The words on this tablet for “vineyards” and “trained shoots” provide an archaic attestation for terms which we may not have otherwise known about at all except for scant reference in all subsequent Greek literature. The first appears to come from a word

οἴνη meaning “vineyard”, while the second appears to derive from a word υἱεύς (or something similar) meaning “vines, trained shoots”. The first can be fairly transparently derived from the usual word for “wine” we have seen above, but the second presents more difficulty (and hence more potential for enlightenment). We only present these terms here; for a fuller discussion, see the chapter on the linguistics of the word for wine.

Thus the Linear B tablets, although scanty, add to our knowledge of wine in the ancient Greek world. Through them we can confirm that wine was an important commodity in the Aegean economy, and that its terminology was well-established and well-developed by no later than 1200 BCE (and almost certainly earlier). Perhaps most significantly, we glean from Mycenaean Greek an elusive viewpoint into the archaic linguistic situation of wine and the vine. Yet from a social and cultural standpoint, we can discern little from the Linear B tablets. For us to fully investigate the trail of wine’s origins in Greece, we will have to dig further still.

Wine in the Homeric Epics

After the flash of illumination that is the plethora of tablets preserved from the

32 time of the Mycenaeans, our written sources go dark for over four centuries. During this period (c. 1200-800 BCE), we can surmise that the Greeks continued drinking wine, but we have no direct literary confirmation of this. However, there began to develop an oral tradition during this time, one about an ancient war between the Mycenaean powers and a neighboring polity. This series of stories surrounding the Trojan War grew and was passed down in the mouths of bards, and in it we find reflections of both the culture of the story-tellers (i.e., anachronisms in the story) and of what appears to be the actual culture of the participants in the story. During the first half of the eighth century BCE, the alphabet arrived in Greece (almost certainly brought by Phoenician merchants), and suddenly oral tradition had a new outlet—and a way to become fossilized.46 Importantly, however, these stories preserved cultural memories of some sort from earlier centuries

—perhaps much earlier. Thus, at the dawn of literacy in the Greek world, we already find a cultural tradition stretching back through an illiterate age. In these works, the narratives of Hesiod and the epics of Homer, we can access a way of thinking which antedates the “literature” itself. This matters, inasmuch as we are here attempting to trace attitudes and memories about wine through literature. The very earliest Greek literature thus provides us a window into a very early Greek civilization’s use of, attitudes toward, and thoughts about wine.

One charge that cannot be leveled against the culture described in the works traditionally assigned to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, is that it had little interest in wine. On the contrary, every reader of these classics of Western civilization has noted 46 For a basic discussion with references, see Horrocks (2010).

33 the constant presence of wine in every facet of life portrayed therein. For our purposes, we need not conduct an exhaustive survey of every mention of wine in Homer; rather, we can use the beverage in these earliest works as a road map, a guide to the place it held in the archaic Greek world and later. The following pages, therefore, will give a brief introduction to wine in the Homeric works, out of which we will expand several themes and investigate more closely what they reveal about the Greeks’ attitudes toward the provenance and antiquity of wine in their culture.47

Wine was many things to the Greeks, yet we must start any discussion of its role in ancient Greek society by examining its timeless purpose as a social lubricant. Wine was well-integrated into the social life of the characters portrayed in Homer, as we can see from the following passage from the Iliad:

δύσετο δ᾽ ἠέλιος, τετέλεστο δὲ ἔργον Ἀχαιῶν, βουφόνεον δὲ κατὰ κλισίας καὶ δόρπον ἕλοντο. νῆες δ᾽ ἐκ Λήμνοιο παρέσταν οἶνον ἄγουσαι πολλαί, τὰς προέηκεν Ἰησονίδης Εὔνηος… ἔνθεν οἰνίζοντο κάρη κομόωντες Ἀχαιοί, ἄλλοι μὲν χαλκῷ, ἄλλοι δ᾽ αἴθωνι σιδήρῳ, ἄλλοι δὲ ῥινοῖς, ἄλλοι δ᾽ αὐτῇσι βόεσσιν, ἄλλοι δ᾽ ἀνδραπόδεσσι: τίθεντο δὲ δαῖτα θάλειαν.

The sun set, and the work of the Achaeans was finished, And throughout the camp they killed cows and made a feast. Many wine-bearing ships from Lemnos were close by Which Euneos the son of Jason had sent… Thence did the flowing-haired Achaeans get their wine, Some in exchange for bronze, some for gleaming iron,

47 Nearly all of the scholars mentioned in the introductory chapter as having written works on the history of wine spend some time on the role and appearances of wine in Homer. However, for particularly good discussions on the topic, see Seltman (1957), Allen (1961), Younger (1966). Probably the best treatment of all is Della Bianca and Beta (2002), whose entire book is on the subject of wine in early Greece.

34 Some for hides, some for the cattle themselves, Some for slaves; and they made a rich feast. (Iliad 7.465-68,472-75)

This passage furnishes a number of issues pertaining to wine in the world of Homer which are worthy of mention. First and most notable is the prominent place given to wine at the feast of the Achaeans. In fact, only two things appear necessary for a feast: beef and wine. With only two comestibles specifically mentioned, we might expect that each of these was of great importance at an ancient Greek social gathering. Wine was not simply one beverage among many, or even one form of alcohol among many; it was the primary source of liquid nourishment. Nor was this simply an idiosyncrasy of an army on campaign, or of the world that Homer represents: we will see later in this chapter that wine would continue to be a primary component of social gatherings well into the times of classical Greece. Yet even in the archaic civilization portrayed in the works of Homer, wine was already embedded in this role.

Just how important wine was to the ancient Greeks is suggested by the lengths to which they went to procure wine for their feast. If one expected an army camped in siege around a city to be subsisting on a spartan diet of military rations, one would be wrong. Procuring wine from the surrounding countryside would have been a dubious proposition, and so ships were summoned from the Aegean island of Lemnos. These ships seem to have come specifically to bring wine to the Greek army. Upon arrival, the wine was not simply given away—of course not—but was sold (or rather bartered) to the Greeks. The wine seems not to have been cheap, for soldiers were induced to part

35 with their implements of war, their cattle, and even their slaves in exchange for the temporary pleasure of wine. But part with these things they did, so important and desirable was wine to the Greeks.

Apart from the intrinsic value of wine and a sense of its irreplaceability in

Homeric society, we also gain from this passage a brief glimpse of the wine trade in the ancient world. The wine trade will be discussed further elsewhere, but it should be noted here that it is almost a matter of course for “wine-bearing ships” to cross the sea and to engage in commerce by selling their wares to wine-thirsty patrons. Already in view here is the idea of wine as an international, or at the very least inter-regional commodity which is carried from place to place and from port to port. If we are to judge by the Homeric evidence, the great demand for wine in the ancient Greek world was met by an equal and obliging supply, wherever it might be from. Timeless economic principles make their first appearance on the stage of Western literature.

When we turn to the religious world of the Greeks, we find that wine plays a role similar in its importance, although quite different in its nature. All throughout the

Homeric works, we see that wine holds an important place in religious ceremony and ritual. In one well-known scene, Hector returns from battle and meets his mother, who encourages him to take wine and pour a libation to Zeus. His response characterizes something of the sacred aura which surrounds wine in the culture of the ancient

Aegean:

μή μοι οἶνον ἄειρε μελίφρονα πότνια μῆτερ, μή μ᾽ ἀπογυιώσῃς μένεος, ἀλκῆς τε λάθωμαι:

36 χερσὶ δ᾽ ἀνίπτοισιν Διὶ λείβειν αἴθοπα οἶνον ἅζομαι: οὐδέ πῃ ἔστι κελαινεφέϊ Κρονίωνι αἵματι καὶ λύθρῳ πεπαλαγμένον εὐχετάασθαι.

Do not hand me sweet-spirited wine, revered mother, Lest you sap me of my strength and I forget my power. For I will not pour a libation of crimson wine to Zeus with unwashed hands; It is in no way possible for one splattered with blood and gore To pray to the stormy son of Kronos. (Iliad 6.264-68)

While Hector seems to first reject the wine offered him due to its intoxicating effects, his main concern is of a more religious nature. As one who has recently shed blood, Hector piously refuses to attempt contact with the king of the gods. The putative contact would come about through the medium of making a libation, or the process of pouring an

(often precious) liquid out on the ground as an offering to the divinity. In the lines immediately preceding these, Hector’s mother shows no hesitation in choosing wine as the liquid most appropriate to such a libation.48 The drink is thus strongly connected to religious rites at an early date.

At the end of the Iliad, we again find wine used in connection with religious rites, this time at the funeral of Hector:

ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς, τῆμος ἄρ᾽ ἀμφὶ πυρὴν κλυτοῦ Ἕκτορος ἔγρετο λαός. αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ᾽ ἤγερθεν ὁμηγερέες τ᾽ ἐγένοντο πρῶτον μὲν κατὰ πυρκαϊὴν σβέσαν αἴθοπι οἴνῳ πᾶσαν, ὁπόσσον ἐπέσχε πυρὸς μένος: αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα ὀστέα λευκὰ λέγοντο κασίγνητοί θ᾽ ἕταροί τε μυρόμενοι, θαλερὸν δὲ κατείβετο δάκρυ παρειῶν.

When early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared,

48 While wine was the most common liquid poured in a libation, others include honey, oil, or water. See Burkert (1985) 72-73.

37 Then the people gathered around the pyre of famed Hector. And when they had come and gathered together First they quenched the entire pyre with crimson wine Until it checked the strength of the fire: and then His relatives and friends gathered the white bones While they mourned, and a huge tear wet their cheeks. (Iliad 24.788-794)

Wine is thus used here to quench the pyre of Hector. Nor is this an isolated occurrence: the very same ritual is performed by the Greeks upon the pyre of Patroclus in Iliad 23.

No comment is made on this usage in the text: it appears to be considered self- explanatory by the composer. But why would Greeks and Trojans alike use wine instead of water to quench a funeral pyre? The answer surely lies not in practicality—water is cheaper and more effective—but in the realm of religious ritual. As we saw above, wine is considered to hold a special quasi-mystical value in its power to connect humans to the gods. We might say that wine itself is a morpheme, a meaning-bearing unit, in religious ritual. Far from being simply a beverage, it carries meaning within itself, meaning ingrained by use in ritual. We will examine wine and its religious connotations in greater detail below, but here it suffices to note that already by the time of Homer wine was well-integrated into the fundamental fabric of Greek religious rituals. 49

Not unconnected with the religious function of wine in Greek society was its well-known role as an intoxicant. The Greeks were naturally well-acquainted with this property of our beverage, and they noted it often. Scarcely has the Iliad begun when we find intoxication from wine used with biting rhetorical effect in a speech from Achilles to

Agamemnon: 49 See Kircher (1970) for a discussion of wine as a religious item in ancient Greece.

38 οἰνοβαρές, κυνὸς ὄμματ᾽ ἔχων, κραδίην δ᾽ ἐλάφοιο, οὔτέ ποτ᾽ ἐς πόλεμον ἅμα λαῷ θωρηχθῆναι οὔτε λόχον δ᾽ ἰέναι σὺν ἀριστήεσσιν Ἀχαιῶν τέτληκας θυμῷ: τὸ δέ τοι κὴρ εἴδεται εἶναι.

Wine-drunkard, dog-eyed and deer-hearted, Never did you dare in your heart to go to war along with your people Or to set an ambush with the best of the Achaeans; Seems like that would be the death of you. (Iliad 1.225-228)

Along with a number of other characteristics rather undesirable in a leader, Achilles accuses the leader of the Achaean army of being οἰνοβαρές—literally, “heavy with wine”. The image is clear: Agamemnon has been over-imbibing to the point of drunkenness. Given what we have seen, this should not be taken to reflect a distaste for wine in Greek society—quite the contrary, in fact, given its important roles in the socio- religious sphere. What exactly, then, is Achilles implying about Agamemnon when he brands him with this epithet? In fact, are we to take it that Agamemnon is really drunk all the time? Maybe, but this seems a bit unlikely. Rather, given what we have already seen, this label would imply three things about Agamemnon. First, given the expense of wine as noted above, the implication that one could be drunk on wine enough to earn such an epithet indicates that Agamemnon has been taking more than his share of wine.

That is to say, such a label may be Achilles’ way of stirring up resentment for the

Achaean leader on the grounds of excess or lack of camaraderie, as well as venting his own frustration with Agamemnon’s overreach in the matter of Achilles’ war-prize

Briseis.50 Secondly, the misuse of wine must also have been construed as something of a

50 Elided from the above passage on the use of wine in social gatherings (Iliad 7.465-75) are two lines which state that the ships which came bearing wine gave Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus a

39 religious crime, given its obvious use in sacred rituals. Wine was in many ways a divine drink (indeed, it is referred to as ἀθέσφατος, ‘unable to be adequately described even by the gods’, in Odyssey 11.61)51, and it was to be respected even in secular use.

Obviously, a lack of respect for wine resulted in drunkenness, itself a meta-conscious state whose divine status was to become personified in the deity Dionysos. Thus, to allow oneself to be οἰνοβαρές was in essence to take a valuable (and indeed sacred) social and religious instrument and to use it in an improper manner. The proper result would be censure by the community.52 Third, as we will discuss below, the Greeks were a society which prided themselves on moderation in drinking. To be “drunk on wine” was the action not of a good Greek but of a barbarian, and as such of one not worthy to lead the Greek army.53

The term οἰνοβαρές leads us into a discussion on the many compounds made with the word for wine in the works of Homer. As is obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the Greek language (then or today), the term οἰνοβαρές is formed from the word for

“wine” (οἶνος) and the word for “heavy” (βαρύς), hence giving its literal meaning “heavy with wine”. If οἰνοβαρές were the only exemplar of wine-compounding found in the works of Homer, the phenomenon might be only slightly remarkable, but it is not. On

significant amount of wine free of charge. While this happens later in the story, we may surmise that this was not a one-time occurrence; and if so, Agamemnon's comparative excess of wine was both real and a likely cause of resentment to others. 51 This adjective is used elsewhere in Homer primarily in conjunction with other prodigious and awe- inspiring natural occurrences, such as the sea or night, and with objects necessary to life and hence bearing the whiff of the quasi-religious, such as food or cattle. 52 The more socially and/or religiously valuable the item or custom in question, the more grievous its misuse. Wine was not so sacred as to incur serious punishment upon its misuse, but its societal and religious role was nonetheless to be respected. 53 Cf. the English term “drunkard” as a general term of denigration.

40 the contrary, we find many such compounds. We begin with a couple of rather natural formations:

ἔνθά μιν ἤνωγον τέμενος περικαλλὲς ἑλέσθαι πεντηκοντόγυον, τὸ μὲν ἥμισυ οἰνοπέδοιο, ἥμισυ δὲ ψιλὴν ἄροσιν πεδίοιο ταμέσθαι.

They commanded him to choose from there a plot Of fifty acres, half of it wine-land, Half empty plow-land of the plain to tend. (Iliad 9.578-80)

νῆσός τις Συρίη κικλήσκεται, εἴ που ἀκούεις, Ὀρτυγίης καθύπερθεν, ὅθι τροπαὶ ἠελίοιο, οὔ τι περιπληθὴς λίην τόσον, ἀλλ᾽ ἀγαθὴ μέν, εὔβοτος, εὔμηλος, οἰνοπληθής, πολύπυρος.

There’s an island called Syrie, if you’ve heard of it: Below Ortygia, toward the turning of the sun, Not too populated, but a nice place, Plenty of pasture and flocks, full of wine, filled with grain. (Odyssey 15.403-06)

These two passages exhibit two wine-compounds, the noun οἰνοπέδοιο and the adjective οἰνοπληθής. The first literally means “wine-land” (the Greek word πέδον means ‘earth’ or ‘ground’), and intends to convey the idea of an area suitable for planting a vineyard. The second literally means “wine-full” (containing the well-attested

Greek root πληθ- ‘full’), and indicates that the noun being described (in this case, an island) is characterized by an abundance of wine. The formation of these compounds is perhaps a natural occurrence in a society characterized by a fixation on wine, but that is precisely the point. The compound οἰνοπληθής in particular indicates a high degree of linguistic comfort with the word for wine: here it is used not nominally or adjectivally

41 but adverbially, parallel to εὔ ‘well’ and πολύ ‘much’ in the same line. The fact that

‘wine’ could stand in such a syntactic location (that is to say, as a quasi-adverbial) seems to show that it is well-integrated not only into the culture but also the language of the

Greeks.

Two more wine-compounds relate to the serving and consumption of wine:

ἐνταυθοῖ νῦν ἧσο μετ᾽ ἀνδράσιν οἰνοποτάζων:

Now sit there and wine-drink with the men… (Odyssey 20.462)

αὐτὰρ ὃ τοῖς ἄλλοισι θεοῖς ἐνδέξια πᾶσιν οἰνοχόει γλυκὺ νέκταρ ἀπὸ κρητῆρος ἀφύσσων:

Then he wine-poured [sic] sweet nectar to all the other gods Drawing it from a bowl while going counter-clockwise… (Iliad 1.597-98)

The first compound is a verb, οἰνοποτάζων, which contains the root ποτ- whose derivatives all have semantic connections to drinking.54 It is perhaps not surprising that wine-drinking would merit its own compound, and in fact we have already seen another such term above in Iliad 7.472, οἰνίζοντο, which essentially means “drink wine” but can be rendered more literally as “wine-ize”. In the second passage, we see another similar compound, οἰνοχόει, whose second part comes from the Greek root χε- meaning “pour” and hence means “to pour wine”.55 Yet a slightly closer examination of the passage in

54 It is noteworthy that the bare verb ποτάζω does not occur. This implies two possibilities: either there once was such a verb created as a denominative from the noun πότος which then formed the wine- compound, or the wine-compound is in fact a denominative from a noun *οἰνόποτος, which would mean something like “wine-drink”. The existence of the parallel verb οἰνοποτέω, exhibiting different denominative morphology, can be explained in the same two ways. 55 This compound is rather transparently back-formed from the noun οἰνοχόη, ‘wine-jug’, the contract verb in –έω indicating the presence of an old Indo-European denominative formant. The connection with the primary verb χέω ‘pour’ is thus only through this intermediary.

42 question reveals something peculiar and intriguing about the use of this term here.

Although the verb quite transparently means “to pour wine”, the object of the pouring here is not in fact wine at all. Instead, it is “sweet nectar” which is being served. We should not wonder at the beverage being served—this is, after all, the drink of the gods, who, as we are told, do not drink wine56—but rather at the fact that this non-wine beverage is being “wine-poured”. The use of this particular compound seems to indicate something rather important about the culture of the Iliad’s composer(s) and indirectly about the culture of those whose exploits are narrated in the story: the verb “wine- pour” is so ingrained into the lexicon as the standard term for serving a beverage in a convivial setting that it is used even when the beverage itself which is being served is not in fact wine. That is to say, the terminology of wine is so ingrained into the lexicon of the language that it is used even when it is technically inappropriate. It would be as though one could use the English noun “milk jug” as a verb (“I'm going to milk-jug you some milk”) but then used it instead to refer to wine (“The sommelier milk-jugged wine into the glass”). Such a use would be strong evidence of the importance of milk in such a society.

Finally, we will look at one more family of wine-compounds found in the works of

Homer, namely proper names. In the following ignominious list we find not one but two such names:

ἔνθα τίνα πρῶτον τίνα δ᾽ ὕστατον ἐξενάριξαν Ἕκτωρ τε Πριάμοιο πάϊς καὶ χάλκεος Ἄρης; ἀντίθεον Τεύθραντ᾽, ἐπὶ δὲ πλήξιππον Ὀρέστην, 56 See Iliad 5.341.

43 Τρῆχόν τ᾽ αἰχμητὴν Αἰτώλιον Οἰνόμαόν τε, Οἰνοπίδην θ᾽ Ἕλενον καὶ Ὀρέσβιον αἰολομίτρην...

Who were the first and last whom Hector The son of Priam and brazen Ares slew? Godlike Teuthras, horse-tamer Orestes, spearman Trechos and Aitolios and Oinomaos, Oinopis and Helenos and Oresbios of the glittering girdle… (Iliad 5.703-707)

Greek names are often formed from two-part compounds, so the existence of such names should not surprise us in principle. What might surprise us, however, is the relative prevalence of names which pertain to wine: we find two alone in this list.

Elsewhere in the Iliad we hear mention of Oineus, whose name is not so much a compound as a name simply meaning “winester”. (He is said to have had many vineyards.) The apparent widespread nature of such names is yet another clue that wine has pervaded the culture of the time: as Greek names often reflect the culture’s values and priorities, it would seem that wine (and the possession thereof) was considered important to Greeks of the earliest period. Even the sea, that most important of Greek topoi, cannot escape an epithet pertaining to wine: it is commonly referred to in

Homeric formulae as οἶνοψ, “wine-faced”- that is, with the appearance of wine or dark- colored.

This concludes our summary, brief though it may be, of wine in the works of

Homer. If the men who wrote and starred in these works could talk, what would they tell us about wine in their culture? If we are to believe what we have seen above, they would tell us that wine was an incredibly important part of their lives. It was

44 indispensable in social situations, being the unrivaled drink of choice at what today we might call parties (which we will discuss further below). It was crucial in religious observances, being the chief libation offered to the gods on various occasions. Its production and procurement was a major part of the economy of the Aegean, leading to a healthy wine trade and even the naming of children after it. With its many compounds, it suffused the everyday vocabulary of the Greeks. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a commodity in modern Western culture as important and omnipresent as wine was for the Greeks of the Mycenaean/Homeric period.

As we seek the origins of wine in this part of the world, we must ask the follow- up question: given all of this, what information can we glean about the introduction of wine into both the region and into the lives of the tribes who came later to be known as the Greeks (and, for that matter, other tribes of the area such as the Trojans)? To answer the first question is more difficult via the literature we have seen (although we will attempt it below by examining other sources): Homer naturally has little interest in the provenance of the region’s flora. But if we are to attempt to ascertain the time-depth of the introduction of wine into the culture of the Greeks from what we have seen in the works of Homer, we would surely be forced to place it well into the depths of prehistory.

Certainly, no recent import (however we choose to define that) would explain the widespread importance of wine in Greek culture, whether as a drink of choice or as an element in nomenclature. Perhaps most importantly, no recent import would show up as an indispensable element in the religious ceremonies of the Greeks, as such

45 ceremonies tend to be conservative to the point of unintelligibility to contemporaries. To conclude our discussion of Homer, therefore, his works attest unequivocally to the archaic presence of wine in the culture of the Greeks (and, if we are to believe his projections, in the culture of other Aegean peoples as well). Just how archaic this presence is we cannot yet answer without the help of further witnesses such as archaeology.

Here we may tie together both of the sources we have examined thus far, the scant (but early) testimony of the Mycenaean tablets and the fuller (albeit somewhat later) evidence from Homer. The two complement each other, giving us a more complete picture of wine in the Late Bronze Aegean. As we have seen, the Homeric sources attest to the complexity of wine ritual and custom in ancient Greece, while the Linear B sources attest to the more pragmatic fact of wine’s presence and economic relevance at a date a few centuries earlier than the setting of Homer’s works (and earlier still than their composition). Viewing both together, it is clear that wine was not only present but thriving in Aegean culture, particularly in that of the Greek-speaking peoples, by the mid-second millennium BCE. And if the literature attests to the fact that wine was thriving by that date, we can reasonably conclude that the literature guarantees a significantly earlier date for the entrance of wine into the Greek consciousness.

This is indeed a satisfactory conclusion. However, it is not so satisfactory that we can leave quite yet the topic of the origins of wine in ancient Greek literature. Although we have discussed the very earliest written records, we should not ignore later works

46 simply because they do not have temporal priority. While we hardly need to examine every instance of wine in classical and later authors—and there are many such instances

—it is nonetheless necessary to discuss a few particularly important themes which can inform us yet further about the origins of wine in Greek culture.

Dionysos: The Wine-God

Along with wine go wine-gods. Every ancient culture which partook in the vine or in wine seems to have had one; some cultures could not agree on who the primary god associated with wine was, and so they had more. The Italians especially had varying traditions, associating Bacchus, Bromius (if not equal to Bacchus)57, Janus58 and Saturn59 with wine and its founding, in addition to the Etruscan Fufluns.60 The Greeks seems to have been less conflicted, although there is at least one ancient tradition about

ἀμπελοφύτης Κρόνος, “vine-planting Kronos” to match up with the Romans' association of wine with Saturn.61 Nonetheless, there was undoubtedly one dominant wine-god in

Greek mythology, namely Dionysos. Dionysos is a complicated figure even by the standards of Greek mythology, and this is not the place to carry out a detailed survey of his traits and his history. However, given his status as the leading wine divinity of Greece and through that culture's influence eventually of the entire ancient Mediterranean world, we should at the very least probe the myths surrounding his coming to Greece

57 See Ennius, Tragedy fragment 121 (cited below). 58 Billiard (1913) 39 references a temple dedicated to “Vine-bearing Janus” found in the ruins of Stabia, near Naples. 59 Billiard (1913) 40, who notes Saturn's traditional role as the bringer of agriculture (presumably including the vine) to Italy. See Aeneid 8.314-325. 60 See Bonfante (1993). 61 See Manzi (1883) 23, who references an inscription from Peligni which contains this epithet.

47 and his early connections with wine. Myths, after all, often encode kernels of historical truth within the improbable stories they tell. Many and varied are the tales told about

Dionysos's origins, but it is certainly worth our time to examine them and see what information, if any, we might distill from them about the advent of wine in Greece.62

Unlike most of the other gods who would come to play a prominent role in the civilization of classical Greece, Dionysos has only a very small part to play in the two works of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey.63 In fact, the wine god's name is only mentioned five times throughout the two books. The two references in the Odyssey

(11.325 and 24.74) allude to little-known stories of Dionysos and do little to shed light on his origins or his role in Homeric society. The references in the Iliad are only a little bit more helpful. In Book 14, we are told by Zeus:

ἣ δὲ Διώνυσον Σεμέλη τέκε χάρμα βροτοῖσιν …

And Semele gave birth to Dionysos, a joy to mortals... (Iliad 14.325)

Meanwhile, the other two occurrences are in Book 6, where an early story about Dionysos is related:

οὐδὲ γὰρ οὐδὲ Δρύαντος υἱὸς κρατερὸς Λυκόοργος δὴν ἦν, ὅς ῥα θεοῖσιν ἐπουρανίοισιν ἔριζεν: ὅς ποτε μαινομένοιο Διωνύσοιο τιθήνας σεῦε κατ᾽ ἠγάθεον Νυσήϊον: αἳ δ᾽ ἅμα πᾶσαι θύσθλα χαμαὶ κατέχευαν ὑπ᾽ ἀνδροφόνοιο Λυκούργου θεινόμεναι βουπλῆγι: Διώνυσος δὲ φοβηθεὶς δύσεθ᾽ ἁλὸς κατὰ κῦμα, Θέτις δ᾽ ὑπεδέξατο κόλπῳ

62 Countless works have treated the subject of Dionysos, and it is not necessary to list here an exhaustive bibliography of the topic. However, for several important works on the subject, see Jeanmaire (1951), Bruhl (1953), Harrison (1955), Otto (1965), Kerenyi (1976), Burkert (1985), Hamdorf (1986), Detienne (1989), Versnell (1990), Seaford (2006), and Graf and Johnston (2007). 63 For a thorough treatment of Dionysos's appearances and role in Homer, see Privitera (1970).

48 δειδιότα: κρατερὸς γὰρ ἔχε τρόμος ἀνδρὸς ὁμοκλῇ.

Indeed, Lycurgus the strong son of Dryas did not live long, Having fought against the immortal gods: He once chased the nurses of raving Dionysos Along holy Nyseion; and they all threw their wands To the ground as they were struck with an ox-goad By man-killing Lycurgus; but Dionysos, afraid, Dove beneath the waves of the sea, and Thetis received him, Shaken as he was: a great fear held him because of the man's threats. (Iliad 6.130-137)

This, the only substantive passage about Dionysos in either the Iliad or the Odyssey, paints a picture of the god which inspires little confidence in his majesty and importance among the other Olympians, or indeed within Greek society. The Dionysos we see here bears little resemblance to the Dionysos we will come to see in later Greek literature (for instance, in Euripides' Bacchae, where Dionysos is a strong leader and an inexorable, even terrifying force); here in Homer, Dionysos seems to be a weak and fairly unimportant god, mentioned only a few times and hardly treated with excessive reverence when mentioned.

The underwhelming impression of Dionysos given by Homer to his readers led many scholars to believe for a long time that Dionysos was a god who had just recently been introduced to Greece.64 This would explain his apparent lack of importance in

Homer when compared with his central position in the Greek religion of the classical period, for the case could be made that the worship of Dionysos was just “catching on”

64 See the discussion by Burkert (1985) 162. While this narrative has been quashed (see below), it still survives in a modified form: many recent scholars (for instance, Johnson (1989), Unwin (1991), and Della Bianca and Beta (2002)) all avow that Dionysos as a wine god was a late development in Greek religion. The usual explanation is that Dionysos was once a fertility or agricultural god from Asia Minor; Seltman (1957) and Younger (1966) expound considerably on this possibility.

49 at the time of Homer and needed only a few hundred more years to rise to its customary prominence. Adding credence to this theory was the fact that Dionysos was often credited by the Greeks themselves as being a foreign god, having come to Greece at some time in the vaguely remembered past. The myth thus seemed to fit the Homeric facts: Dionysos, a foreign god, had not yet won the full respect of the Greeks at the time of Homer, but his influence would thereafter grow and grow quickly.

The discovery of the Mycenaean tablets (as discussed above) dealt a blow to this theory. Of the several names of gods readable in the Linear B script from the mid-second millennium BCE, the name of Dionysos clearly appears—and in a seemingly central role, no less.65 If Dionysos was already an important god in the pantheon of the Mycenaean

Greeks, it seems untenable to claim that he was only a recently introduced god at the time of Homer. Scholars were forced to go back to the drawing board to explain the minor role played by Dionysos in Homer.

Yet scholars may not have ever held such a belief about Dionysos as a late-comer if they had lent more credence to other ancient Greek texts written only a century or less after Homer (and, in the case of some works, even traditionally ascribed to Homer).

The corpus of so-called Homeric Hymns is among this select body of early literature, comprising a few dozen hymns each addressed to specific gods. As one peruses the various addressees, one notices that most of the Hymns are on the topic of undoubtedly

65 See Palmer (1995) 61-62. The name di-wo-nu-so is attested once in the company of di-we (Zeus) and once on the reverse of what appears to be a votary tablet, thus all but confirming that this name refers to the god Dionysos. Additionally, the obverse of the votary tablet contains a reference to wo-no-wa-ti- si (?wine-women), which implies that Dionysos was connected with wine at this early date.

50 important Olympian gods: Apollo, Aphrodite, Demeter, Hermes. A few are addressed to mortal heroes who have undergone some kind of apotheosis, such as Heracles or the

Dioscuri. Yet among this august group of names, there can be found not one but two hymns to Dionysos. What, then, are we to make of the fact that Dionysos was being hymned at such an early date and among such exclusive company? Surely, we must believe that Dionysos played an important role in early Greek religion. Whether that role was less than it would become later is harder to say, but we should at least note an important statement from Hesiod, an author dated within a few decades of Homer:

εὖτ᾽ ἂν δ᾽ Ὠαρίων καὶ Σείριος ἐς μέσον ἔλθῃ οὐρανόν, Ἀρκτοῦρον δ᾽ ἐσίδῃ ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ηώς, ὦ Πέρση, τότε πάντας ἀποδρέπεν οἴκαδε βότρυς: δεῖξαι δ᾽ ἠελίῳ δέκα τ᾽ ἤματα καὶ δέκα νύκτας, πέντε δὲ συσκιάσαι, ἕκτῳ δ᾽ εἰς ἄγγε᾽ ἀφύσσαι δῶρα Διωνύσου πολυγηθέος.

When Orion and Sirius come into the middle of heaven, and the rosy-fingered dawn looks at Arcturus, O Perses, then is the time to cut off all the grape clusters and bring them in. Expose them to the sun for ten days and ten nights; Cover them for five, and on the sixth draw off into vessels The gifts of joyful Dionysos. (Works and Days 609-14)

Here we have the earliest piece of advice given in Western culture about the proper procedure for the harvesting of grapes and the fermentation of wine. But what interests us most here is Hesiod's almost off-handed comment at the end of the passage. Making use of metonymy typical of Greek poetry, Hesiod does not use the word “wine” to refer to the fermented juice of the grape. Instead, he refers to the juice as “the gifts of joyful

Dionysos”. Besides providing an additional witness to the presence and importance of

51 Dionysos in Greek culture at any early date, Hesiod's statement vouchsafes another fact for us, namely that Dionysos was intrinsically linked to wine at an early date. This is doubly important because none of the references to Dionysos in Homer make this clear.

Thus, Hesiod's testimony, coupled with that of the Homeric Hymns, help to counterbalance the weight of Homer as we attempt to ascertain just who Dionysos was in archaic Greek society and just what he meant to those living at the time.

Thus, we can posit with some certainty the antiquity of both Dionysos himself and his association with wine in Greek society. Yet in this sense, we have only thus far come up with a negative answer: Dionysos was not a recent arrival from the east, and thus cannot represent any putative arrival of wine from that direction at a relatively late date. What, then, can we tell about the actual origins of Dionysos?

There is perhaps no better place to start our (necessarily brief) inquest than by citing one of the Homeric Hymns to Dionysos mentioned above. Because of its relative antiquity, we can believe that we are getting a glimpse into a rather early state of the mythology surrounding Dionysos.66 The Hymn begins:

οἳ μὲν γὰρ Δρακάνῳ σ᾽, οἳ δ᾽ Ἰκάρῳ ἠνεμοέσσῃ φάσ᾽, οἳ δ᾽ ἐν Νάξῳ, δῖον γένος, εἰραφιῶτα, οἳ δέ σ᾽ ἐπ᾽ Ἀλφειῷ ποταμῷ βαθυδινήεντι κυσαμένην Σεμέλην τεκέειν Διὶ τερπικεραύνῳ: ἄλλοι δ᾽ ἐν Θήβῃσιν, ἄναξ, σε λέγουσι γενέσθαι, ψευδόμενοι: σὲ δ᾽ ἔτικτε πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε πολλὸν ἀπ᾽ ἀνθρώπων, κρύπτων λευκώλενον Ἥρην. ἔστι δέ τις Νύση, ὕπατον ὄρος, ἀνθέον ὕλῃ, τηλοῦ Φοινίκης, σχεδὸν Αἰγύπτοιο ῥοάων...

66 While dating these and other hymns is an inexact science, the most archaic hymns (a group to which this fragment is thought to belong) date to the seventh century BCE. See, for instance, the discussions in Allen et al. (1940) and West (2003).

52 Some say that it was at Dracanum, some on windy Icarus, Some in Naxos, O holy-born, the in-sewn one; Some say that it was on the banks of the deep-eddying Alpheius That Semele bore you to thunder-loving Zeus; Others, lord, say you were born in Thebes; But they're all lying. The father of men and gods bore you Far away from men, hiding it from white-armed Hera. There is a certain Nysa, a high mountain, verdantly forested, Far from Phoenicia, near the streams of the Aegyptus... (Hymn to Dionysos, 1-9)

If this is the earliest statement on what the Greeks thought about the origins of Dionysos

—and it appears to be—then we must already find ourselves in a considerable amount of aporia when trying to trace the actual origins of the god in Greek culture. The

“standard” story67 is of course encoded here and ultimately endorsed by the author: at a remote (and foreign) locale known as Nysa, Dionysos was “borne” by Zeus from his thigh, wherein he had been sewn after his mother Semele's unfortunate demise. Yet the very fact that the composer of the hymn felt it necessary to first refute other tales which run quite differently suggests that there was no great amount of unity among his listeners as to what the “real” story was. In fact, his casual allusions to other versions seem to suggest that many of his listeners may have known about and even adhered to these other versions of Dionysos's birth. It is noteworthy that these other versions involve both a more traditional divine birth-story and a birth which would make

Dionysos not a foreigner but a native of the Aegean. The latter fact, in particular, would change our perceptions both of him and of what (if anything) he may tell us about the origins of wine in Greek society. 67 See, inter alios, Otto (1965) 65-73.

53 With the passing of time, opinion failed to coalesce around a definitive place

(and manner) of origin for the wine god. Rather, it seems that even more tales began to be spun about Dionysos. For instance, a distinct Orphic tale arose as early as the sixth century BCE which portrayed Dionysos as the victim of a conspiracy by the Titans before his subsequent rebirth.68 Writing six centuries later in the middle of the 1st century BCE,

Diodorus Siculus was able to do little more than enumerate the various stories:

τῶν δὲ παλαιῶν μυθογράφων καὶ ποιητῶν περὶ Διονύσου γεγραφότων ἀλλήλοις ἀσύμφωνα καὶ πολλοὺς καὶ τερατώδεις λόγους καταβεβλημένων, δυσχερές ἐστιν ὑπὲρ τῆς γενέσεως τοῦ θεοῦ τούτου καὶ τῶν πράξεων καθαρῶς εἰπεῖν. οἱ μὲν γὰρ ἕνα Διόνυσον, οἱ δὲ τρεῖς γεγονέναι παραδεδώκασιν, εἰσὶ δ᾽ οἱ γένεσιν μὲν τούτου ἀνθρωπόμορφον μὴ γεγονέναι τὸ παράπαν ἀποφαινόμενοι, τὴν δὲ τοῦ οἴνου δόσιν Διόνυσον εἶναι νομίζοντες.

The ancient mythographers and poets wrote things about Dionysos which are at odds with one another, and they put forth many stories filled with marvels. Thus, it is difficult to neatly discuss the origin of this god and his deeds. Some have handed down the story that that there is one Dionysos, others three; and there are some who relate that his origin was not anthropomorphic at all, supposing that the gift of wine is equivalent to Dionysos. (Bibliotheca Historia 3.62)

In attempting to write what he considers to be an encyclopedic history of the world,

Diodorus nonetheless freely admits the impossibility of crafting a unified story about the origins of Dionysos. Apart from the various mythic accounts (several of which we have seen above), a more practical account has also begun to to take hold by Roman times.

This story holds that Dionysos is in fact wine itself, and then goes on to explain some of his epithets and traits as simple allegories for wine and the production thereof. For instance, as Diodorus relates in the passage following the one quoted above, he is

68 See Graf and Johnston (2007).

54 known as διμήτωρ (“having two mothers”) not because he was borne by Semele and then Zeus but because the grape-seed itself has two births, the first when it is placed into the ground and the second when it sprouts. Similar explanations harmonize nearly all of the important features of Dionysian mythology with the life-cycle of the grape, the vine, and wine.

Another complicating factor as the Greeks tried to ascertain just where Dionysos came from was their awareness of the fact that a plethora of other cultures also had a god of wine, a god who often shared a sizable number of traits with Dionysos. This was nothing unusual, for the Greeks were used to comparing and contrasting the members of their pantheon with that of other cultures. However, given the pervasive idea that

Dionysos had a foreign origin, such comparison took on an added importance in his case, since the Greeks also believed that such gods may not simply be analogs of Dionysos but also forebears. One such point of possible comparison swirled around the Thracian god of wine and revelry Bacchus Bromios, who in turn drew his name from the Lydian god

Bacchus, also a god of wine.69 The tangency of this god with Dionysos is reinforced by the fact that Bacchus came to be a commonly-accepted surname of Dionysos, lending its name to the carousals undertaken in his honor. Thus, it was not unusual in ancient

Greece to associate Dionysos with Thrace70 and with the East (Asia Minor first and foremost). In fact, the introduction of Euripides' Bacchae takes this historical path for granted:

69 See Seltman (1957) 24ff. and 62 for a discussion of this process. 70 In the passage quoted above from the Iliad (6.130-37), the king who drives Dionysos's maenads into the sea- Lycurgus- is king of Thrace. Thrace is also associated with wine in Homer: see Iliad 9.72.

55 λιπὼν δὲ Λυδῶν τοὺς πολυχρύσους γύας Φρυγῶν τε, Περσῶν θ᾽ ἡλιοβλήτους πλάκας Βάκτριά τε τείχη τήν τε δύσχιμον χθόνα Μήδων ἐπελθὼν Ἀραβίαν τ᾽ εὐδαίμονα Ἀσίαν τε πᾶσαν, ἣ παρ᾽ ἁλμυρὰν ἅλα κεῖται μιγάσιν Ἕλλησι βαρβάροις θ᾽ ὁμοῦ πλήρεις ἔχουσα καλλιπυργώτους πόλεις, ἐς τήνδε πρῶτον ἦλθον Ἑλλήνων πόλιν...

Having left behind the lands of the Lydians with all their gold, And the lands of the Phrygians, and the sun-beaten fields of the Persians, Having come to the Bactrian walls and the wintry land of the Medes And blessed Arabia and all of Asia, Which lies beside the salty sea and has cities With beautiful towers which are full Of Greeks and barbarians mixed together, I came first to this city of all the cities of the Greeks... (Bacchae 13-20)

Euripides charts a course for Dionysos from the far East, through the entire Persian

Empire and Arabia before arriving in Asia Minor.71 However, regardless of Dionysos's putative connections with the far East and India, such a myth is ultimately built on the belief that Dionysos's arrival into Greece was from the immediate neighbors of the

Greeks to the east, the Lydians and Phrygians. The connection between Bacchus the

Lydian god and Dionysos Bacchus was not taken lightly.

Yet if Dionysos was indeed a foreign god, the East did not have undisputed claim to his origins. If the connection between Dionysos and Lydian Bacchus was compelling to some, so also was the connection between Dionysos and Egyptian Osiris. This god shared a number of traits with Dionysos, leading inquirers such as Herodotus to equate

71 India was among the nations commonly rumored to be the home of Dionysos. See Plutarch, Aqua an ignis utilior 7, which likely bases its belief that “the sea brought the Greeks the vine from India” on this piece of mythology.

56 the two in an instance of interpretatio Graeca (that is, the process of equating foreign gods with Greek ones). Herodotus notes an intrinsic Egyptian connection in Dionysian mythology:

νῦν δὲ Διόνυσόν τε λέγουσι οἱ Ἕλληνες ὡς αὐτίκα γενόμενον ἐς τὸν μηρὸν ἐνερράψατο Ζεὺς καὶ ἤνεικε ἐς Νύσαν τὴν ὑπὲρ Αἰγύπτου ἐοῦσαν ἐν τῇ Αἰθιοπίῃ...

Now the Greeks say that as soon as he was born, Zeus sewed Dionysos into his thigh and took him to Nysa, which is above Egypt in Ethiopia... (Histories, 2.145)

Yet Herodotus was not a blind believer in myths, but rather a rationalist. For Herodotus, the fact that the Egyptians claimed to have “certain knowledge” that Dionysos (that is,

Osiris) was fifteen thousand years old was a problem, for the Greeks considered him to be the “youngest of the gods”, less than sixteen hundred years old at the time of

Herodotus. Desiring to reconcile the Egyptian and Greek accounts, Herodotus posited the following theory about the origins of both Dionysos and another god, Pan:

δῆλά μοι γέγονε ὅτι ὕστερον ἐπύθοντο οἱ Ἕλληνες τούτων τὰ οὐνόματα ἢ τὰ τῶν ἄλλων θεῶν: ἀπ᾽ οὗ δὲ ἐπύθοντο χρόνου, ἀπὸ τούτου γενεηλογέουσι αὐτῶν τὴν γένεσιν.

Thus it has become clear to me that the Greeks learned the names of these individuals later than the other gods: they reckon their birth from the time when they themselves learned of them. (Histories, 2.145)

Herodotus, therefore, believed that Dionysos was of Egyptian origin, and was borrowed by the Greeks into their pantheon sometime around 2000 BCE.

This brief foray into the thinking of the ancients on the origins of Dionysos should convince us that a search for the “true account” is likely futile. Given that classical

57 authors themselves either propound competing theories (as do the contemporaries

Euripides and Herodotus) or disclaim certain knowledge (like Diodorus), it seems that we can hardly claim a better vantage point from where we stand.72 Yet ultimately, that need not thwart our purposes for this study. After all, we are less interested here in ascertaining the “real story” behind Dionysos than in sifting through the legends and narratives of the Greeks to determine what, if anything, they can tell us about the origins of wine. What, then, can these conflicting stories tell us?

Given Dionysos's long-standing association with wine in Greek culture and the antiquity of many of the myths surrounding him, we can claim fairly reasonably that these myths represent the Greeks' earliest recorded cultural narratives about the origins of wine. In other words, these myths reveal what the Greeks themselves would have likely told us about the origins of wine in Greece if we could interview them. If this is the case, we would have received different responses: some would think that wine and its attendant culture came from the east, others from the south, and still others that it was autochthonous. Where does this leave us? It seems that we have two options for interpreting this state of affairs. First, we can throw our hands up and say that these myths must simply reflect entirely made-up tales, thus explaining their lack of coherence. Second, we can claim that these myths, handed down from older

72 This has not stopped modern scholars from trying. Most draw Dionysos's origins from Thrace and ultimately from Asia Minor; in addition to Seltman (1957), see also Hyams (1965) and Unwin (1991). Billiard (1913) 34 suggests that Dionysos was originally an Indo-European god, noting connections to Sanskrit mythology. Meanwhile, Kerenyi (1976) presents a large amount of evidence indicating that Dionysos was originally from Crete. Younger (1966) creatively attempts to weave many of these accounts together, saying that Dionysos may originally have been an Aegean god, only to go into exile to the east and come back in the form of Dionysos Bacchus.

58 generations who stood to have actual knowledge of the origins of wine in Greece, reflect the actual truth of the situation in some way. But upon careful consideration, the consequences are not so different if we privilege one of these premises over the other. If we take the latter option, we would clearly posit that wine and its culture likely contain both a native and a foreign element. In other words, the lack of harmony among the myths about Dionysos would in fact be revealed to represent a diversity of origins for wine in Greece. Yet if we take the first option—the one that involves us calling the mythology entirely fictitious—we still must account for the presence of the myths by positing that the Greeks who crafted them had it in mind that the wine-god and his wine were associated of old with various locales. In both cases, we are left with this conclusion: the stories surrounding Dionysos indicate that wine and its attendant culture were not introduced once into Greece or from a clear direction. Rather, wine was in some way present in Greece from time immemorial, but knowledge and tradition concerning it were carried to Greece from the older, more advanced wine-drinking civilizations to the south and east.

Such a conclusion helps to explain the schizophrenia on the part of the Greeks about the origins of their wine-god (and indeed of their wine). Wine and wine culture are two very different things, but Dionysos is alternately associated with each. In some traditions, Dionysos actually introduces the Greeks to the fruit of the vine, while in others he is simply the agent through which the Greeks learn to manage and respect its dangerous powers. This dichotomy can be seen by examining two myths involving

59 Dionysos and the origins of wine.73 The first, involving a man named Ikarios living in the times of King Pandion of Athens, goes as follows:

ἀλλὰ Δήμητρα μὲν Κελεὸς εἰς τὴν Ἐλευσῖνα ὑπεδέξατο, Διόνυσον δὲ Ἰκάριος: ὃς λαμβάνει παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ κλῆμα ἀμπέλου καὶ τὰ περὶ τὴν οἰνοποιίαν μανθάνει. καὶ τὰς τοῦ θεοῦ δωρήσασθαι θέλων χάριτας ἀνθρώποις, ἀφικνεῖται πρός τινας ποιμένας, οἳ γευσάμενοι τοῦ ποτοῦ καὶ χωρὶς ὕδατος δι᾽ ἡδονὴν ἀφειδῶς ἑλκύσαντες, πεφαρμάχθαι νομίζοντες ἀπέκτειναν αὐτόν.

But Keleos received Demeter into Eleusis, and Ikarios received Dionysos. He received from him a branch of a vine and learned from him what there was to know about making wine. And, wishing the gifts of the god to be given to mankind, he went to certain shepherds, who tasted the drink. They drank it unsparingly without water because they liked it so much, but they thought that they had been drugged and so they killed him. (Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, 3.14.7)

In this story, we see that Dionysos represents the raw, untamed gift of the vine and wine.

The god gives the gift of the grape and basic information on how to make it, but does not also transmit information on its intoxicating power or cultural norms on how this power should be contained. As a result, confusion results and Ikarios is killed.74 Yet in another story, Dionysos specifically transmits not wine but wine culture to a group of

Greeks:

Φιλόχορος δέ φησιν Ἀμφικτύονα τὸν Ἀθηναίων βασιλέα μαθόντα παρὰ Διονύσου τὴν τοῦ οἴνου κρᾶσιν πρῶτον κεράσαι. διὸ καὶ ὀρθοὺς γενέσθαι τοὺς ἀνθρώπους οὕτω πίνοντας, πρότερον ὑπὸ τοῦ ἀκράτου καμπτομένους [....] θέσμιον ἔθετο προσφέρεσθαι μετὰ τὰ σιτία ἄκρατον μόνον ὅσον γεύσασθαι, δεῖγμα τῆς δυνάμεως τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ θεοῦ, τὸ δὲ λοιπὸν ἤδη κεκραμένον, ὁπόσον ἕκαστος βούλεται: προσεπιλέγειν δὲ τούτῳ τὸ τοῦ Διὸς σωτῆρος ὄνομα διδαχῆς καὶ μνήμης ἕνεκα τῶν πινόντων, ὅτι οὕτω πίνοντες ἀσφαλῶς σωθήσονται.

73 See Detienne (1989) 27-41 for a summary of these and other relevant myths. 74 Subsequently, Ikarios's daughter Erigone hangs herself in grief and curses Athens, causing other Athenian maidens to also hang themselves. This series of events was commemorated every year in Athens and elsewhere in Greece by the festival known as the Anthesteria, a wine festival which conveyed the danger of the incorrect use of wine.

60 Philochoros says that Amphictyon, the king of the Athenians, learned from Dionysos the art of mixing wine [with water] and was the first to mix it. And so the men drinking it in this way became upright, since before they had been bent over by the unmixed wine [….] He also instituted the custom of taking just a sip of unmixed wine before a meal as a display of the power of the good god; afterwards, each person could drink as much mixed wine as he wanted. Additionally, he instituted the custom of saying over the wine the name of Zeus the savior as a way of teaching and reminding those drinking in this way that they would surely be safe. (Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 2.38)

The ancient Greeks were drinkers of mixed wine—that is to say, wine mixed with water to reduce its potency. This aspect of wine culture was particularly important to the

Greeks, and they viewed the drinking of unmixed wine as reckless and even barbaric.75

Yet these stories reveal that the Greeks envisioned a time in the distant past when they did not drink wine mixed. The boundaries of this time were represented in Greek thought by two visits from Dionysos: the first to bring knowledge of wine and the vine, and the second to deliver important cultural knowledge on how to make use of the these gifts.76 Thus, we see that Dionysos in fact performs more than one function with regard to the origins of wine and its use in Greek society.

The importance to the Greeks of this distinction between wine itself and its attendant culture cannot be understated. The Greeks were aware that many peoples who lived off in the hinterlands—that is to say, barbarians—had access to wine, but

75 See Athenaeus Deipnosophists 10.427-28 for a discussion of the customs in various Greek cities surrounding the mixing of water with wine, including the story of the Spartan king Cleomenes being driven mad by drinking unmixed wine. Drinking such wine is associate with the Scythians, a stereotypical group of barbarians. 76 To speak precisely, these myths have issues of continuity: Amphictyon is said to have reigned several decades before Pandion. Yet such technicalities seem not to have bothered the Greeks, and so they will not bother us.

61 these unpolished drinkers were distinguished from the Greeks by their (subjectively) improper use of it, or by their lack of knowledge about how to manage its effects wisely and with social grace.77 The importance of this distinction can be seen as early as the

Odyssey, where in Book 9 Odysseus visits the island of the Cyclops. We are informed that the vine can be found here in abundance:

ἀλλὰ τά γ᾽ ἄσπαρτα καὶ ἀνήροτα πάντα φύονται, πυροὶ καὶ κριθαὶ ἠδ᾽ ἄμπελοι, αἵ τε φέρουσιν οἶνον ἐριστάφυλον, καί σφιν Διὸς ὄμβρος ἀέξει.

But everything grows unsown and unplowed, Wheat and barley and even vines, which bear Wine made from fine grapes, and the rain of Zeus makes them grow. (Odyssey 9.109-11)

It is clear that Dionysos the vine-giver has visited this land.78 Yet the denouement of the plot indicates that Dionysos the giver of wine-culture has not yet arrived: when

Odysseus gives the Cyclops some wine he brought with him, the Cyclops drinks recklessly and heedlessly, leading to his downfall. Much like in the story of Ikarios above, the gift of wine alone—without the attendant wisdom of how to use it—leads to a disaster. And once again, one sign of such civilization is the mixing of wine with water—

77 Athenaeus Deipnosophists 10.432: “The Scythians and Thracians entirely make use of unmixed wine, the women and everyone. They pour it on their clothes and think that they're observing a noble and wise practice.” 78 In later mythology, this seems to change: in Euripides' Cyclops (late 5th century BCE), it is explicitly stated that the inhabitants of the island do not possess wine (123-24), with the implication that there are also no vines. This may be part of a wholesale change in Dionysian mythology with the passing of time, with emphasis increasingly on his status as the bringer of wine and less so as the bringer of wine culture. In Nonnus's Dionysiaca, thought to have been written in the 4th century CE, two different stories are given (Book 12) as to the origins of wine; both envision Dionysos as bringer of wine and the vine (although it is perhaps worth noting that in one of them Dionysos does not introduce the vine to Greece but rather tames one which is already present, albeit wild).

62 that is, its dilution so that one may drink without easily becoming drunk.79

Thus, it is clear that the Greeks kept quite distinct the possession of wine and the vine on the one hand and the accompanying culture which allowed a society to make wise use of it on the other. It is also clear that Dionysos can represent one or both of these. This, then, is the best answer to our riddle about the conflicting origins of

Dionysos in Greek mythology. If he is both autochthonous and foreign, it is because the

Greek experience with wine was both autochthonous and foreign. As a raw beverage prepared from a plant which had grown in Greece since time immemorial, wine was indeed autochthonous to Greece. However, knowledge on how best to prepare it and wisdom on how best to use it can be described as foreign, having come from the south or the east. Thus, the confusing nature of Dionysian mythology may well represent a historical situation which, as we will see in other chapters, is corroborated by other evidence.

The Symposium

Another important aspect of wine culture in ancient Greece was the custom of the symposium. A symposium, from a Greek term meaning “a drinking together”, came by classical times to be a feast where adult males would eat food, drink wine, play games, sing, and talk about all manner of things important to them.80 The symposium was memorialized (and dramatized) by classical authors such as Plato and Xenophon, but

79 Mixing wine with various foreign elements was common in the ancient civilized world; resin was a particularly common additive. See McGovern (2003) 70 ff. 80 Literature on the Greek symposium includes Dentzer (1982), Vetta (1983), Murray (1990) and (1995), Hitchcock et al (2008), and Lopez-Ruiz (2012).

63 it can be traced through Greek literature to an earlier time: in fact, the lyric poet

Alcaeus, writing near the end of the 7th century BCE, is our first literary attestation of this practice in Greece. Yet if we are willing to stretch the meaning of the term “symposium” a bit, we can make the case that symposia are recorded from the time of Homer.81 In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, we find recorded for us a number of social events involving many of the same ingredients as the symposium of classical times, namely food, wine, and conversations of some social importance, including the recitation of poetry. In the Iliad, these often amount to councils of war on the plains of Troy; in the

Odyssey, they oftentimes represent welcoming banquets for a traveling hero, or else simply the daily feasts of the suitors in the house of Odysseus. As gatherings comprised of individuals oftentimes inimical to each other, symposia also represent a locus of intrigue, as seen by Agamemnon's description of the role a symposium played in his death (Odyssey 11) or Odysseus's use of a symposium to bring about the destruction of the suitors (Odyssey 22).82 The symposium is thus portrayed in Homer as a central feature of aristocratic life, providing the opportunity for both sustenance and for politics.

The lower classes may well have had their own modest symposia, of course, but of these we can only surmise.

Why do these symposia matter as we attempt to trace the origins of wine in

81 See Della Bianca and Beta (2000) 27-40 for a discussion of the symposium in Homer. He chooses to refer to such events in Homer as “pre-symposia”. All the same, later Greeks felt no compunction about using the term “symposium” to refer to Homeric feasts; see Athenaeus Deipnosophists 5.186 (“We will now talk about the Homeric symposia...”). Hitchcock et al (2008) contains a wide-ranging discussion of 'symposia' (or at any rate, feasts) in the Bronze Age. 82 See Lopez-Ruiz (2012) for a full discussion.

64 Greece? There are a couple of answers to this question. First, like the mixing of wine with water, they represent the efforts of a culture to accommodate wine and to mitigate its socially deleterious effects. The symposium provided a “safe haven” for the consumption of wine, representing a social milieu which proscribed (and prescribed) both action and behavior.83 As such, it serves as a step away from barbarian practices; and, as we have already seen (and will see further in subsequent chapters), such

“civilizing” influence is likely to come from older cultures to the south and east. Second, as just anticipated, symposia which are fairly similar to those conducted in archaic and classical Greece are indeed known to have taken place in Near Eastern cultures, both

Mesopotamian and Egyptian. Thus, linking the two practices—the Near Eastern symposium and the Greek symposium—will be important as we trace wine back in time.

For the purposes of this chapter, however, it is enough to have touched upon the presence and basic features of symposia in the earliest Greek literature. As further (and more substantial) evidence for symposia comes from Near Eastern literature and, most importantly, from material evidence such as the artistic representations of symposia as well as archaeological finds which pertain to the custom, we will discuss this topic further in later chapters.

Conclusions on Greek Literature

We have thus examined from a number of angles the question of what we can know (or infer) from Greek literature about the origins of wine, both in Greece and

83 Pantel (1995) 101 makes the connection between such “secular” ritual activity and religious rituals as a way of “licensing” the drinking of wine. See also Kircher (1970).

65 ultimately. To summarize, we can say the following: wine is present as far back as we can go in Greek literature (even to Mycenaean times), and there is no indication that it is a

“new” beverage even at that ancient date. Myths surrounding the origins of wine in

Greece lack harmony, but when taken together they seem to indicate that, while the vine and the basic presence of wine may have been in Greece for a very long time, elements of culture associated with wine-drinking came to Greece at a somewhat later date from the older civilizations to the south or east. Just how long ago this was may be unrecoverable to us; one of our only clues is the fact (as mentioned by Herodotus) that

Dionysos was thought to be born sometime around 2000 BCE, and even this must of course be taken not as an actual “birthdate” but rather as a mythic indication of wine's long-standing (but not too long-standing) presence in Greek society. With regards to the question of wine's ultimate origins, the fact that older cultures had a more developed wine culture to transmit to Greece in the first place guarantees that they also had wine at a very early date; and thus, it is to the south and east that we will want to turn as we look for the birth of wine and its attendant culture.

Latin Literature

Yet before we close this chapter on evidence from classical literature, we must turn in a different direction and examine that other great corpus of ancient

Mediterranean writings, the body of literature written in Latin. Latin was originally the language of a small tribe or group of tribes living in central Italy, well to the west of

Greece;84 and so, in view of what we have seen above, one can note that by removing 84 See Cornell (1995).

66 our focus from Greece westward we are also retreating further away from those lands from which wine culture appears to have reached Greece. In doing so, we are also retreating further away from the founts of civilization, and the literature we have in Latin

(and indeed, from Italy in general) is correspondingly later than that attested in Greece.

In fact, some of our earliest literary records concerning Italy are not in Latin but in Greek, since the Greeks colonized southern Italy (particularly the island of Sicily) from the 8th century BCE.85 The Phoenicians, too, had colonies in this area. Together, the Greeks and the Phoenicians did much to bring the elements of civilization to Italy, and among these elements was the knowledge of how to make wine and how to drink it in a socially responsible manner. Apart from such eastern influence in southern Italy, culture also flowed outward from the land of the Etruscans, located in modern-day northern Italy.

The Etruscans, a somewhat mysterious people, seem also to have drunk wine, as might be expected from their trade links with Greece and the east.86 (In fact, they likely first received the rudiments of wine culture from the Phoenicians.) Thus, wine culture flowed into Italy from two points of entry: Sicily and the southern Italian peninsula on the one hand, and Etruria at the head of the Adriatic on the other.87

85 See Ridgway (1993) and Boardman (1999). 86 Although the Etruscans were literate, they left us very little of substance in writing. Thus, much of what we know about them comes from material evidence, and will be introduced in the appropriate chapter. For works on the Etruscans and their language, see Pallottino (1939), Grant (1980), and Bonfante and Bonfante (2002). 87 Scholars tend to favor the Etruscan north over the Greek south as the direction from which the first elements of wine culture arrived in central Italy. While Seltman (1957) 152 does not find it necessary to choose one over the other, Younger (1966) 152-53 suggests that while the Etruscans laid the foundations for Italian viticulture, the Greek south soon took the lead. Johnson (1989) 59 says much the same thing, but Hyams (1965) 94 and Phillips (2000) 33 give clearer priority to the Etruscans.

67 Wine in the Latin Language

Before examining the relevant literature, we will briefly take note of the variety of wine vocabulary in the Latin language. A glance at any Latin dictionary will show that, much like in the Greek language, many of the terms connected to this beverage all stem from a single root. In Latin, this root is vīn-, and from it is built a number of words: vīnum, the unmarked and most common word for wine;88 vīnea, a word meaning

“vineyard” or “vine”; vīnētum, another word meaning “vineyard”; and the list goes on, with the vīn- root building a large number of compounds just as the corresponding οἶν- root does in Greek. Also attested is the term vītis, meaning “vine” or “vine branch”. This term, which gives its name to the modern-day genus vitis in which is found the wine- grape vinifera (“wine-bearing”), patently seems connected to the vīn- root, but the precise connection is not immediately obvious. This question will be revisited in the chapter on linguistics.

There are but a few other words worth noting. The generic Latin word for “grape” is ūva, and requires little further discussion. As for other words relating to the product of the vine, one should note mustum, which is used to refer to grape juice or unfermented wine. This latter word may have originally meant simply “fresh” or “new”, and the

Oxford Latin Dictonary lists such an adjective.89 In any case, these two words are naturally unrelated to the primary root in vīn-, and need not concern us too much.

88 Pliny (Naturalis Historia 14.14) makes note of what he calls an archaic word for wine, tēmētum. However, the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1982) 1912 defines this term simply as “any intoxicating liquor, strong drink”, citing several authors such as Plautus and Cicero. 89 Oxford Latin Dictionary (1982) 1149.

68 Wine in Early Italy

We now return to a discussion of the relevant literature. Several authors writing in Latin are noteworthy for the treatises they wrote about wine and winemaking. The first was Cato the Elder, whose work De Agri Cultura from the 2nd century BCE represents an early how-to guide on growing grapes and making wine. This early Roman treatise on wine-making was based on the work (now lost) of a Carthaginian named Mago, whose knowledge was considered so useful by the Romans that the treatise containing it was saved from the sack of Carthage and translated into Latin.90 About a century later, the author Varro gave similar details in his Rerum Rusticarum. Finally, Columella, a century later still, treated the subject yet again in his De Re Rustica. Yet if we are to look for commentary on the origins of wine in Italy, we must look beyond these authors who were more specifically concerned with the pragmatics of how to grow and tend vines and prepare wine. Specifically, we must look to Pliny the Elder, whose work Naturalis

Historia of the late 1st century CE gives an indication of what Romans of the classical period thought about the origins and antiquity of wine in Italy. He relates that there was no native Italian vintage worth speaking of until the 600th year of the city—that is to say,

153 BCE, around the time of the conclusion of the Punic Wars and the beginning of

Rome's growth as a cosmopolitan power. As to the status of wine in the ancient history of the city, Pliny says:

Romulum lacte, non vino, libasse indicio sunt sacra ab eo instituta, quae hodie custodiunt morem. Numae regis postumia lex est: "vino rogum ne respargito." quod sanxisse illum propter inopiam rei nemo dubitet. 90 See Johnson (1989) 61.

69 The fact that Romulus poured libations with milk and not with wine is evidenced by the rites instituted by him and which even today maintain that custom. The Postumian Law of King Numa is as follows: “Let the funeral pyre not be sprinkled with wine.” No one doubts that he sanctioned this law because of the scarcity of the stuff [sc. wine]. Naturalis Historia, 14.28

Pliny cites two traditions involving the earliest (likely mythological) kings of the city, dated to the 8th century BCE. Whether the kings actually lived or not is hardly relevant for our purposes; after all, the fact that these traditions were passed down from ancient times seems to indicate precisely what Pliny and others believed, namely that wine was scarce in ancient Rome.91 This implies, at the very least, that the vine was not grown in the immediate neighborhood of Rome, and that wine had to be imported from north or south.

Naturally, we have more literary information about the Greek south than the

Etruscan north, and so it is that direction in which we will turn. As already mentioned,

Greeks arrived in southern Italy beginning in the 8th century BCE, and it is certain that they brought with them the elements of wine culture already possessed by the Greeks, beginning with the basic knowledge of how to grow the vine and make wine. They soon found that Sicily and southern Italy were an ideal climate for winemaking, and the region came to be known as Οἰνωτρία (Oinotria), “vineland” (or “wineland”). Whether the

Greeks found vines present and cultivated them or simply brought vines from Greece is a debated question, even up to modern times. The ancient story, as told here by

91 As Hyams (1965) 95 says, “Romulus is thought to have been a legendary character, but that does not matter: for Romulus read 'the earliest Roman government....'” Milk was not an entirely unusual libation in the ancient world, but its general use as noted here would be somewhat unusual.

70 Dionysus of Halicarnassus, is as follows:

πρῶτοι γὰρ Ἑλλήνων οὗτοι περαιωθέντες τὸν Ἰόνιον κόλπον ᾤκησαν Ἰταλίαν, ἄγοντος αὐτοὺς Οἰνώτρου τοῦ Λυκάονος […] εὑρὼν δὲ χώραν πολλὴν μὲν εἰς νομάς, πολλὴν δὲ εἰς ἀρότους εὔθετον, ἔρημον δὲ τὴν πλείστην καὶ οὐδὲ τὴν οἰκουμένην πολυάνθρωπον, ἀνακαθήρας τὸ βάρβαρον ἐκ μέρους τινὸς αὐτῆς ᾤκισε πόλεις μικρὰς καὶ συνεχεῖς ἐπὶ τοῖς ὄρεσιν, ὅσπερ ἦν τοῖς παλαιοῖς τρόπος οἰκήσεως συνήθης. ἐκαλεῖτο δὲ ἥ τε χώρα πᾶσα πολλὴ οὖσα ὅσην κατέσχεν Οἰνωτρία, καὶ οἱ ἄνθρωποι πάντες ὅσων ἦρξεν Οἴνωτροι.

These Greeks, with Oinotros the son of Lycaon leading them, were the first to cross the Ionian Gulf and colonize Italy […] And they found plenty of grazing-land, and also plenty of land suitable for plowing, although the land was mostly empty and largely uninhabited by men. And after they cleared a certain part of it of barbarian influence, they founded small cities close together on the mountains, which was the custom of founding cities for the ancients. The whole land, which was large, was called Oinotria, however much it encompassed; and all the men he ruled were called Oinotroi. (Bibliotheca Historia 1.11-12)

Whether we believe or not that the land of Oinotria was named after an eponymous founder rather than its reputation for producing wine, this account preserves some details about the ancients' attitude toward the origins of wine in Sicily. First, the association of Sicily with wine stretches far back indeed, such that a mythical founder

“Oinotros” (whose name itself naturally carries connotations of wine) is hardly unthinkable. Second, the Greeks envisioned the natives of the area to be barbarians; when they arrived, the Greeks found a land suitable for agriculture yet unplowed by the locals.92 Thus, the story among Greeks and Romans of the classical Roman era (when

Dionysus of Halicarnassus wrote) seems to have been that southern Italy contained at the very least no tended vines, and perhaps no vines at all. In any case, wine production

92 The Cyclops story would later come to be set in prehistoric Sicily. As Sicily was considered in classical times to be without vines before the coming of the Greeks, so later versions of the Cyclops story (as mentioned above) remove all reference to the vines which are mentioned in the Odyssey.

71 began only upon the arrival of the Greek colonists to the area, with their knowledge of winemaking and perhaps even their vines.

Yet despite the lack of wine production in early Italy and the attendant scarcity of the product, we should not make the mistake of thinking that wine was of no importance to the archaic Romans (and, presumably, to other peoples of the area). We have already seen that the Romans who lived in the era of Rome's semi-mythological early kings (an era traditionally dated to 753-509 BCE) were said to possess some wine, even if just enough to use when necessary. The abundance and variety of terms made from the vīn- root likewise attest to wine's importance and relevance to those speaking the Latin language at a fairly early date.93 Additionally, wine had its own mythological accoutrements in early Rome, quite apart from the cult of Dionysos/Bacchus which would take root with the intensification of Greek influence in the 3rd and 2nd centuries

BCE.94 In fact, as already noted, the Romans credited various other figures with early vine-planting or even with discovering the vine:

Quin etiam veterum effigies ex ordine avorum antiqua e cedro, Italusque paterque Sabinus vitisator, curvam servans sub imagine falcem, Saturnusque senex Ianique bifrontis imago vestibulo astabant, aliique ab origine reges...

Indeed, images from the order of ancient ancestors Made from aged cedar stood in the vestibule, Italus, and father Sabinus the Vine-planter, holding a curved sickle

93 See the Oxford Latin Dictionary (1982) 2067. Many of the terms involving wine can be traced to inscriptions, some relatively ancient. 94 The well-known Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, a decree handed down in 186 BCE, represents a watershed moment in the growth and history of the Bacchus cult at Rome. For an excellent history of this growth, see Bruhl (1953).

72 Beneath his image, and old Saturn, and the image Of two-faced Janus, and other kings from the beginning... (Aeneid 7.177-181)

While discussing various ancient figures (human and divine) which could be seen carved in the palace of King Latinus, Virgil notes almost in passing that of “Sabinus the Vine- planter”. Ennius mentions yet another such figure:

His erat in ore 'Bromius', his 'Bacchus pater', Illis 'Lyaeus vitis inventor sacrae'...

In the mouth of some was 'Bromius', others 'Father Bacchus'; Others 'Lyaeus, discoverer of the sacred vine'... (Tragedy fragment 128-129)

Although the context is not entirely clear due to the fragmentary nature of the text, it seems that various people in the poem are mentioning figures associated with the origins of wine. Next to Bromius and Bacchus (whether these are meant to be separate figures or not is difficult to say) is placed “Lyaeus, discoverer of the sacred vine”.

Untangling these lines of mythology is difficult, but we can say one thing with certainty: there were a number of seemingly ancient stories in Rome about the coming of the vine

(and, one assumes, of wine) to Rome. Cultures rarely form multiple narratives about things of no importance, and as such it is clear that a relative absence of wine in archaic

Rome cannot and should not be equated to a lack of social cache possessed by the beverage.

Thus, when summing up what we can know from literature about the origins of wine in Italy and specifically in Roman society, we can say this: although the time and place of the intensification of winemaking in Italy seem reasonably certain (that is, Sicily

73 and the south from the 8th century BCE on), we still must admit a certain amount of uncertainty about exactly when the inhabitants of central Italy began to import it, or even to grow it themselves. The extent to which the Etruscans were involved, in particular, is difficult to gauge, although it seems prudent to grant to them the earliest influence on the inhabitants of central Italy. Yet the Romans seem to remember no time when they were unaware of wine or when they had absolutely no access to it, and the evidence we have examined seems to back this up. In fact, it seems that we can claim that wine was a fairly important beverage in early Roman culture, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) its scarcity. Thus, the evidence from literature allows us to place no terminus post quem on the introduction of wine into the Italian consciousness.

Wine in the West

Finally, before we close this chapter on the contribution of Greco-Roman literature to the question of the origins of wine, we will briefly mention what we can learn from literature about the presence of wine in the far western Mediterranean— specifically, modern-day France, Spain, and North Africa.95 By the era of classical Rome, it is certain that all of these areas had the vine and were growing at least some wine;

Spain, in particular, was rapidly becoming a primary region for wine-production. Yet all of this is not surprising, for these areas had been in the process of being colonized, invaded, or ruled by peoples from the east for centuries. The Greeks founded a colony at

Marseilles on the Mediterranean coast of France around 600 BCE, and we may assume

95 Most general histories of wine include a section on the origins of wine in France and Spain. See Allen (1961) 136-154, Hyams (1965) 133-168, Younger (1966) 159-163, and Johnson (1989) 82-97.

74 that they brought the vine with them (if they did not find it already there). Meanwhile,

Phoenicians (both from Tyre and later Carthage) were founding cities in Spain, and we may assume the same about their own possession of wine and the vine. Carthage itself was located on the North African coast, and as a colony of Tyre, a city awash in wine from an early date (see the next chapter), we must believe that the North African coast was also a locus for winemaking from an early date. Thus, the western Mediterranean likely acquired wine culture by a direct ingrafting from civilizations further to the east.

Whether this region already possessed the vine or not must, of course, be answered by other means (as we will do in the chapter on material evidence).

Roman literature of the classical age does, however, give us a window into the haves and have-nots of the wine world around the 1st centuries BCE and CE. According to

Diodorus Siculus, the Gauls did not produce wine, but drank quite a bit of it nonetheless:

διὰ δὲ τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τοῦ ψύχους διαφθειρομένης τῆς κατὰ τὸν ἀέρα κράσεως οὔτ᾽ οἶνον οὔτ᾽ ἔλαιον φέρει: διόπερ τῶν Γαλατῶν οἱ τούτων τῶν καρπῶν στερισκόμενοι πόμα κατασκευάζουσιν ἐκ τῆς κριθῆς τὸ προσαγορευόμενον ζῦθος, καὶ τὰ κηρία πλύνοντες τῷ τούτων ἀποπλύματι χρῶνται. κάτοινοι δ᾽ ὄντες καθ᾽ ὑπερβολὴν τὸν εἰσαγόμενον ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμπόρων οἶνον ἄκρατον ἐμφοροῦνται...

On account of the excess of cold weather and the poor mixing of the air, [the land] bears neither wine nor olive; for this reason, those of the Gauls who are deprived of these fruits make a barley drink called “zythos”, and they rinse out honeycombs and make use of the liquid gained thence. But they are great lovers of wine, and they drink unmixed the wine which is brought into their country by merchants.... (Bibliotheca Historia 5.26)

Diodorus goes on to recount the revelry which ensues, and the great price the Gauls are willing to pay for just one jar of wine. Thus, it appears that France—or, at the very least,

75 the parts not along the southern coast—was not a winegrowing region two thousand years ago. All the same, the barbarians inhabiting these regions beyond the borders of the Roman Empire were quite fond of the drink.

Cicero remarks on the same phenomenon of the lack of viticulture in the north, but he gives a different reason:

Nos vero iustissimi homines, qui Transalpinas gentis oleam et vitem serere non sinimus, quo pluris sint nostra oliveta nostraeque vineae....

We are indeed most just in not allowing the races who live across the Alps to sow the olive and the vine, so that our own olive groves and vineyards might be worth more... (De Re Publica 3.16)

Thus, Cicero suggests that wine is not produced in these regions not for reasons of climate, but because the Roman government does not permit it. Indeed, Suetonius records that, a century and a half after Cicero, the Emperor Domitian handed down a general edict which ordered half of the vineyards in the provinces to be destroyed so as to increase Italy's share of the wine market.96 While Suetonius cryptically remarks that

Domitian was unable to achieve his goal, the fact remains nonetheless that the Romans had no compunction about preventing wine production elsewhere to stimulate the

Italian economy. In any case, we should probably attribute the lack of serious winegrowing in the north both to economic and to climatic reasons.

Conclusion

Thus, in the period of classical Rome, wine was primarily a Mediterranean phenomenon—and not just “Mediterranean”, but especially southern Mediterranean. 96 Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, Domitian, 7.

76 So our literary sources say. If we are to look for wine-growing further north, we seem unlikely to find it.97 And as we have seen, the techniques of wine-growing form only one part of a larger bequest of wine culture, or knowledge of how to make use of wine in a socially responsible way. The Gauls, who drank unmixed wine and grew correspondingly drunk, had not received wine culture, but only wine. The merchants who brought them the latter did not also give the former. The very early Romans also did not produce wine

(it seems), yet they had more self-control (and smaller amounts of wine to work with).

Still, they too lacked the fundamental elements of wine culture, the knowledge of how to produce it and the institutions like the symposium designed to control its use.98 The pre-literate Greeks, too, may well have been the same way: if we are to take seriously the mythology surrounding Dionysos, wine was present in the land of Greece before the knowledge of how to manage its potentially destructive effects.

From our survey of classical literature pertaining to the question of the origins of wine in the Western world, we can therefore see a historical pattern emerging which was followed in each region and by each civilization. In early, proto-civilized times, wine was present, but was scarce or difficult to come by. Sometimes, this may have been due to lack of presence of the vine; at other times, this may have simply been due to lack of good knowledge on how to cultivate it. Yet despite this scarcity of wine, each civilization

97 Evidence of wine-growing further north in France commences (as might be expected) after the Roman takeover in the middle of the 1st century BCE, and grows apace in the centuries thereafter (see Allen 1961 and Hyams 1965). Yet wine production does not begin in earnest until after the classical period. 98 The early Romans did have “symposia”, but these carmina convivialia were very different from Greek or Near Eastern symposia, being largely gatherings to sing “ancestor-songs”. See Coarelli 205 in Murray (1995).

77 seems or claims to have been aware of wine from nearly the beginning. As can be supposed or read in the texts, this is a reflection of the idea that wine was brought in from a foreign land (or otherwise by a god), thus making its presence known. As this process takes place, the civilization goes through what may be termed growing pains, struggling to tame the wild power inherent in wine. Mishaps occur, and regulations about its usage begin to form. Yet this situation grows more acute with the subsequent arrival of the technology to intensively grow the vine and produce wine. With more wine being produced, social controls become more necessary than ever. Fortunately, other cultures had already faced this problem, and had developed social and religious institutions to cope. Having already received wine technology from these cultures, the culture readily adopts these accoutrements. The culture has now become a mature wine society. Wine and wine culture thus move together—not because they must, but because it is easiest for all involved.

We have spent much of this chapter tracing the historical processes outlined above. Throughout it all, we have seen that wine and wine culture move consistently from east to west through the Mediterranean. When Gaul is in the primary stages of wine culture, Rome has perfected it. When Rome is in the primary stages of wine culture, Greece has perfected it. When Greece, in turn, was in the primary stages of wine culture, lands to the south and east had long since perfected it. If we are to trace wine through literature, we must continue east, and it is to these regions we now turn.

78 CHAPTER 3: NEAR EASTERN LITERATURE

In the previous chapter, we examined the testimony concerning the origins of wine which can be found in the tomes of Greek and Latin literature. Now, we continue east—and back in time—to examine the evidence from another broad corpus of literature, that of the ancient Near East. What exactly is the ancient Near East? In marked contrast from the relative continuity of the literatures of Greece and Rome, the textual artifacts from the ancient Near East encompass many different cultures and languages over a very lengthy period of time, almost three thousand years. The one thing these cultures and languages share is a geographical area roughly corresponding to modern-day Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and western Iran. It was in this region that the earliest civilizations of the western world were born, and it was only here for a long time that writing flourished until it slowly spread west and east.99

This chapter examines the varied and chronologically disparate testimony offered by the literatures of these regions on our question, namely the origins of wine. We will examine each body of literature separately, roughly in chronological order of its floruit.

The two earliest foci of writing in the region are located in Egypt on the banks of the Nile

99

For a broad overview of the history of the ancient Near East, see Kuhrt (1995). For an important early treatment of wine in the region, see Lutz (1922).

79 and in Sumer on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. Each of these cultures, whose writings are recorded by means of hieroglyphs and cuneiform, respectively, began producing writing a little bit before 3000 BCE, and they continued to do so for many centuries. In the case of Egyptian hieroglyphs, these are attested for several thousand years, only gradually dying out with the imposition of long-term foreign rule in the time of the Greek-speaking Ptolemies (330-30 BCE) and subsequently the Romans. Sumerian cuneiform did not survive quite as long, as Sumerian appears to have died out as a spoken language sometime around 2000 BCE;100 however, the cuneiform system of writing was taken up by another group, the Semitic-speaking Akkadians. These

Akkadians would produce a substantial and long-running body of literature, dating from the last centuries of the third millennium on into the era post-dating Alexander the

Great. This second wave of cuneiform-based literature includes texts produced by arguably the most dynamic of near eastern civilizations, namely the Babylonians and the

Assyrians. As it turns out, cuneiform would pass to a third culture as well: the Hittites, an

Indo-European-speaking group of Asia Minor, picked up the cuneiform system of writing from the Assyrians by around 1800 BCE and began using it to record their own language.

Hittite is attested for a shorter period of time, down to the dissolution of the Hittite

Empire around 1200 BCE, but it nonetheless provides us with an important perspective from a region located partway between Mesopotamia and the region of the Aegean.101

100 Sumerian would, however, survive as a literary language for centuries. 101 Another Anatolian language, Luvian, is also attested from a period following the fall of the Hittite Empire; its testimony on wine is briefly noted below alongside that of Hittite.

80 During the second millennium BCE, writing also came to the region of the

Levant.102 From the direction of Egypt came the impetus for the idea of an alphabet

(more properly an abjad, or an alphabet which records only consonants),103 and this form of writing was eventually adopted by cultures across the region. The earliest substantial corpus of such writing comes from Ugarit, which used cuneiform symbols to record its abjad. The texts from Ugarit, dating from the 14th to the 12th centuries BCE, include many references to wine and provide valuable testimony, even though it is somewhat later than the sources already discussed. During the next half-millennium alphabetic writing truly came into vogue across the Levant, being adopted by the city- states of Phoenicia and eventually by a small group of people living in the remote highlands of the region. Through a number of consecutive twists of fate, the extensive literature of this latter group would survive not in the sands (as did all of the testimony we have thus far mentioned) but by being handed down from generation to generation, eventually becoming codified in a work known as the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible thus represents a rare glimpse into the stories and the narratives of a Near Eastern culture not known for its power or its riches. Although dating from a period over half a millennium after the texts from Ugarit and well over two millennia after the earliest

Sumerian and Egyptian texts, the Bible provides an important additional witness for the ideas of those living in the ancient Near East about the origins of wine. While the Bible is younger than the other Near Eastern texts we will discuss, it makes up for its youth by its

102 This is not to include the outposts of Akkadian cuneiform in the region, notably the early testimony from Ebla (to be discussed below). 103 See Darnell et al (2005) and Hamilton (2006).

81 diversity of genre and perspective.

Egyptian Literature

Having introduced the various corpora we will examine in this chapter, we will begin with Egyptian literature.104 We are fortunate to have the copious hieroglyphic testimony of the presence and importance of wine and the vine in ancient Egyptian society, for if we had to trust only Herodotus we might think otherwise:

οἴνῳ δὲ ἐκ κριθέων πεποιημένῳ διαχρέωνται: οὐ γάρ σφι εἰσὶ ἐν τῇ χώρῃ ἄμπελοι.

They [the Egyptians] drink wine made from barley, for they do not have vines in that region.105 (Herodotus, Histories 2.77)

As we have seen, other Greeks knew better: even the god Dionysos was associated with

Egypt and the god Osiris (for more on whom see below), and the region was known for its wines in the Greco-Roman era. Yet if we only had the testimony of Greek or Latin literature, we would have but an inkling of the incredible importance that wine played in

Egyptian society from the time of its earliest written history two and a half millennia before the time of Herodotus until the era of that author and well beyond. The written records of ancient Egypt thus provide us with priceless information as we attempt to answer the questions of the origins of wine in Egypt and elsewhere.

Before examining the literary evidence, we will discuss the primary terminology

104 For studies on wine in ancient Egypt (and in its literature), see Poo (1995), Guasch-Jané (2008), James (1995), and Lesko (1995). For a broader history of Egyptian civilization, see van de Mieroop (2011) and (for early Egypt) Wilkinson (1999). 105 All translations of Greek and Hebrew texts are the author's own. Translations of texts from other languages belong to the individual noted.

82 which refers to wine and the vine in the language of ancient Egypt. The default (and by far the most common) term for wine in the hieroglyphs is ἰrp, which is almost certainly a native coining and may be related to the root for “to rot” (in the sense that wine is made from grapes which are allowed to rot or to ferment).106 This basic term could be modified by a plethora of adjectives to refer to different types of wine, many of which refer to the different places with which the types of wine in question were associated (see below).107

A number of other terms for wine arose later, some by metonymy; specifically, terms which originally meant “vineyard” or “grape” eventually came to mean “wine” as well.108

One of these is the term wnš (originally “grape”), which we will discuss more fully in the chapter on linguistic evidence. In any case, ἰrp remained the standard term to refer to wine. Meanwhile, the usual term for “vineyard” was k3nw/k3m(w).109 The etymology of this term is not clear, but it is plausibly connected to the Semitic term for vine(yard)

(krm/krn), perhaps suggesting a borrowing from Semitic speakers to the east in the

Levant.110

It becomes clear from a perusal of the earliest Egyptian writings that wine was not just present but also played an important part in the earliest civilizations of the Nile.

Although much of the written testimony from the era of the first few dynasties can hardly be considered “literary”, consisting primarily of lists of kings and their

106 See Poo (1995) 21. 107 See Sist (1994) 131. 108 See Poo (1995) 21-27. 109 See Poo (1995) 13. 110 See the discussion in Zamora (2000) 59. The similarity may also be explained as a common inheritance from Proto-Afro-Asiatic, the language from which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are believed to descend.

83 accomplishments, even so the importance of grape-growing and winemaking shines through. Inscriptions found in the royal tombs of kings from the 1st Dynasty mention a pair of winepresses, “the wine-press of the East in the nomes of the north” and “the wine-press of the West in the nomes of the north”.111 In the same inscription we find mention of what might be interpreted to be “a title connected with 'the royal vineyard'”.112 These very early inscriptions allow us to believe that the cultivation of the grape was already an important activity in early Egypt, so much so that the ruler was vitally concerned with it. A little bit later, during the time of the 3rd Dynasty, we find the following statement in the biography of a royal official named Methen:

Very plentiful trees and vines were set out, [and] a great quantity of wine was made therein. A vineyard was made for him, 2,000 stat of land within the wall...113 (Biography of Methen)

This passage describes a portion of the honors which were bestowed upon the faithful servant Methen. Clearly, the possession of the means to make wine was considered to be a notable honor.

We can see the cultural importance of wine in early Egypt in other ways as well.

As we noted in the chapter on classical literature, the presence of a wine-god betrays the importance that wine has in a given culture. We saw that the Greeks noted a connection between their own Dionysus and the Egyptian god Osiris, and we will see that there were good reasons for them to do so. In fact, several ancient texts from the

111 Petrie (1900) 44. 112 Petrie (1900) 44. 113 Breasted (1906) 78.

84 pyramids114—that is, from the time of the Old Kingdom, or no later than the mid-third millennium BCE—include the following commentary on Osiris:

Anubis, the counter of hearts, deducts Osiris N. from the gods who belong to the earth, (and assigns him) to the gods who are in heaven, lord of wine at the inundation.115

Behold, he is come (again) as Śȝḥ; behold, Osiris is come as Śȝḥ. lord of the wine-cellar at the Wȝg-feast.116 (Pyramid Texts)

From the time of the Old Kingdom, therefore, Osiris was envisioned as the god who presided over winemaking and wine-drinking, much as Dionysos would do in classical

Greece over two thousand years later.117 The assignation of such a god to oversee the sphere of wine in Egypt once again indicates that wine was an item of some cultural importance from an early date. Yet Osiris was not the only god associated with wine in

Egypt; there were in fact a number of others associated with this sphere of culture. In fact, Isis is even called “mistress of wine” to match Osiris.118 Thus, we can say unhesitatingly that the earliest Egyptian texts available to us betray the importance of wine in early Egyptian culture.

These literary data assure us that the origins of wine in Egypt are, at any rate, coterminous with our earliest written records. However, this does little to inform us of

114 These texts from the pyramids take the form of spells or religious observances meant to guide the dead pharaoh in the afterlife. 115 Mercer (1952) I 239. 116 Mercer (1952) I 144. 117 As the god of death, Osiris's parallel role as the god of wine could be plausibly connected to the putrefaction and decay inherent in its production. 118 Matthiae (1995) 60.

85 what the Egyptians themselves may have thought about the origins of wine in their land.

For this, we must broaden our scope and examine other texts, some of which come from a later period. Fortunately for us, the Egyptians loved to associate places with types of wine, and so we can form a good idea of the areas that the ancient Egyptians associated with winemaking. We have already seen one text which referred to the “wine-press of the East” and the “wine-press of the West”, although these locations are not very precise. Fortunately, other early texts do more to specify locations. Another text from the pyramids says,

To say four times: For N., a lifting up of the offering, four times. Two jars of wine of the North. Wine: Two bowls of the North; two jars of ‘bš; two bowls of Buto; two bowls of (wine) of ḥȝmw; two bowls of Pelusium.119 (Pyramid Texts)

Here we see a number of imprecise locations as before, but we also begin to see wine identified by specific locations such as Pelusium. This is located in the far northern region of Egypt in the area of the Delta, and Buto may also refer to Lower (that is, northern) Egypt.120 Other early sites associated with winemaking, such as Memphis, are all located in the Delta region or at least in the far north of the country.121 This is to be expected from a perspective of climate (although winemaking would drift south with time),122 but it also leads us to conclude that very early Egyptians associated wine strictly with the northern part of the country. Unlike the Greeks, the Egyptians likely had no

119 Mercer (1952) I 48. 120 See the discussion in Mercer (1952) II 36. 121 Poo (1995) 7. 122 As we will see in the chapter on material evidence, the grape does not grow well in hot and dry climates. Northern Egypt, particularly along the Mediterranean coast, would have comprised the most hospitable environment for the grapevine in the region.

86 confusion about which direction wine came from: it was originally a northern drink.

Yet we can say more than this. While the texts reveal that northern Egypt was the focus of indigenous wine production, they also show a consistent recognition of the preeminence of another region in the arts of vine-growing and wine production. This area is the Levant, located to the east and north of Egypt.123 As early as the 6th Dynasty, we find the biography of an official making mention of the vines of the Levant as it narrates an expedition into the region:

This army returned in safety, (after) it had hacked up the land of the Sand- dwellers; this army returned in safety, (after) it had destroyed the land of the Sand-dwellers; this army returned in safety, (after) it had overturned its strongholds; this army returned in safety, (after) it had cut down its figs and vines...124 (Inscription of Uni)

The produce of the land, specifically its figs and vines, are singled out for special attention. We see the same thing in the Tale of Sinuhe, a work from the 12th Dynasty

(early second millennium BCE):

It was a goodly land, named Yaa; There were figs in it, and vines; More plentiful than water was its wine... I portioned the daily bread, And wine for every day... (Tale of Sinuhe)125

Here, the Levant is singled out not just for its vines but for its copious wine.126 These

123 Political, cultural, and material connections existed between Egypt and the Levant as early as predynastic times; see Teeter (2011) 112 ff. 124 Breasted (1906) 143. 125 Breasted (1906) 238-39. 126 Our modern terminology for the region (e.g., Levant, Canaan, Israel, Palestine) postdates the Tale of Sinuhe. Yaa is an early Egyptian name for the area.

87 texts show that the grapevine and its product were firmly associated in the Egyptian mind with the region to the northeast, even at an early date. This is also good evidence, of course, that wine production was already in full swing in the Levant by the last half of the third millennium BCE.

The strong connection between wine and the Levant continued into the period of the Middle Kingdom and beyond, when tribes from the Levant known as the Hyksos invaded Egypt and settled in much of the country. Kamose, a native ruler who fought the

Hyksos, explicitly connects them with winemaking:

May your heart quake, O miserable Asiatic. See, I am drinking the wine of your (own) vineyard which the Asiatics whom I have captured (have been forced to) press for me.127 (Second Stela of Kamose)

A bit later on during the 18th Dynasty, two tombs from the reign of Thutmose IV explicitly designate the tenders of the vines depicted on the walls as 'prw, or Hapiru.128 This is a typical term for wanderers (usually of Semitic ethnicity) from the Levant, and its use here suggests that the Levant was not only known for providing wine but also for providing individuals with expertise in its production. All of this suggests that the Levant was firmly planted in the Egyptian consciousness as a wine culture par excellence, even above that of Egypt.

While wine is mentioned hundreds if not thousands of more times throughout

127 Simpson (2003) 349. 128 See Poo (1995) 10. The epithet Hapiru may be connected to the term Hebrew, which would make some sense in the context.

88 our corpus of extant Egyptian literature, this short survey demonstrates a few important points. First, Egyptian literature unquestionably attests that wine was present in the culture from an early period, dating practically to the beginning of writing in the region near the beginning of the third millennium BCE. Second, while Egyptians likely originally associated wine exclusively with the northern part of their country, they certainly always gave due deference to the wine culture of the neighboring Levant. While it is difficult to say what the Egyptians believed about the origins of wine in their country from their literature, we can nonetheless claim that an Egyptian asked a question on the topic might point north and east.

Sumerian Literature

While the Egyptians were first recording their thoughts in stone, wood, or more perishable materials, the Sumerians were doing so in clay.129 The culture of Sumer, located at the far eastern end of the Fertile Crescent in modern-day southeastern Iraq, was a lowland civilization centered in an area which even five thousand years ago must have been drier than one would hope for growing grapes.130 Yet our ancient literary testimony from Sumer, picking up in the mid-third millennium BCE and extending through the beginning of the second millennium, attests that grapes and even wine had a presence (if not a dominant one) in this earliest Mesopotamian civilization.131

129 For a classic study of Sumerian culture, see Kramer (1963). 130 This region may have been somewhat wetter in the first half of the third millennium than it is today. After a drought in the last half of the fourth millennium, monsoon rainfall seems to have increased until another dry spell beginning in 2200 BCE. See Burroughs (2005) 243 and Plimer (2009) 53. In any case, like Egypt (and perhaps even more so), Sumer was a beer culture. See the many references in Milano (1994) and McGovern et al (1995). 131 The most important survey of the written evidence for wine in Bronze Age Mesopotamia is Powell (1995).

89 In the language of ancient Sumer, there was one word, geštin, which referred simultaneously to both the grape, the vine, and to wine. This appears to be a term native to Sumerian, and it seems likely that as originally coined it was meant to refer exclusively to the vine. To quote one notable scholar,

“Il [the term 'geštin'] était alors clairement composé d'un caractère dont le sens est alors inconnu, en sumérien, et qui se lisait quelque chose comme TIN, superposé à celui du 'bois', qui s'articulait GISH. On devait donc déjà le lire, comme on fera plus tard, GISH.TIN ou GESH.TIN (graphie décomposée qui se recontre, çà et là, au deuxième millénaire notamment), et l'entendre de 'le bois/l'arbre/l'arbuste de...'.”132

Thus, the term geštin literally means 'tin-plant'. As such, it is sensible to think that this term's original semantic sphere extended only to the vine itself (particularly since the prefix giš was commonly appended to various types of woody plants in Sumerian). The fact that the term's semantic sphere was then apparently later extended to refer to the product of the vine (i.e., wine) as well suggests that the Sumerians were aware of the grapevine before they had any need for a term for 'wine'. This, in turn, suggests that wine became an item of cultural importance at Sumer at some point after the Sumerians coined the term for 'grapevine', perhaps painting wine as a new import at some point in

Sumerian prehistory.133 In any case, the term's extension to refer to the fruit of the vine produced an ambiguity which could be resolved by re-adding the term for 'woody plant' to the beginning, thus creating the not-uncommon collocation giš-geštin to refer

132 Bottéro (1995) 28. 133 The opposite could also be true, however: wine could be more ancient at Sumer, while the vine could be the newer import. We could hypothesize that the morpheme tin once meant 'wine', dating to a time when the Sumerians imported wine but had no grapevines. After the subsequent introduction of the grapevine to Sumer, it was named giš-tin, or 'wine-plant'. In this scenario, the old term for 'wine' would later have been replaced by the newer term for 'grapevine'.

90 specifically to the grapevine. However, it is unclear just how often the bare term geštin referred to wine and not the vine even in this later phase; in the majority of instances in which it appears the correct translation seems to be not “wine” but rather “vine”.134

Thus, the term for wine alone has much to tell us about the presence and importance of wine in Sumerian society. While its presence was certain, it was hardly the most important alcoholic beverage to the ancient Sumerians (despite its definite significance in certain aspects of that society, as we will see below).

While the term geštin covers much of the semantic sphere of the grapevine and its products, it could be modified in certain ways. For instance, the term geštin had/ geštin ḫea (literally, 'grape+sun') means 'raisin', although earlier scholars erroneously translated it as 'white wine'.135 Various beverages which were not strictly wine could be created with geštin (that is, the grape) as an ingredient; these include a geština

('water of the grape', perhaps some kind of beverage made from soaked raisins) and kaš-tin, which may be some kind of beer infused with grape juice or grape syrup.136

Meanwhile, the term še-geštin seems to have referred to a cluster of grapes.137

As is clear, we can be reasonably certain that grapes played a relatively important part in the lives of the ancient Sumerians, even if the fermented juice of those grapes

134 Postgate (1987) 117: “This....follows from the fact that, unlike beer, it is not usually measured in pottery or other vessels, but in dry capacity measures like other fruits with which it is listed (in pre- Sargonic and Ur texts).” 135 See Postgate (1987) 117 and Powell (1995) 104. 136 See Powell (1995) 104 and Bottéro (1995) 29, the latter of whom says: “[The term kaš-tin was used] pour désigner une boisson alcoolisée voisine de la bière et peut-être préparée plus ou moins à la manière du vin, ou comparable au vin, dont nous ne savons pas de quoi elle était faite.” Meanwhile, Genouillac (1909) 51 mentions a slightly different term (kaš-geštin) and describes it simply as “le vin”. 137 Fronzaroli (1994) 122.

91 was of somewhat less importance. References to grapes, raisins, and vineyards are scattered throughout the ancient records of Sumer, such as a “long texte débutant par l'évaluation de un vignoble à Tigabba (2/3 de sicles...)”.138 All the same, wine as a commodity is noticeably rare. How could it be that grapes were so common and yet wine was not? The answer may be one of economy: with the cheap and widespread availability of beer as an alcoholic beverage, grape wine may have been prohibitively expensive for most (as indeed it would continue to be for thousands of years).139

Meanwhile, grapes were largely used for other purposes, whether simple consumption as is, being dried into raisins, or being boiled down to extract their sugar for other purposes. As such, wine did not have a significant place in the economy of southern

Mesopotamia.140

Yet for its relative economic irrelevancy, we would be mistaken if we concluded that wine had no cultural importance among the Sumerians. In fact, several pieces of evidence indicate otherwise. First, as we have seen in other cultures where wine plays an important societal role, the Sumerian pantheon contains at least one deity dedicated to wine and the vine. In this case it is not a god but a goddess, conspicuously named

Geštinanna. While Geštinanna is also associated with the arts (i.e., music and writing), her name (literally meaning “vine of heaven”) indicates that she was originally a goddess of the vine, if not of wine. Furthermore, there exists another goddess named Ama-

138 Thureau-Dangin (1910) II, 58. 139 Grapes did not grow comfortably in the lowlands for reasons of climate and soil, while grain was more easily grown. See the chapter on material evidence for further discussion of the range of the grapevine. 140 See the discussion in Powell (1995) 104.

92 Geštin ('Mother Vine'), although it is not clear if these two goddesses are linked (or if so, in what way).141 In any case, the inclusion of geštin in the names of not one but two goddesses certainly implies that the grapevine was an item of some cultural importance in ancient Sumer.

Yet if the vine and wine were connected to the gods in this way, so also were they connected in another familiar way, namely the offering of wine libations to the gods.

This can be inferred from the fact that a number of temples are said to cultivate vineyards on their property, suggesting a particular connection between the fruit of the vine and the cultivation of the gods.142 In any case, the very scarcity of wine suggested it as a proper gift for the gods; human beings have always spared no expense in the placation of unseen forces.143 In one text we do, in fact, find a mention of wine used as a libation to the goddess Inanna:

They pour dark beer for her, They pour light beer for her.... Beer at days' end, flour in syrup, (And then) syrup and wine at sunrise, they pour for her. (Hymn of Iddin-Dagan)144

Despite its rarity, wine thus plays an undeniable role in Sumerian culture, especially with regards to its religion.

We can therefore claim that wine was not, at any rate, a very recent import into

141 See Streck (2012) 3. 299-301. 142 See Younger (1966) 60. 143 Powell (1995) 101: “The overall picture which emerges from the cuneiform texts from Babylonia is that wine consumption increased gradually over the centuries, but it remained to the end primarily the prerogative of the gods and the rich.” 144 Jacobsen (1987) 121. See the discussion in Michalowski (1994) 32-33.

93 Sumer by the mid-third millennium BCE, even if it was perhaps introduced to the

Sumerians at some point in the history of their linguistic consciousness. Yet what about the question of origins? As we will see in the chapter on material evidence, the vine (and thus wine) were not native to lowland Mesopotamia. If so, where did the Sumerians believe they came from? Fortunately, their literature helps to enlighten us on this question. A text found at Lagash and dating from the mid-24th century BCE reads,

Pour Nin-Girsu, le champion d'*Enlil, Uru-ka-gina, le roi de Lagaš, a bâti son temple; a bâti son palais du Tiras; a bâti l'Anta-sura; a bâti le temple du Char, le temple dont la splendeur terrible recouvre tous les pays; a bâti la Brasserie qui, de la montagne, (lui) apporte le vin (par) grands vases.145 (Tablet of Urukagina)

The Sumerians thus conceived of wine as an import from “the mountains”. This is perhaps not surprising, as the mountains would provide a cooler and wetter climate for grape-growing and wine production. But which mountains, exactly? Other tablets specify that wine is imported specifically “from the mountains of the east”. Furthermore, several locations are mentioned, including Izallu, a toponym thought to be located within the region of Elam in the mountains to the east and southeast of Sumer.146 Thus, the Sumerians seemed to have a fairly clear idea of where wine came from (indeed, likely clearer than any other culture we have examined thus far). Wine was not autochthonous, nor did it arrive from multiple directions. When the Sumerians thought of the “origins of wine”, they were likely to think quite logically of the mountains which lay to their east.

145 Sollberger and Kupper (1971) 78. 146 See Genouillac (1909) 51 and the discussion in McGovern (2003) 150.

94 By the end of the third millennium, the Sumerians as both a language and a culture came to be overshadowed and ultimately replaced by a new group of people from the northwest, the Semitic-speaking Akkadians. Yet the Akkadians respected the literary accomplishments of the Sumerians, and they adopted their writing system (that is, cuneiform) and many of their words to write their own literature. Thus it is that if we wish to continue to trace wine throughout the written record of Mesopotamia beyond the third millennium BCE, we must turn to another body of literature, that of the

Akkadians.

Akkadian Literature

With the Akkadians, we pick up the history of Mesopotamia in the second and on into the first millennium. While Akkadian speakers eventually settled in the former

Sumerian territory of southern Mesopotamia, they also lived in areas farther to the north and west, giving us a wider geographic perspective as we trace the origins of wine in the region. We will thus for the first time encounter written records which enable us to study the question of wine in upper Mesopotamia at the beginning of that region's recorded history.

When the Akkadians took over the writing system of Sumerian, they also took over certain Sumerian signs for many terms. So it is that when reading an Akkadian text about wine, we will often find not the Akkadian term for the beverage but rather the now-familiar Sumerian term geštin. When these Sumerian terms occur in Akkadian literature, they are written with upper case letters to identify the cuneiform sign as a

95 logogram whose pronunciation in Akkadian could vary with place and time, hence

GEŠTIN. We should not think that an Akkadian reader would have actually read the term with its phonological value in Sumerian, however, for the Akkadians of course had their own words for things which they would no doubt use when reading such texts. The corresponding term in Akkadian to Sumerian geštin is karānu, and in fact we know this because the latter is sometimes spelled out in place of the so-called Sumerogram. Much like Sumerian geštin, Akkadian karānu (occasionally spelled kirānu) was a polysemous term which could refer to a number of things related to the semantic sphere of the vine, including wine, the grapevine, and grapes themselves.147 As such, context must decide which is meant. However, we should note that the twin terms GEŠTIN and karānu as used in Akkadian literature seem to more commonly refer to wine than did the term geštin in Sumerian literature. This, in turn, may be because wine played a greater role in the world of the Akkadians than the relatively small role it seemed to play in that of the Sumerians. This is likely at least partially a function of geography, for (as mentioned) our corpus of Akkadian literature reaches much farther north into traditional wine- producing lands.148

Besides the major catch-all term karānu, the Akkadian language is relatively poor

147 See the excellent entry in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary K (1971). 148 It is also likely a function of ethnicity, as well as chronology. Powell (1995) 114 describes the arrival of a wine-loving superstrate in Akkadian (and Sumerian) lands: “Evidence for [Babylonian] wine culture is limited to the ruling stratum of the “Amorites”; however, this evidence is significant for the history of wine in the ancient Near East in general. These “Amorites” were of Syrian origin, and they brought with them into Mesopotamia a variety of cultural baggage... [including] a taste for wine. These “Westerners”—as the Babylonians thought of them—begin to turn up in significant numbers shortly before 2000 BC.... By the 18th century, they have become the ruling elite all across Mesopotamia, and along with their typical “Amorite” names, they seem to have retained their taste for wine.”

96 in terminology relating to the vine and its fruit. Two terms, gapnu and inbu, are shared with other Semitic languages and can mean 'grapevine' and 'grape' respectively, but in reality the semantic sphere of each term is broader than this. The term gapnu in fact refers primarily to any kind of tree, with more particular reference to fruit trees; from there it can be specialized to the grapevine.149 The term inbu in turn can mean 'fruit' in a general or even a metaphorical sense, with only secondary specialization to the particular fruit of the grapevine.150 More definite terms in Akkadian for such things seem to be affective creations by speakers themselves: the term muziqu ('raisin') literally means 'the little sucked-out one', while ini alpi ('grape') literally means 'the eye of an ox'.151 This lack of inherited vocabulary pertaining specifically to the grapevine and to wine has led some to believe that the ancient Semites once had little experience with these things.152 Not so with alcohol in general; the word šikaru in Akkadian (coming from a well-attested Semitic root) is a broad-ranging term meaning 'alcoholic or intoxicating beverage'.153 Other such drinks also certainly existed in the Akkadian-speaking world: the drink kurunnu, etymologically linked to karānu, is nonetheless almost certainly not wine but is rather made from a mixture of beer and grape syrup.154

The Akkadian texts reveal a wide-ranging and significant interest in wine which stretches all across the Akkadian-speaking world from east to west and which likewise

149 See Chicago Assyrian Dictionary G (1956) 44. 150 See Chicago Assyrian Dictionary I (1960) 144. 151 See Powell (1995) 98 and 104. 152 See Lutz (1922) 40. 153 See Reiner (1992) 420. 154 See Powell (1995) 104.

97 stretches through the centuries from the time of our earliest texts in the late third millennium to that of the last great Semitic-speaking empires of the Near East in the sixth century BCE. Some of our earliest-attested texts in Akkadian (or, at any rate, in a closely related East Semitic language) come from the site of Ebla in modern-day western

Syria, dated to the middle of the 23rd century BCE. Unlike the cuneiform sources we have examined thus far, we should immediately note that these were found in a region more likely to produce wine, and indeed we find evidence of such production in the Ebla texts.

The texts mention both the cultivation of the grapevine and the production of wine in several locations which have been identified as being very close to Ebla.155 If we move forward several hundred years as well as several hundred miles to the southeast, we find wine likewise mentioned in texts from Babylonia—that is, the general area originally inhabited by the Sumerians. Here, however, it is portrayed as an import; in fact, the text

(in the form of a letter from one Babylonian to another) mentions that the “wine boats” have arrived from upriver before asking,

Ammīnim GEŠTIN ṭābam la tašāmamma la tušābilam?

Why did you not buy and send me good wine?156 (Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler 16 52:14)

Despite this evidence for a wine trade down the rivers of Mesopotamia, wine nonetheless remains a relatively scarcely-mentioned commodity in texts originating from the southeastern portion of the region.157 This is not the case at Mari, the site of a

155 See Fronzaroli (1994) 124. 156 Chicago Assyrian Dictionary K (1971) 203. 157 Powell (1995) 103: “What is remarkable is that this [the text just cited] is the extent of the evidence for

98 flourishing city located on the middle Euphrates which was destroyed by Hammurabi in the 18th century BCE. Texts from Mari reveal the city's role as a thriving commercial entrepot for many commodities but especially for wine, which was often shipped downriver to the city from further up the Euphrates or overland from the mountainous regions of Syria to the west. Mari in turn sent wine further downstream to the

Babylonians:

1 DUG GEŠTIN ša sāmim šubult[um] ana Hammu-rabi, LUGAL Kurda; GIR Puzur- UTU. 1 DUG GEŠTIN ša sāmim [a]na GIŠ kanim ša LUGAL; GIR Abi-šadȋ.

1 jarre de vin rouge: envoi à Hammu-rabi, roi de Kurda; intermédiaire de Puzur- Šamaš. 1 jarre de vin rouge: pour l'entrepôt du roi; intermédiaire d'Abi-šadȋ.158 (Archives Royales du Mari XXI.94)

The trove of texts found at Mari thus reveals a thriving trade in wine in the first half of the second millennium BCE. Whether the region immediately surrounding Mari itself produced wine at this time is a debated question, but in any case we can be sure that most of the wine which arrived at Mari came from elsewhere.159 (We will examine more closely the question of the provenience of this wine below.)

Wine continues to occur in the Akkadian texts throughout the millennium (and more) after Mari, including a number of other significant finds specifically related to wine. One of these is the so-called Nimrud wine lists, which is a record of the wine

wine in Babylonia in the Old Babylonian period. The Assyrian Dictionary cites another instance for wine in a list of provisions, but this turns out to be a haunch of meat. No doubt, more evidence for wine will turn up, but that it will fundamentally change this picture is beyond the bounds of probability.” 158 Durand (1983) 114. 159 See the discussion in Durand (1983) 104.

99 disbursements to various officials from the time of the Assyrian Empire in the early 8th century BCE.160 A brief excerpt:

GEŠTIN.MEŠ [rik]-su ša IT[I.BARAG UD 1[1? KAM] 1BAN 5 ½ qa ginȗ 3BAN ana E.MI [É].GAL...

Wine, schedule of the month Nisannu, the 1[1th day]. 1 seah, 5 ½ liters, regular offering; 3 seahs for the palace of the queen...161 (Nimrud Wine Lists)

The list continues in this way for some time, naming various officials to whom various quantities of wine were to be allotted. It thus seems clear that wine played an important role in the administration of the Assyrian Empire, perhaps more so than in any previous empire of Mesopotamia that we can document.162

In general, we can make the claim that the Akkadian texts at our disposal show varying degrees of cultural importance for wine, depending on the place and time of their writing. However, it seems clear that wine was of some importance to all of these cultures, even if that importance was limited to certain spheres. As in Sumerian times, one of these was the cultivation of the gods. We find a wide-ranging record of the use of wine in libations to the gods throughout Akkadian literature, such as in the following text:

GIŠ.GEŠTIN ana ginȇ ša UTU … lušēbilunu [sic] GEŠTIN aganna maṭu...

They should send us wine for the regular offerings to Šamaš; wine is in low

160 See Kinnier Wilson (1972) and Fales (1994) for discussion. 161 Fales (1994) 376. 162 See Stronach (1995) for a discussion of the significant cultural importance of wine in the Assyrian period.

100 supply here...163 (Babylonian Inscriptions 1:67 11, 16)

Such a sentiment is not unique in the corpus of Akkadian literature. In view of all of the testimony thus far examined, therefore, we can claim that the cultures who wrote in

Akkadian had a notable place for wine in their society.

Yet by noting that wine has a seemingly well-integrated place in the cultures of

Bronze and Iron Age Mesopotamia, we have only answered part of the question on the origins of wine in the region. As we have done with previous bodies of literature, we must also inquire: what can the literature tell us about where the people who wrote it thought wine came from? It is to this question that we now turn.164

In the section on Sumerian literature, we noted specific texts that made a strong connection between wine and the mountains to the east of Sumer. Even though

Akkadian literature encompasses a much broader geographic region, we still see that peoples from all parts of Mesopotamia would for the next millennium and a half continue to associate wine primarily not with the dry lowland regions but with the mountains which surround Mesopotamia to the west, north, and south. Nabonidus, the

163 Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (1971) 204. 164 Many scholars of the past century have cited statements in the famous Epic of Gilgamesh which ostensibly indicate that second-millennium Akkadians associated the origins of wine with the mountains to the east of Mesopotamia (or alternately with the region of Syria): see the discussions in Younger (1966:32) and Unwin (1991:80-81). Unfortunately, these discussions are based on a flawed English translation of the epic (Thompson, 1928) which mentions wine in several places where wine simply cannot be found in the original Akkadian. One crucial instance revolves around the ale-wife Siduri in Book X: referred to in Akkadian as a sabitum (tavern-keeper), she is nonetheless called by Thompson a “Maker of Wine”. Regrettably, there is no strong reason to associate Siduri specifically with wine, and in fact wine plays only a very small role in the Epic of Gilgamesh: see the transliteration and translation in George (2003). For a more responsible (if perhaps nonetheless overly eager) discussion, see McGovern (2003) 16-19.

101 last king of Babylon before Cyrus the Great brought Persian rule to the area in 539 BCE, exemplifies this attitude about wine:

[GEŠ]TIN KAŠ.SAG KUR-i ša ina qereb mātija jānu 18 (SILA) GEŠTIN ana 1 GIN kaspi KI.LAM ina qereb mātija

Wine, the fine drink from the mountains, of which there is none in my country, was priced at 18 silas [~liters] of wine per shekel of silver in my country.165 (Stela of Nabonidus)

Nabonidus, the king of the Babylonian Empire in Mesopotamia, suggests that wine exists in his country only because it is imported from the mountains. The price of wine is included specifically as an indication of its relative abundance: we learn that the gods

(and Nabonidus) have made wine more easily available and hence cheaper following a period of drought. However, the price is still so high as to be out of the reach of most: one calculation suggests that the price cited equates to about one and two-third days' work for one liter of wine.166 Clearly, wine is still an expensive (and hence likely rather scarce) import into Mesopotamia (perhaps especially its southern regions) well into the first millennium BCE.

But where did the wine ultimately come from? Herodotus, writing about a century after Nabonidus (and likely relying on accounts from others who had visited or lived in Mesopotamia), gives this account:

τὰ πλοῖα αὐτοῖσι ἐστὶ τὰ κατὰ τὸν ποταμὸν πορευόμενα ἐς τὴν Βαβυλῶνα, ἐόντα κυκλοτερέα, πάντα σκύτινα. ἐπεὰν γὰρ ἐν τοῖσι Ἀρμενίοισι τοῖσι κατύπερθε Ἀσσυρίων οἰκημένοισι νομέας ἰτέης ταμόμενοι ποιήσωνται, περιτείνουσι τούτοισι διφθέρας στεγαστρίδας... τοῦτο ἀπιεῖσι κατὰ τὸν ποταμὸν φέρεσθαι,

165 Chicago Assyrian Dictionary K (1971) 203. 166 See Powell (1995) 101.

102 φορτίων πλήσαντες: μάλιστα δὲ βίκους φοινικηίους κατάγουσι οἴνου πλέους.

They have round boats covered completely with skins which go down the river to Babylon. They make them in the land of the Armenians who live above the Assyrians, and after they construct frames made of willow, they stretch skins around them as a covering... This [sort of boat] do they send forth to be carried down the river after filling it with cargo; most of all, they bring down wooden barrels filled with wine. (Herodotus, Histories I.194)

By the 1st millennium BCE, the mountainous regions to the north of Mesopotamia at the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates are firmly connected with the production of wine to be imported into Mesopotamia. Yet while Armenia may be a chief supplier of wine, it cannot be said to be the only supplier. A tablet of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar lists a number of regions from which he received wine as tribute:

...[Karanu] Izallu, Tuimma, Siminu, Ḫilbunu, Arnabanu, Sȗḫu, Bit-Kubati, Upi u Bitâti...

Wein von Izallu, Tuimmu, Siminu, Ḫilbunu, Arnabanu, Sȗḫu, Bit-kubati, Opis und Bitâti...167 (Die neubabylonischen königschriften)

While not all of these places can be located with precision, those that can be placed lie in a great semicircle around Mesopotamia, beginning with Syria in the west and curving around to Elam in the southeast.168 That is to say, Nebuchadnezzar imported his wine not just from the mountains of the north (that is, Armenia) but from the mountains and highlands in all directions. Wine was indeed the “drink of the mountains”, with no

167 Langdon (1912) 154-55. 168 See the entries in the Reallexikon der Assyrologie. Arnabanu and Izallu lie to the north along the river Habur; Bit-kubati and Opis are found east of the Tigris at the foot of the Zagros nearly halfway down the eastern flank of Mesopotamia; Siminu is tentatively identified with a location to the west of Mesopotamia in Syria or the Levant.

103 discrimination as to which mountains were meant.

Jumping back in time over a millennium from the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, we find that the tablets found at Mari hint at a slightly different state of affairs in the first half of the second millennium BCE. As already mentioned, Mari imported most of its wine from the mountains and plateaus to the north and west, yet much of it passed through the areas of Carchemish and Šuda (both today in far northern Syria near the

Turkish border), two places which are located on the flatlands of Mesopotamia some ways away from the mountains.169 While the possibility exists that these were simply hubs which handled and shipped wine from further north (something certainly true of

Carchemish), it also seems to be a fact that some parts of northern Mesopotamia were areas whose Bronze Age climate was hospitable to the grapevine even if it no longer is today (or indeed, even if it no longer was by the time of Nebuchadnezzar and

Herodotus).170 One piece of evidence to this effect is a city named Karana, thought to be located at a site in modern-day northern Iraq southwest of the Tigris and at some distance from the mountains.171 The name of the city is closely related to the Akkadian term karānu, which (as we have seen) means “wine” or “vine”. In fact, the connection runs deeper: the city may have been named as a calque off of the Sumerian goddess

Geštinanna. To top it all off, tablets have been found at the site which mention wine

169 See Chicago Assyrian Dictionary K (1971) 205 and Talon (1985) 212. 170 The climate of eastern Anatolia and Armenia reached an optimum (that is, a period of greater rainfall) between approximately 4000 and 2000 BCE before beginning to dry out during the second millennium; see Burroughs (2005) 244. Neighboring northern Mesopotamia likely benefited (and suffered) from elements of the same pattern, and so it is not only plausible but likely that conditions for vine-growing in the area steadily declined from the late third until the first millennium BCE. 171 See Streck (2012).

104 rations for the king of the city. Thus it is that a city located in (northern) lowland

Mesopotamia may be vitally connected with both the wine goddess and with wine itself.172 We must therefore be careful not to make wine the exclusive province of the mountains, at least not before the first millennium BCE; it may be that at the time of the earliest lowland empires the vine could indeed be profitably grown (and thus wine profitably made) in the far northern reaches of the lowlands.

So where, then, might those who penned the tomes of Akkadian literature say that wine was from if asked? The evidence suggests that the answer might have changed somewhat over time: as we have just seen, lowland areas in northern Mesopotamia may have produced non-negligible amounts of wine four thousand years ago. All the same, our Akkadian informant would likely tell us that wine primarily came not from

Mesopotamia but from the regions of higher elevation which surrounded it toward the north, west, and east. This association of wine with the surrounding (often mountainous) regions is consistent over time and space, being mentioned by sources from various cities and empires which flourished at various periods. Another consistency is the importance of the major rivers of Mesopotamia (the Tigris and the Euphrates) as a system of conveyance for wine from northwest to southeast in the region. If asked where wine came from, many who lived in southern Mesopotamia in the second and

172 As Powell (1995) 115 says, “The evidence connecting the town Karana'a with the goddess Geštinana is strictly circumstantial, not enough to convict in court but enough to raise suspicion. As Finet (1974: 122) has suggested, probability lies on the side of a connection between Karana'a and Geštinana, in other words Wine-Land and Wine-Goddess. For the perceptive historian, whether Karana'a is really derived from karanu or whether Geštinana is really the tutelary goddess of Karana'a must necessarily be of secondary importance to explaining why the two turn up together along with documentary evidence for wine. On the whole, it suggests a fairly important role for viticulture in the agricultural life of this area in the 18th century BC.”

105 first millennia BCE may simply have pointed upriver, and they would certainly not have been wrong. Of course, “upriver” is hardly a precise answer, and we have seen that a traveler who went up the Euphrates from Babylon would come to a number of cities

(such as Mari and Carchemish) which were known for their wine commerce before actually reaching the mountains in which wine was no doubt produced in abundance.

Yet as such, the answer of “upriver” is precise in its imprecision: wine culture gradually phased in as one moved north through Mesopotamia, coming to its full flower when one entered the mountains and (ultimately) reached the area of Armenia. Inhabitants of the

Akkadian-speaking empires knew all of this, and their writings betray that knowledge.

Hittite Literature

We move now from Mesopotamia to the northwest, into the very mountains we have been discussing.173 Here in central Anatolia arose the empire of the Hittites, an

Indo-European people who dominated Asia Minor from the 18th to the 13th century BCE.

The Hittites had much the same problem as the Akkadians once did: they had no system of writing with which to record their language. However, they found the same solution as the Akkadians did: they largely took over a system of writing from neighbors who had already innovated one. Thus, just as the Akkadians received cuneiform from the

Sumerians, so also did the Hittites receive it from the Akkadians. Likewise, just as the

Akkadians continued to use certain Sumerian terms when they wrote in cuneiform, so also did the Hittites continue to use both those Sumerian terms and certain Akkadian

173 For a valuable discussion of wine in Hittite literature, see Gorny (1995) 150-58. For a general treatment of Hittite culture, see Macqueen (1996).

106 terms when they in turn wrote in cuneiform. Thus it is that the written records of the

Hittites are a curious amalgamation of terms in three different languages, none of which are related to each other.

This situation with regard to the writing system of Hittite directly impacts our discussion of wine (and the question of its origins) in Hittite literature. It will be recalled that in both Sumerian and Akkadian, just one primary term was used to refer to wine, the grapevine, and grapes themselves. This term was the Sumerian term (GIŠ.)GEŠTIN, even though the actual (spoken, and sometimes written) term in the Akkadian language was different. Much like speakers of the Akkadian language did, those who used cuneiform to write the Hittite language chose to write the Sumerian term an overwhelming percentage of the time when discussing wine or the vine. Thus it is that in

Hittite literature, we almost exclusively find the term (GIŠ.)GEŠTIN when the text is talking about wine or the vine. This system of writing forces us to rely on context to decide first how to pronounce the word which this logogram represented and secondly what the term actually meant. In fact, it is difficult to ascertain if spoken Hittite had different terms for “wine” and for “vine” or if they simply used the same word for both, as did the other languages of the region we have examined. We are fortunate to have even scant attestation of the native Hittite terminology surrounding wine and the vine: in two places, the term wiyanaš occurs as a genitive singular in a context clearly meaning “wine”. Despite a lack of secure written evidence, it is likely that the Hittite term for 'vine' looked something like this as well; we will examine this issue more closely

107 in the chapter on linguistic evidence. In any case, we should note one more collocation found in Hittite: the phrase GIŠ.KIRI.GEŠTIN, integrating yet another Sumerogram, is frequently used to mean 'vineyard'.

Unlike any of the three bodies of literature we have examined thus far from the ancient Near East, Hittite literature hails from a region in which the grapevine appears to have been native for millennia. Thus, we have no reason to be surprised that grape- growing and vine-tending are attested in the very earliest literature from the region. This literature is, in fact, in Akkadian and dates to the period immediately preceding the rise of the Hittite Empire, namely the so-called Old Assyrian Colony Age, which extended from the 20th to the 18th centuries BCE. During this period the Assyrians established a trading site at Kültepe in east-central Anatolia, and from this area come texts which mention both wine and the grape harvest (in Akkadian, qitip karānim).174 Yet it is not until the Hittite texts of a few centuries later that we become fully informed of the cultural importance of wine and the vine for those living in central Anatolia. A wide variety of texts relating to the daily life of the Hittites have been found, including a fairly thorough law code. While observing the expected sections on topics such as murder or theft, so also do we find significant attention given to penalties for harming fruit trees, including the grapevine:

[Takku miandan] GIŠ.GEŠTIN-an kuiški karašzi karš[andan GIŠ.GEŠTIN-an] apāš dai SIG-ana GIŠ.GEŠTIN [ANA BE]L GIŠ.GEŠTIN pai...

[If] anyone cuts down a [fruit-beari]ng vine, he shall take the cut-down [vine] for

174 See Gorny (1995) 148.

108 himself and give to the owner of the (damaged) vine (the use of) a good vine.175 (Hittite Law 113; Catalogue des textes hittites 292)

A number of other laws likewise relate to the theft or destruction of vines, suggesting that vine-tending was hardly an unimportant occupation at the time of the Hittite

Empire in the mid-second millennium BCE.176 Yet if the vine was important, all the more important was its most prestigious product. Another law sets the price for three major commodities:

ŠA 3 PA. ZIZ 1 GIN KU.BABBAR ŠA 4 P[A. ŠE 1/2 GIN KU.BABBAR] ŠA 1 PA. GEŠTIN 1/2 GIN KU.BABBAR...

The price of 150 liters of wheat is one shekel of silver. The price of 200 liters [of barley is ½ shekel of silver.] The price of 50 liters of wine is ½ shekel of silver.177 (Hittite Law 183; Catalogue des textes hittites 292)

The juxtaposition of wheat, barley, and wine in the text of this law gives us strong evidence that wine was a commodity of some importance among the Hittites, ranking alongside such staples as wheat and barley. As can be seen, wine is idealized as the most expensive of the three commodities by volume, being four times as costly as barley and

33 percent more costly than wheat. Yet even at this price, wine appears to be significantly more affordable than it was anywhere in lowland Mesopotamia. If we recall

Nabonidus' boast about the cheapness of wine in his country (18 liters a shekel), we see that even at those “rock-bottom prices” wine was over five times as expensive at

175 Hoffner (1997) 108-09 (KUB 29.24). 176 See Hoffner (1997) 99-109. 177 Hoffner (1997) 146 (KBo 6.26).

109 Babylon as it was among the Hittites.178 This, in turn, must be chalked up to economic factors, which we can infer as follows: while wine had to be imported to Babylonia, it was locally made in relative abundance in the highlands of Anatolia. Thus, this simple journey through basic principles of economics supports a conclusion we have already posited from other evidence: wine (and the vine) were rare in southern Mesopotamia but were reasonably common among the Hittites.179

Wine likewise occurs in the Hittite texts in a number of important rituals, religious and otherwise. In a number of places we are informed that libations of wine are to be customarily made to the gods, something which highlights the important and ingrained role which wine played in Hittite society. Indeed, there even exists a deity

Winiyan, “The Wine-Bearing (God)”.180 We also see the importance of wine in another more secular but no less important ritual, an oath of loyalty for soldiers:

[EGIR-a]nda-ma-kan GEŠTIN arḫa lāḫui nu-kan anda kišan memai: kī-wa UL GEŠTIN šumenzan-wa ēšḫar nu-wa kī [maḫḫan] [tag]anzi-pa-aš ka[ta] pašta šumenzan-n[a ēšḫar] [….]-ya taganzi-pa-aš kat[a QATA]MA... [EGIR-and]a-ma ANA GEŠTIN wātar menahanda lāḫui nu-[kan anda] [kiša]n memai: kī-wa wātar GEŠTIN-ya maḫḫan [imeatati] [EGIR-and]a-wa kī NIŠ DINGER.LIM in[ana] RAMANI.MEŠ [KU]NU [QATAM]A imeataru

Then he pours out wine and speaks the following: This is not wine, it is your blood, and as the earth has sipped it,

178 Some of this difference is due to inflation: in the approximately eight centuries between our two points of comparison, the buying power of the shekel was reduced by between 50 and 70 percent. However, after inflation is taken into account, wine was nonetheless approximately three times as expensive at sixth-century Babylon as it was among the Hittites of the Late Bronze Age. 179 Texts in Luvian dating from the centuries following the fall of the Hittite Empire also attest to the presence and importance of wine and the vine in the region. See Hawkins (2000) 466-67 for one text about a vineyard and its patron deity (who also happens to be the Luvian storm god). 180 See Kloekhorst (2008) 1012.

110 Even so also let the earth sip your blood... Then he pours forth the water into the wine and says the following: As this water and wine were mixed together, Hereafter let this oath and disease of your bodies be likewise mixed.181 (Catalogue des textes hittites 493)

Given the importance of the vine and wine in both the everyday and the ritual life of the

Hittites, we can say with some certainty that these things were hardly an innovation to

Hittite society in the mid-second millennium BCE. Rather, we must posit a lengthy history for wine in the region, stretching far back beyond the onset of writing.182

What, then, did the Hittites believe about the origins of wine in their land? It is perhaps more difficult to answer this question from their literature than it has been from any other culture's literature thus far. The reason for this difficulty is simple: as far as we can tell from the texts which have thus far been discovered, the Hittites seem to have simply taken for granted the fact that the grapevine and its fruit were a native product of their own region. At the very least, the ubiquity of wine and the vine in the area demanded no myth to “explain” the coming of these things from elsewhere, and the Hittites seem to have had no genuine historical memory to infuse into such a myth in any case. This is not to say, however, that the Hittite texts fail to record the association of wine with other places besides the Hittite Empire itself: one text informs us of wine brought as tribute from an area thought to be located in Cilicia in southeastern Anatolia on the shores of the Mediterranean, while another text seems to imply that wine was brought in trade from Greece to the west.183 However, it must be admitted that these

181 Gorny (1995) 152-53, 174 (KUB 43.38). 182 See the supplementary discussion in Hoffner (1974) 39-41. 183 Gorny (1995) 157-58.

111 scanty associations count for little; while they prove that wine was imported in some quantity into the Hittite Empire, they do nothing to inform us about the beliefs of the

Hittites with regard to our ultimate question. We must therefore be content with concluding the following: the Hittites were an ancient wine culture with no known reason to believe that wine and the vine had in the distant past arrived from anywhere else.

Ugaritic Literature

From Anatolia, we move south to the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean and the city of Ugarit, a once-thriving port town located just to the north of the region which would later be called Phoenicia.184 The inhabitants of Ugarit spoke Ugaritic, a language belonging to the Semitic family (like Akkadian) and more specifically to the Northwest

Semitic branch (like Phoenician, Aramaic, and Hebrew). The texts discovered at Ugarit date from the mid-15th century BCE until around 1200 BCE, when the city appears to have been burned by invaders from the sea and abandoned. Ugarit was thus a victim of the same general conflagration of the eastern Mediterranean which also brought down the Hittite Empire to the north and the Mycenaean realm to the west.

While Akkadian texts written in the traditional syllabic cuneiform script were found at Ugarit, so also were found many more texts written in a cuneiform abjad unique to Ugarit. The use of this script (rather than Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform) to record the native language gives us much more information as to what the words of the language actually looked and sounded like, allowing us to avoid the ambiguities we 184 The seminal tome on wine at Ugarit is Zamora (2000).

112 faced while discussing Hittite. As we turn to discuss the wine-related vocabulary in

Ugaritic, we find that the variety (and precision) lacking in the Near Eastern languages discussed so far is fully present in Ugaritic. The Ugaritic language boasts something we take for granted in modern languages, namely separate and relatively clearly-defined terms for 'wine', 'grapevine', 'grape', and 'vineyard'. First of all, the Ugaritic term for

'wine' is yn, a term whose connections to similar terms in many other languages we will discuss fully in the chapter on linguistic evidence.185 This is the generic term for wine and is extremely common. A more specific (and less common) term for wine is trṯ, which seems to refer to “new wine” or even simply freshly-pressed grape juice (“must”).186

Meanwhile, the term ḫmr exists as a broader term to refer simply to an alcoholic beverage, although the dominance of wine culture at Ugarit meant that this word was often utilized simply as a generic term for wine.187 With regards to the vine itself, the usual term is gpn, cognate with an Akkadian term we have already noted.188 The grape was designated by the term gnb (also cognate with a term in Akkadian)189, while an entire cluster of grapes could be called uṯkl (although this term is in fact only attested once in the Ugaritic corpus).190 Finally, the common term for 'vineyard' was krm, likewise cognate with a number of related terms in Semitic languages (including most likely

Akkadian karānu).191 As is clear from this brief survey, the Ugaritic language deployed a

185 See the discussion in Zamora (2000) 266 ff. 186 See Zamora (2000) 241. 187 See the discussion in Zamora (2000) 306 ff. 188 See Zamora (2000) 190. 189 See Zamora (2000) 211. 190 See Zamora (2000) 208. 191 See Zamora (2000) 58.

113 full set of vocabulary related to the world of vine-growing and winemaking.

If the inhabitants of Mesopotamia were forced to import their wine, and the

Hittites produced enough at least for their own needs, the city of Ugarit (and its environs) seems to have run a perennial surplus. Even though our corpus of Ugaritic literature is not gigantic, nonetheless we find significant evidence of a culture infused with wine and the vine. The city of Ugarit was at the center of a small empire whose influence extended inland over one mountain range to the valley of the Orontes and eastward onto the plateau beyond. Around 40 towns are specifically mentioned as having vineyards throughout Ugaritic literature; if these are placed on a map, we find that they extend all throughout the territory of Ugarit, with the greatest concentration occurring on the mountain range between the sea and the Orontes and on the plateau at the eastern edge of Ugarit's hinterland.192 Given the realities of rainfall and climate, this concentration is sensible. Yet such widespread vine-growing, coupled with the need or desire to enumerate the vineyard-towns in administrative texts, immediately provides a window into the importance and the ubiquity of wine culture at Ugarit.

As already mentioned, wine was the primary alcoholic drink consumed at Ugarit.

Yet if wine was of great importance in everyday life, so also did it play a part in religious ritual. In one text, we find a prescription for a regular offering of wine:

(….) b ṯmnt iy[]m akl . ṯql ksp . wkd yn . l 'ṯtrt ḫr

On the eighth (day) 192 See Zamora (2000) 181.

114 as a sacrifice of “grief” (they shall offer): (one measure of) grain, one shekel of silver and (one jar of) wine to “'Aṯtartu of the tomb(s).”193 (Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit 1.112: 11-13)

Another text prescribes an offering not of wine but of clusters of grapes:

b yrḫ . riš yn . b ym . ḥdṯ šmtr . uṯkl . l il . šlmm

In the month of riš yn (the first wine), on the day of the new moon, a grape cluster will be cut for Ilu as a peace offering. 194 (Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit 1.41/87: 1-2)

The vine and its products were thus well-integrated into religious ritual. Indeed, there even existed gods by the name of Gpn (“Grape”) and Trṯ (“New Wine”), showing all the more that the process of viticulture was central to cultic life at Ugarit.195

The myths and stories of Ugarit also exhibit a marked presence of wine. In the

Epic of Aqhat, the main character Danel characterizes one of the services a son may perform for his aged father as follows:

aḫd . ydh . b škrn . m'msh [k]šb' yn . spu . ksmh . bt . b'l

To grasp his arm when he's drunk, To support him when sated with wine; To eat his portion in Baal's house...196 (Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit 1.17 I:30-31)

Mentioned almost casually here, wine is seen to play an understood and natural role in one's life. It is not clear if the final clause includes the drinking of wine in the temple of

193 Olmo Lete (1999) 245. 194 Olmo Lete (1999) 107.. 195 Zamora (2000) 629. 196 Parker (1997) 53.

115 Ba'al, but we would not be surprised if it did. Indeed, several other mythic texts refer to the gods themselves drinking wine, as in the following excerpt:

il . yṯb . b mrzḥh yšt . [y]n . 'd šb' . trṯ 'd škr

El settles into his bacchanal. El drinks wine till sated, Vintage till inebriated.197 (Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit 1.14:15-16)

And at the end of the story of the fight between Ba'al and Mot in the Ba'al Cycle, measures are taken

ltlḥm lḥm . trmmt ltšt yn . tgzyt

So you may eat the sacrificial [me]al, You may drink the offertory wine.198 (Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit 1.6 VI:43-45)

It is unclear whether this invitation is addressed to divinities or human participants in an attendant sacrificial ceremony, but given everything we have seen the distinction hardly matters. Wine culture knew no limits at Ugarit: both humans and gods drank wine for reasons ranging from banal to cultic. Wine hardly seems to be the province only of the rich (as implied by its proverbial mention in the Epic of Aqhat), nor does it seem to be reserved largely for religious purposes. Indeed, we can make the claim that wine suffused the lives of those who lived on the coast of the Mediterranean in the second half of the second millennium BCE.

With such a surfeit of wine as well as easy access to the sea, it is no surprise that

197 Parker (1997) 195. 198 Parker (1997) 164.

116 the Ugaritic texts record the shipment of large amounts of wine to points north and south among the Mediterranean coast. Egypt is frequently mentioned as a market for

Ugaritic wines, and there is also reason to believe that wine was shipped to both the

Hittite Empire and to the Mycenaean world. Yet not all commerce took place over the sea; Ugarit was also in contact with Carchemish, a city to the east of Ugarit which (as we have already seen) was an important shipment point for wine in the second millennium

BCE. Ugaritic wines almost certainly made their way overland to Carchemish, where they in turn were sold down the Euphrates to central and southern Mesopotamia. Ugarit was thus the lynchpin of the Syrian wine trade, supplying all of the empires we have so far discussed with varying measures of wine.199

So it is that while other regions are associated with wine in Ugaritic literature, they are always associated not with its production but with its export. Egypt, Assyria,

Greece, and the Hittite Empire are simply markets for Ugaritic wine; they are not seen as contributing to the wine culture of Ugarit. Indeed, Ugarit seems to have been a wine culture par excellence, and many of its citizens surely knew it. Wine did not come from elsewhere; wine came from Ugarit. While Ugarit's myths (much like the myths of the

Hittites) tell us little explicitly about the origins of wine, we do get one hint of what those at Ugarit might have thought on the topic. We previously mentioned the existence of a god Gpn (“Grape”) as evidence for the importance of the vine at Ugarit, but Gpn is not a god without a home; rather, he is one of the two messengers of the great god

Ba'al, whose dwelling is on the towering Mount Zaphon located a short distance north of 199 See the discussion in Zamora (2000) 479-84.

117 the city of Ugarit and well within its hinterland.200 In one text, we see the gods going to visit Ba'al on Zaphon, where they encounter Gpn:

tb' . wl. yṯbilm idk / lytn . pnm 'm . b'l / mrym . ṣpn wy'n / gpn . wugr

The gods depart, they do not sit still; So they head out To Baal on the summit of Sapan [Zaphon]. And Gapn and Ugar speak...201 (Keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit 1.5 I:9-12)

The home of the god “Grape” (and, as this text tells us, the place where one might find him) is on a mountain visible from the city of Ugarit. While we have no direct commentary on this fact, we can certainly believe that this connection reinforced the idea of the autochthonous nature of wine and the vine at Ugarit. In any case, we have not even the hint of a myth which leads us to believe that those at Ugarit believed that wine and the vine came from elsewhere. If there was a time in the distant past when wine culture did indeed come to the region of Ugarit, it has been long since forgotten by those who tell its stories.

Hebrew Literature

We finally arrive at the corpus of ancient Hebrew literature, as exemplified by the

Hebrew Bible.202 The texts found in the Bible arose and were written down in the central

200 Parker (1997) 248. 201 Parker (1997) 141. 202 For an early discussion of wine in the Bible, see Zapletal (1920). For a more recent monograph on viticulture in the region in Biblical times, see Walsh (2000). For one discussion of early Israelite history

118 Levant in the early-to-mid first-millennium BCE, making them something like the first cousins of the Ugaritic literature we have just examined. While we have been able to glean adequate information on attitudes about the origins of wine in the cultures we have just examined from their texts which have been preserved in clay or stone, the broader array of texts available in the Bible gives us a more comprehensive window into the attitudes of first-millennium Israelites toward the antiquity and the origins of wine.

In fact, the intentional and relatively systematic codification of one culture's literature and mythology as found in the Bible is precisely what we would like to have for all of the cultures of the ancient Near East.

The Hebrew language is a Northwest Semitic tongue closely related to the one spoken at Ugarit in the second millennium BCE, and among the characteristics shared by these two languages is a large amount of terminology relating to wine. Hebrew and

Ugaritic thus stand against the other Near Eastern languages we have examined in exhibiting a wide variety of wine terminology with clearly defined meanings. The first and most important Hebrew term relating to wine is yayin, which is the standard term for “wine”.203 This term is clearly connected to the word for “wine” in both Ugaritic and in many other languages, a connection we will exhaustively explore in the chapter on linguistic evidence. For “new wine”, “must”, or “grape juice”, Hebrew has the word tīrōš

(cognate with Ugaritic trṯ), while another term 'āsīs may also mean “sweet or new wine”.

and culture, see Finkelstein and Mazar (2005). 203 For information on these terms, there are several sources. For a basic list with discussion, see Frankel (1999) 198 and Walsh (2000) 193. For a more exhaustive list (but with less discussion), see van Selms (1974) 176-77. For dictionary entries, see Brown Driver Briggs (1906), the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (1995), and the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (2011).

119 For a drink made of wine mixed with water or other substances there occurs the term mezeg. Other, more generic terms for alcohol also appear; the most notable of these is

šekār, cognate with terms in a number of other Semitic languages (including Akkadian).

The term ḥemer is likewise attested a few times to mean “strong or seething drink”; it is associated with a root meaning 'to ferment' as well as with the cognate term in Ugaritic we have already mentioned. Yet it should be noted that much like in Ugaritic, these other more generic terms for alcohol often seem to be used in ways which make us think that they, too, are referring to wine.

Besides these terms referring to alcoholic beverages, there also exists in Hebrew a wide range of vocabulary relating to the vine and its fruit. Much of this vocabulary will look familiar, as it is cognate with similar terms we have already seen in Ugaritic and in

Akkadian. First of all, the term kerem means 'vineyard', much as it does in Ugaritic; recall also that this is thought to be cognate with the Akkadian term which covers a wide variety of meanings within the semantic sphere of wine and the vine. The word 'ēnāb means 'grape', while the term gepen means '(grape)vine' or 'tendrils'.204 Finally, the word

'eškōl broadly means 'cluster', although this is usually in reference to a cluster of grapes.

In addition to these primary terms, a number of other words also exist in the Hebrew language to refer to varying types of grapes or wine or various activities related to the process of vine-tending and winemaking; this rich vocabulary assures us that viticulture was of some importance among the ancient Israelites.

This initial impression is confirmed by a reading of the Biblical texts. The 204 This term is said by Brown Driver Briggs (1906) 172 to be “always grape-bearing exc. 2 K[ings] 4:39.”

120 grapevine and its products are often mentioned throughout the Hebrew Bible, not infrequently in specific connection with the land of Canaan. We might start with a passage which highlights the Israelites' first impression of the region after their exodus from Egypt. When two spies are sent into the land as a prelude to the Israelite conquest, they are said to have been amazed not only by the great size of its people but also of its vegetation:

ויב או עד־נחל אשכ ל ויכרת ו מש ם זמור ה ואשכ ול ענבים אח ד וישא הו במ וט בשנים

And they came to the Valley of Eshkol (“Grape Cluster”), and from there they cut a branch and one cluster of grapes, and they lifted it up on a pole between the two (of them)... (Numbers 13:23)

The land is thus reputed to be quite literally a prodigious center of grape production.

Indeed, the grapevine is considered to be the fruit par excellence of the land.

The literature of the pre-exilic period (from around the eighth to seventh centuries BCE) is replete with imagery and metaphor involving the grapevine, indicating the central cultural importance of this one plant. Quite frequently, the people of Israel themselves are compared to a vine or a vineyard, with God as the tender:

גפן ממצר ים תס יע תגר ש ג וים ותטעה

A vine did you bring up out of Egypt; you drove out the nations, and you planted it. (Psalms 80:8)

כי כ ר ם יהוה צבאות ב ית ישר א ל וא יש יהוד ה נט ע ש עשוע יו

121 For the vineyard of Yahweh Tsabaot is the house of Israel, and the man of Judah is the plant of his delight. (Isaiah 5:7)

In one text, we even receive some particular information about vine-tending in the

Levant of the first millennium:

וא נכי נטעת יך שר ק כלה זר ע אמ ת ואיך נהפ כת ל י סור י הגפן נכר יה

I planted you as a choice vine, of completely good stock; how have you turned against me (like) the vine turning wild? (Jeremiah 2:21)

The contrast between a choice vine205 which bears fruit as expected and a wild vine whose output is unreliable is most easily explicable by the presence of two different kinds of grapevines in the Levant of the first millennium. The one was the cultivated sort, used in viticulture, while the other grew wild and perhaps gave unreliable fruit. As we will see in the chapter on material evidence, this is likely to have been the actual state of affairs from a botanical perspective, and so the metaphor used by the author indicates a reasonably high degree of understanding among both writer and audience of the botanical situation of the grapevine in the region.206

If the Hebrew Bible gives evidence of a culture which is quite familiar with the grapevine and the art of tending it, so also does it show a culture which is permeated by wine. Excess drinking seems to be a problem at times, and wine is singled out specifically

205 The Hebrew word here translated as “choice vine” is śōrēq, defined by the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (1995: 1362) as “a valued, bright-red species of grape”, and by the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (2011: VIII 198) as “choice vines”. 206 The Samaria ostraca, tax records likely dating from the first half of the eighth century, record that local farmers paid their taxes in the form of jars of oil or wine. If even peasants produced wine, we must believe that a working knowledge of vines and viticulture was widespread in Iron Age Canaan.

122 by one giver of advice:

אל־ת ר א יין כי יתא ד ם כ י־ית ן עינ ו י תהל ך במישר ם אחר יתו כנח ש יש ך וכצפעני יפר ש

Do not gaze at wine as it is red, when it gives its color in the cup, when it goes down smoothly; In the end it bites like a snake, and like a serpent it stings. (Proverbs 23:31-32)

The befuddling properties of wine are well-recognized and well-respected. When the author of one psalm wishes to portray the judgment of God on the wicked, he suggests that the divinity uses nothing less than wine to effect their downfall:

כי כ וס ב יד־יהוה ויין חמ ר ׀ מ לא מסך ויגר מ זה אךש־מר יה ימצו ישתו כ ל רשעי־ארץ

For there is a cup in the hand of Yahweh—foaming wine, full and mixed— And he has poured from it; down to the dregs they will drain and drink, all the wicked of the land. (Psalms 75:8)

Thus, while the Israelite divinity is like many other divinities of the Near East in being associated with wine, it is in a very different way: rather than drinking wine for pleasure, he causes others to drink it for punishment. The cultural attitude of the Israelites toward wine is likewise markedly different from that of others: it betrays a caution and a hesitancy whose closest parallels might be said to be not among the cultures of the Near

East but in the Classical Greek customs of mixing wine with water in order to keep one's wits and to stave off drunkenness (or indeed, in the early Roman strictness toward wine). Yet we should not so quickly conclude that the attitudes found in certain parts of the Bible are reflective of all of Israelite culture; as is often the case, we may learn more

123 about the lifestyles of other groups of Israelites by paying attention to what the Biblical authors proscribe:

ה וי משכימ י בב קר שכ ר יר ד פו מאחר י בנשף יין יד ליק ם

Woe to those who get up early in the morning (so that) they chase alcohol (šekār), and (stay up) late at night (so that) wine inflames them... (Isaiah 5:11)

Such a proclamation by the prophet Isaiah would hardly be necessary if many Israelites were not, in fact, living in such a way.207 This mode of living reminds us of the banqueting culture common in the Near East at the time and soon to become fashionable in Greece as well. Indeed, a number of texts in the Bible commend (or even recommend) inebriation at appropriate times.208 Thus, we see that Israel and Greece may have had this cultural tension in common: while they drink and carouse, such behavior nonetheless does not always go by without some level of disapproval by certain influential voices within the community.209

We receive a glimpse of the massive importance of wine and the vine in Israelite culture by the strict (if voluntary) prohibition given against them in another text:

ד בר אל־בני ישר א ל ואמרת אלה ם א יש או־אש ה כי יפלא לנדר נד ר נז יר להזיר ל יהוה מיין ושכר יז יר ח מץ יין וח מץ שכ ר לא ישת ה וכל־משר ת ענבים לא ישת ה וענב ים לח ים ויבש ים לא יאכ ל כ ל ימ י נזר ו מכל אש ר יעש ה מגפן היין מחר צנים ועד־זג לא יאכ ל

207 In particular, this proclamation can be seen to be related to the breakdown of the social order due to monarchical over-reach in the eighth century BCE. Such extravagant use of alcohol would be seen as an abuse of power and wealth. 208 See, for instance, Proverbs 31:6-7 or Deuteronomy 14:26. 209 The cursing of Canaan by Noah after the latter's wine-induced stupor in Genesis 9 (see below) has been interpreted to be an encoded condemnation of just this sort of behavior on the part of local Canaanite peoples (i.e., Phoenicians) and the Israelites who mimic them. See López-Ruiz (2012) and references there.

124 A man or a woman who dares to make a vow, the vow of the Nazirite, From wine and alcohol (šekār) he will abstain; wine vinegar and alcoholic vinegar he will not drink; he will not drink any juice of the grape, nor will he eat fresh or dried grapes; All the days of his vow, everything which the grapevine produces—wine, seeds, and even skin —he will not eat. (Numbers 6:2-4)

Such specific prohibitions do not arise in a vacuum. Rather, they are generally the product of prevailing circumstances. If an Israelite wanted to make a particularly special vow and cut himself off from the normal flow of community life to serve God for a specific period of time, he (or she) had to completely avoid the fruit of the vine, including all parts of it. A prohibition such as this makes sense only in the context of a culture which makes significant use of the vine and its fruits in the first place. By writing such a sweeping prohibition, the authors of the Nazirite vow limn for us the cultural backdrop against which this vow was to be taken.

We might point out one more avenue by which we can get a glimpse into the importance of the vine and its fruit in the culture of Iron Age Israel. Placenames have long been recognized as frequent conveyors of archaic and ingrained cultural and/or linguistic information. Along these lines, we can point out a number of apparently early town-names in the land of Israel which relate to the grapevine and its cultivation.210 We have already seen a reference to “Grape-cluster Valley” (the Valley of Eshkol) in Numbers

13, but many other such localities exist. One town is simply named 'Anab ('grape');211

210 See the discussion in Lutz (1922) 25. 211 See Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (2011) VI 491: “town in hill country of Judah, Kh. 'Anab el-Kabir, 22 km southwest of Hebron.”

125 others are likely named for their vineyards, like Abel Keramim ('vineyard-meadow')212 and Beth Ha-Kerem ('house of the vineyard').213 These names on the land provide additional evidence for the importance and ubiquity of grape cultivation in the southern

Levant in the first half of the first millennium BCE.

All of this evidence makes it clear that wine and the vine were of central importance in the lives of the Israelite tribes who inhabited the southern Levant throughout the first half of the first millennium BCE. In this way, the evidence for Israel is similar to that which we found for Ugarit, a city only a few hundred kilometers to the north and flourishing a few centuries earlier. In the case of Ugarit, though, we were unable to establish any clear cultural narrative about the origins of wine in their region; as far as we can tell, the natives of Ugarit would have considered wine to be native to the area. What, then, can we tell about what the ancient Israelites might have thought about the question?

For all of the mention of wine and the vine in the Hebrew Bible, these items are associated with particular places only infrequently. Epigraphical information helps us to fill in the gaps: jars have been found which contain references to wines of Carmel,

Gibeon, and Ashdod, all located within the immediate area of the southern Levant.214 Yet if we return to the Biblical evidence, we find only a scant few additional references. In

Numbers 20:5, the Israelites who are wandering in the desert complain that, unlike

Egypt, their current location has no grapevines; this confirms that Egypt was known to

212 See Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (2011) I 109: “in Ammon (Judges 11:33).” 213 See Brown Driver Briggs (1906) 111: “in Judah...(Jeremiah 6:1, Nehemiah 3:14).” 214 See Frankel (1999) 199.

126 have grapevines, but does not suggest that Israelites would look to the south or west when pondering the origins of wine. A verse from the book of Hosea is somewhat more illuminating:

ויפר חו כגפן זכר ו כיין לבנ ון

[Israel] will blossom like a vine; its renown (will be) like the wine of Lebanon. (Hosea 14:7)

Clearly, the region of Lebanon—roughly coterminous with Phoenicia and just to the south of the area where Ugarit was once located—was well-known for its wine. While the Israelites were themselves blessed with a land rich in vines and their product, it appeared that even they deferred to their neighbors to the north when it came to wine production. When an Israelite thought of a superior wine culture, we can believe that his thoughts might have turned toward Phoenicia.

When discussing the other cultures of the ancient Near East, we were unable to say much more than this. However, the Hebrew Bible preserves just the type of wine- related aetiological story which we would like to have for other cultures of the region.

This, of course, is the story of Noah. Noah is well-known for being one of eight people to survive the Flood, but a curious footnote to his story occurs just after he exits the ark:

ויחל נ ח א יש ה אדמ ה ויט ע כ ר ם וישת מן־היין וישכ ר

And Noah, a man of the land, began to plant a vineyard (or was the first to plant a vineyard, or planted a vineyard right away). And he drank from the wine, and became drunk. (Genesis 9:20-21)

The verse can be read in multiple ways, but, given the context that Noah has just

127 disembarked from the ark and is inaugurating mankind's post-Flood existence, the simplest interpretation is that Noah is founding (or in any case, re-founding) the sciences of viticulture and winemaking. This would perhaps be nothing more than an interesting story, however, except for the geographical information we receive with it: in Genesis

8:4, we are told that the ark had come to rest in the mountains of Urartu (later vocalized as Ararat)215 in Transcaucasia. Thus, the story of Noah and its denouement gives us a priceless window into what the ancient Israelites must have thought about the origins of wine. If Noah was the first to plant a vine and drink wine in the post-Flood era in the region of Ararat, then wine and the vine must have logically spread outward from there.

This story is all the more striking for its strangeness: living in a land rich in vines and near a land which had for centuries if not millennia excelled in the wine trade, it would seem strange for a culture to fabricate a story about the far-distant origins of wine and the vine if that story were not based on some kind of cultural memory. Indeed, we should wonder if this was not once a widespread narrative in the Levant; after all, the Israelites shared many of their stories with their neighbors, and versions of the Flood myth are found in many cultures of the region. Perhaps the inhabitants of Ugarit had a similar tale of a man who survived the Flood and planted a vine, a tale which was not recorded or has not been found.216 Yet while we are free to speculate, we can be sure of this: the inhabitants of ancient Israel must have believed that wine and the vine had come from

215 While the Masoretic Text vocalizes the term as Ararat (apparently through an insertion of dummy vowels), the older vocalization is preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls (text 4Q252). 216 While other Mesopotamian flood myths contain no parallel to Noah's planting of the first vineyard, Greek myths do: as mentioned in the chapter on Greco-Roman literature, the son of Deucalion (=Noah), Orestheus, discovers the vine. See Darshan (2013).

128 the north and east into the land at some point in the ancient past.

We have now examined literary evidence from all of the major cultures of the ancient Near East which have left to us a written record. In a few cases, we found that we could arrive at no satisfactory conclusion about the origins of wine in that region, but we have nonetheless managed to glean some important information. First, the antiquity of viticulture and of winemaking in nearly all of these regions is indisputable; we have seen that wine and the vine are well-integrated into all of these cultures at the time of their earliest written record. Even the great cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt, inhabiting regions in which the vine is not native, had already developed a taste for wine at an early period. Each of these regions were located next to more prodigious wine- producing areas, and likely associated wine with those regions: Egypt looked north and east to the Levant, while Mesopotamians looked to the mountains to the north, east, and west. At Ugarit and among the Hittites, there was no clear narrative of a direction from which wine had come, but in the texts of ancient Israel we find evidence of a belief that wine and the vine had long ago come from the far north, from Transcaucasia. The literary evidence from the ancient Near East thus allows us to paint a tentative picture of origins.

Having analyzed literary evidence from both the classical world and the world of the ancient Near East, we now turn to other types of evidence which can inform us on our question. Material evidence is of great importance, but before we discuss it there is another type of philological evidence which can tell us much about the origins of wine.

129 This is the linguistic evidence, and it is in this direction that we now turn.

130 CHAPTER 4: LINGUISTICS: TRACING THE “WINE” WORD

Etymology has been a fashionable discipline for millennia. The ancients were fascinated by where their words came from, and they rarely hesitated to make conjectures on the subject. The “wine” word was no exception, and as early as

Athenaeus (writing in the third century CE) we find a record of what the ancient Greeks thought on the topic:

ὅτι τὸν οἶνον Κολοφώνιος Νίκανδρος ὠνομάσθαι φησὶν ἀπὸ Οἰνέως: Οἰνεὺς δ᾽ ἐν κοίλοισιν ἀποθλίψας δεπάεσσιν οἶνον ἔκλησε. φησὶ δὲ καὶ Μελανιππίδης ὁ Μήλιος: ἐπώνυμον, δέσποτ᾽, οἶνον Οἰνέως. […] οἱ γὰρ παλαιοί, φησίν, Ἕλληνες οἴνας ἐκάλουν τὰς ἀμπέλους. ‘Οἰνέως δ᾽ ἐγένετο Αἰτωλός.’ Πλάτων δ᾽ ἐν Κρατύλῳ ἐτυμολογῶν τὸν οἶνον οἰόνουν αὐτόν φησιν εἶναι διὰ τὸ οἰήσεως ἡμῶν τὸν νοῦν ἐμπιπλᾶν. ἢ τάχα ἀπὸ τῆς ὀνήσεως κέκληται: παρετυμολογῶν γὰρ Ὅμηρος τὴν φωνὴν ὧδὲ πώς φησιν ἔπειτα δὲ καὐτὸς ὀνήσεαι, αἴ κε πίῃσθα.

Nicander of Colophon says that wine [oinos] was named after Oineus: “Oineus squeezed it in hollow cups and called it 'oinon'.” And Melanippides the Melian says, “Master, oinon is named after Oineus.” […] They say that the ancients called vines oinai. “The son of Oineus was Aetolos.” And Plato, etymologizing in Cratylus, says that oinon is in fact oionoun [“sense-thinking”] because it fills our mind with wild notions. Or perhaps it was named from oneseos [“benefit”]; Homer perhaps hints at this etymology when he says about the word, “You will yourself be benefited, if you drink it.”217 (Deipnosophists 2.35)

Such ramblings were not atypical of the ancient approach to etymology, which often involved the “sounds-like” principle: if a word sounded like another, it could legitimately be derived from it. Yet this quote from Athenaeus is included here to show that scrutiny

217 The translation is the author's own.

131 of the word for wine has been going on for thousands of years, even before the advent of the scientific study of language as pioneered within the past two hundred years.

Today, thanks to the modern discipline of linguistics, we need not depend on abject guesswork to ascertain the origin of words as Athenaeus and his sources did; rather, we can trace words in a near-scientific fashion, using the words themselves as data and the rules developed by linguists as our guidelines. This chapter will attempt to do just that with one very peculiar case, the international word for wine.

Foundations and Methodology

Some might take it for granted that the word for “wine” is so similar in so many languages. A cursory glance at the word in modern European languages—English wine,

Spanish vino, French vin, German Wein, Russian vino—reveals that each word exhibits a high degree of similarity to its equivalents in other languages. Since the linguistic sign which denotes a given object is fundamentally arbitrary, such widespread equivalence must be explained in one of two ways. The first is borrowing. Borrowings rarely happen with items of core vocabulary; for instance, a language rarely needs to borrow a neighboring language's word for be or hand or from. However, borrowings are much more common when a culture is introduced to a new product or concept and must decide what to name it. In such cases, it is often easiest to simply take over the word already used by another culture, especially if that culture was instrumental in in the introduction of the product or concept. We can very easily imagine this being the case with wine as it spread from culture to culture: a wineless culture, introduced to wine by

132 a culture which already knew it well, might simply borrow the latter's word for it. Such an explanation would account nicely for the widespread similarity of the word for wine among so many languages. The second explanation for the remarkable similarity of the word for wine among so many languages is one of genealogy. Like living beings, languages are related to each other in a complex set of relationships, and it is common terminology to say that languages descend from other languages, and thus have daughters and sisters and mothers. One well-known family of modern Europe is the

Romance languages, whose five largest members are Spanish, French, Italian,

Portuguese, and Romanian. These languages all descend from a common mother, Latin, and are thus said to be genealogically related. If languages in a single family share words which look similar to each other, there is no need to invoke borrowing as the cause for the similarity. Rather, it is more likely that these languages have simply inherited the word from their common ancestor, which also had the word in (perhaps) a slightly modified form. This is in fact demonstrably the case with the word for wine in the

Romance languages. The Latin word for wine was vīnum, and each of Latin's daughters maintains this word in a slightly modified form, vino or vin. Importantly, the modifications made to this word throughout the centuries—the loss of the final m, the change of the Latin u to o (or, in the case of French, the complete loss of the vowel)—are in accordance with the sound laws of each language. In other words, by examining all of the words which passed from Latin to each daughter, we notice patterns and find that, for instance, every Latin word that ended with an m loses that consonant by the time of

133 the modern Romance languages. This is called a sound law because it always happens. In fact, we would be suspicious if the modern Spanish word for wine ended with an m like the Latin word did, because we know that such an m consistently and reliably is lost. The fact that this change happened confirms our hunch that the word passed genealogically from Latin to Spanish and its sisters. Thus, we can say with a fairly high degree of confidence that the word for wine was not borrowed directly into Spanish or French at a recent date, but rather was handed down from generation to generation by speakers of these languages at least since the time of the Roman Empire.

But as it turns out, Latin itself is part of a larger language family, and it too has a number of sisters which in turn descend from a common ancestor. This family is called

Indo-European, and the language from which each member of the family descends existed so far back in time that it was never written down and would never be known if it were not for the many daughters it left. This earlier common ancestor is called Proto-

Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European was a particularly prolific language, and it left a number of descendants: besides Latin, it is clear that Greek, the Germanic languages

(including English), the Slavic languages, most modern languages of India, and a number of other smaller languages all reckon their descent from Proto-Indo-European. Since these languages are all genealogically related, it is also possible that the similarities they share in their word for wine are not the result of borrowing but rather of common descent. If this is the case, we should be able to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European word for wine which, when made to follow each daughter's sound laws, ends up as the

134 attested word in each language. We will explore this idea in much more detail below.

Yet whatever we decide regarding the status of the word in the Indo-European languages (inheritance or borrowing?), the Indo-European family hardly encompasses the whole story of the history of the word for wine. While most Indo-European languages do indeed have this word, so also do many languages which are not related to

Indo-European. More importantly, our most ancient attestations of this word come not from any Indo-European language but from other language families, specifically Egyptian and the Semitic languages. The Kartvelian language family, by all accounts native to the region immediately south of the Caucasus, also appears to have had the word at an early date. Thus, the fact that so many Indo-European languages have the word for wine does not in and of itself prove anything, especially in view of the fact that several other language families attested in antiquity also share it. The one thing we can know for sure is that there must be some connection between all of these terms—after all, they are far too similar to have arisen independently by chance—but beyond that point the question grows more complex. It is thus our task in this chapter to unravel this riddle and to determine as far as possible who borrowed this word from whom (and when), who inherited it from whom, and ultimately to trace the word back to a common source in one of these language families (or, indeed, to conclude that the word was borrowed into all of these families from a language which is now lost).

As we examine the word for wine in each of these language families, we have at our disposal a number of diagnostic tools which can aid us as we attempt to determine

135 which of these families borrowed the word and in which, if any, it is native. When a term is borrowed into a language, it is possible that it will look foreign, whether phonologically or morphologically. A term might look foreign phonologically if it makes use of sounds or combinations of sounds which do not regularly appear in words native to the language. For instance, a linguist who knows nothing about the history of the

Americas might discern that the word Quetzalcoatl is native to neither Spanish nor

English because those languages do not typically end words with the sounds tl in succession. The linguist would be wise to search for other languages of the region which do regularly make use of this consonant cluster, and a brief search would soon reveal the existence of the Meso-American language Nahuatl, which (as evidenced by its name) has no hesitancy to end words in tl. The linguist might then deduce that this term is most likely a borrowing from Nahuatl or a closely related language and is foreign to Spanish and English. Side by side with the principle of phonological foreignness is that of morphological foreignness. The morphemes of a language are its basic meaning-bearing units, and borrowed terms often mean nothing in the languages into which they are borrowed. To return to the example of Quetzalcoatl, this word has no discernible meaning in English or Spanish and cannot be broken down to mean anything else.

However, in its native Nahuatl, the term can in fact be broken into two parts, each of which has a meaning in the language: quetzalli means “tail feather”, and coatl means

“serpent”. To a speaker of Nahuatl, the name Quetzalcoatl was not simply a string of sounds, but was actually a term with meaning. The fact that the name cannot be

136 similarly reduced in Spanish and English suggests (although does not prove) that the word is not native to those languages; the fact that the name is well at home within the broader scope of Nahuatl morphology almost ensures that the term originated in that language.

Previous Scholarship

We will be following a similar rubric as we attempt to determine what language family may have given birth to the international word for wine. Yet speculation, much of it unscientific, has been going on for hundreds of years. The similarity of the terms in various languages has led many an author to attempt to trace the path this word took, although such efforts were often based on little more than unprincipled guesswork.

Hehn, for instance, in his 1885 broad-based work On the Wanderings of Plants and

Animals, attempts to trace the word from Greece to Italy by stating that “the earliest voyages of the Greeks to the west must have introduced the intoxicating beverage to the

Italian coast, for that wine came to Italy from Greece is proved by the word vinum, its neuter form being accounted for by imitation of the accusative voinon.”218 In a note, he brings up the possibility that this term is connected to the Indo-European root meaning

“twine” seen in terms like vītis 'grapevine', but he concludes that “it is more probable that vinum only accidentally resembles vitis, that the former is a foreign word, the latter a native one with the meaning of “flexible plant””.219 Hehn is full of ideas, but without any rubric by which to judge them he has little way of arriving at a conclusion based on

218 Hehn (1885) 74. 219 Hehn (1885) 450.

137 the linguistic data. Meanwhile, Curtel, writing in 1903, believes that “il semble extrèmement probable que le mot latin vinum n'est pas un dérivé grec, mais qu'il a une très vieille parenté d'origine avec le mot οἶνος (ou voinos), l'hébreu jain, l'arménien gini, l'éthopien wain, l'albanais vēnε, que ce sont tous et au même titre des dérivés d'un mot comun aux premières races indo-germaniques.”220 Curtel is at odds with Hehn, but is ultimately reduced to talking past him without directly combating his ideas. In a world where linguistic science does not moderate the debate, all ideas have the potential to be equally valid.

Nonetheless, the debate raged on over the provenance of the word (and with it,

yyn) in the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew dictionary) ייו wine). A glance at the entry

(1906) reveals evidence of a wide range of scholarly opinions on the origins of the

Hebrew term; two prominent figures, Hommel and Jensen, are at odds, with Hommel positing that the Georgian form “g'wino” is the origin of the term and Jensen considering the latter instead a loanword from another source.221 Billiard, writing in

1913, gives an even better resume of the state of the question, mentioning also the theory propounded by several scholars that the word for wine ultimately comes not just from Indo-European but from one particular branch of that family, the Indo-Iranians.

Billiard states, “L'étymologie du mot οἶνος, vin, a donné lieu à des très vives controverses. L'une des plus raisonnables, indiquée par Kuhn, ferait venir οἶνος de la

220 Curtel (1903) 6. 221 Brown Driver Briggs (1906) 406. For more recent treatments of the word, see the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (1995) and the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (2011).

138 racine sanscrite vena, aimé, qui est le nom de la liqueur du soma.”222 Yet Billiard can do no more than identify “one of the most reasonable theories” of those expounded by philologists; a whole range of possibilities remains on the table. In fact, the only theory expressly disfavored by scholars of the period is one of Semitic origins for the term; and even this is due more to guesswork based on prevailing ideas of the home of winemaking than to sound linguistic theory.

The monumental 1930 dictionary of Indo-European roots and terminology by

Walde and Pokorny represented a synthesis of all of the efforts of historical linguists for over a hundred years to reconstruct the lexicon and the morphology of Indo-European.

Yet even this work could do little more than to list the various possibilities for the origins of the word for wine and the path it took. The term is treated under the heading of the

Indo-European root *wei- 'to twist, weave', but no clear evidence is adduced as to whether the word for wine is truly connected to it (or if so, how). Much of the discussion is devoted to discussing the unlikelihood of the various theories which had been brought forth, such as one which attempted to connect the various forms using native Indo-

European morphology: “Dass ital. vīnom und das sonstige woinom nur verschiedene

Lautsubstitutionen für ein voridg. Wort des Mittelmeergebietes seien nach Meillet... ist darum wenig einleuchtend, weil der Wz. wei- auch in lat. vītis und in gr. υἱήν, υἱόν,

εὐάδες Worte für die Weinrebe entstammen.”223 No clear answer is reached, but the idea to receive the least criticism is one which considers the term as a loanword from

222 Billiard (1913) 35-36. 223 Walde and Pokorny (1930) 226.

139 Proto-Armenian—possibly with influence from the Etruscans—224into both Semitic and the rest of Indo-European. Unable to decide upon the origins of the word for wine through linguistic reasoning, the linguists were forced to resort to guesswork based on the likely home of the beverage and on other auxiliary considerations.

The aporia exhibited by scholarship of the early 20th century would scarcely be lessened in the decades to come. Those to comment on the subject in the following years would simply follow in the footsteps of those who had paved the way with their best ideas and their best intentions. Perrin, writing in 1938, seems to have read Billiard, stating that “...le 'Inu' [des Assyriens] était d'origine arménienne. Le francais 'vin' a pour

équivalent en sanskrit 'vena', en arménien 'ghini', en géorgien 'gvino'...”225 Later on,

Hyams, writing in 1965, wishes to consider the Semites as the first winemakers but must combat the received wisdom: “To me it seems that the arguments in favour of a Semitic origin for the art we are discussing are sound. But there is a theory that some sort of very primitive viticulture was practised, or at least that wine was made from wild grapes, by the ancient people who spoke the proto-language called Indo-European, which as far as I know is hypothetical. The Semitic peoples, according to this theory, borrowed the words for wine and other, cognate, terms from this language, with the idea and the art themselves.”226 Hyams goes on to cast doubt on the theories of Billiard and others, a quest made easier by the lack of methodological rigor in the work done by the earlier generation. Hyams sums the whole situation up with an observation that was in his day

224 This idea is credited to Sophus Bugge, a Norwegian linguist. 225 Perrin (1938) 16. 226 Hyams (1965) 87.

140 all too true: “In all the scholars in whose writings I have sought enlightenment, I have found only opinion and confusion; nor has later criticism by men of science done anything to make a choice between the opinions of men of letters any easier.”227

Yet if scholars in the early 20th century were unable to come to a clear conclusion about the origins of the word for wine, we must remember that they had less data to work with than we do today. As the 20th century wore on, the discovery first of Hittite and then of Mycenaean Greek provided crucial additional data for those wishing to tackle the question. Yet with the discovery of additional languages that possessed the term came not clarification but a further profusion of theories concerning the word's origin. Seltman, writing in 1957, eagerly notes that “...the very name “wine” is already present at the dawn of history. At least as far back as 1500 BC the Hittites, whose language was dominant in Asia Minor and adjoining regions, referred to it in their cuneiform script as wiyan-, in their hieroglyphic script as wiānas, and in a language called Luwian as win-. This is the long-sought oldest cognate of numerous forms. The discoverers of the Mycenaean Greek Script have found the word woi-nē-wei for 'wine- merchant, while the oldest Greek name on an archaic inscription is “Woinos”, which lost its “w” and became the Classical oinos. From this comes Etruscan and Latin vinum and all of its offshoots...”228 A few years later, Amerine echoed him before going even further:

“Even the neighboring languages accepted the Hittite word: in Armenian it is gini, in

Mingrelian gvin-i, and in Georgian -gvino. Even the Semitic languages used the word:

227 Hyams (1965) 87. 228 Seltman (1957) 15.

141 wayin (later yayin) in Hebrew, wayn in Sabaean, Arabic, and Ethiopian.”229 Thus, the theories of an earlier generation were modified by a wave of excitement apparently fueled by the obvious antiquity of the Hittite language. As Hittite provided the oldest attestation of the term (so they said), thus it must also be the source of the term.

Thus, the state of the discipline as the 20th century reached its final two decades can only be described as a state of anarchy. Whether the word should be drawn from

Indo-European, Semitic, or some other family (and if from Indo-European, what branch?) remained an open question. Linguists, more careful with the data than some we have cited, were reduced to pleading ignorance on the topic. Chantraine, who published his excellent etymological dictionary of Greek in 1977, discussed the likelihood that neither the Latin, Greek, nor Hittite forms of the word for wine can be derived from one another before saying:

“On se demande à quelle langue ces formes diverses sont empruntées. Le mot pourrait être pris à une langue indo-européenne très ancienne et se trouver finalement apparenté à lat. vītis, grec ἴτυς, etc. Il semble toutefois plus plausible que la culture de la vigne se soit développée dans des régions méditerranéennes, le Pont, ou le sud du Caucase: en ce cas le terme ne serait pas indo-européen. De son côté, le sémitique a emprunté arabe wain, hébreu jajin, assyr. īnu (sémitique commun wainu).”230

Chantraine seems certain about few things. First, the term could be Indo-European.

Second, the term is seemingly not Semitic. But beyond that, Chantraine expresses

229 Amerine (1965) 10. 230 Chantraine (1977) 785. Chantraine is known for his conservative treatment of terms throughout his dictionary; a slightly earlier Greek etymological dictionary (Frisk 1970) is more willing to entertain theories of an Indo-European origin, even going so far as to consider the possibility that all attestations of the term in Indo-European, Semitic, and Kartvelian stem from “einer nordbalkanischen idg. Sprache”. The language (and the means of transmission) are not specified.

142 hesitancy. Wine culture was founded and spread in the area of the Mediterranean and

Pontic basins; the word is likely simply to be a Wanderwort common to the languages and cultures of the region. So echoes the 1982 edition of the Oxford Latin dictionary, which tersely comments about the term in various languages, “...all prob. from a common Mediterranean source.”231 It would seem that “the men of letters” could do no better than this.

Scholars of the West were befuddled; a fresh look at the evidence was needed.

This came suddenly in 1984 with the publication of Soviet scholars Gamkrelidze and

Ivanov's magnum opus, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans.232 While making a number of other claims considered to be audacious at the time (some still today), these scholars posited an Indo-European origin for the word for wine. More importantly, unlike many of their predecessors, they set out to examine the linguistic data in something approaching a scientific fashion. They revived the theory which had been in circulation for over a hundred years about the possible link of the word to the Indo-European root

*wei(H) 'weave, twist' while showing that the distribution of the terms across the Indo-

European languages could be the product of a native process of vowel alternation called ablaut. They also challenged the idea of the term as a borrowing into more northern families (Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic), noting that such claims were based more on

“cultural-historical assumptions about the original location of grapes and the ancient

231 Oxford Latin Dictionary (1982) 2067. 232 This work was only translated into English in 1995; it is the translation which is cited henceforth. Some (although not all) of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov's ideas were anticipated in Georgiev (1981).

143 Indo-European homeland” than on anything in the linguistic data.233 By claiming an Indo-

European origin for the term, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov claimed that they could derive the word in each family by well-established sound laws and linguistic rules.

Although dedicating fewer than ten pages in all to the topic, Gamkrelidze and

Ivanov's claims invited a reanalysis of the question from other linguists. Three years later, the prominent Leiden Indo-Europeanist Robert Beekes published a brief but important article which took the idea of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov one step further. “A decisive argument could be found, I think,” Beekes says, “if we could show that the different forms could be explained from PIE morphology.”234 In five pages, Beekes went on to demonstrate the likelihood that the original term was an n-stem in Indo-European, making it likely indeed that the term was of Indo-European provenance. Although only a brief discussion, Beekes's article represented the endorsement of a prominent and respected Western linguist, and the hypothesis that the word for wine was of Indo-

European origin was given a huge boost.

Yet for all their importance, the efforts of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov and of Beekes hardly put the matter to rest. For one thing, their discussions of the topic amounted to a combined thirteen pages, hardly the exhaustive study necessary to examine all of the evidence and to make a strong case for the Indo-European quality of the term. More importantly, gaps remained in their explanations of the data, as one might expect from such brief discussions. As such, others were left free to disregard or to dismiss their

233 For the quote, see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) 558; the entire discussion spans pages 557-64. 234 Beekes (1987) 21.

144 claims. Etymological dictionaries of the late 1980s and the 1990s showed themselves reluctant to adopt the new ideas; Lehmann's 1986 dictionary of Gothic includes a paragraph on the theory of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, yet states rather authoritatively that the term was “taken over into IE languages as they invaded the Mediterranean areas

[....] The word has also been borrowed independently into Afro-Asiatic […] Discussed widely, as by [two scholars], with references stating that no ultimate source can be determined.”235 Meanwhile, Orel in his 1998 etymological dictionary of Albanian ignores the theory of Indo-European origins altogether, stating that the terms for wine in various branches of Indo-European were “ultimately borrowed from Sem *wainu-” and giving a number of references to that effect.236 Only two years later in 2000, Zamora provides a well-informed discussion of the origins of the word in his tome on wine at Ugarit but concludes that “como occure con el semítico, no es posible explicar convincentemente la raíz *wayn- como de origen indoeuropeo.”237 Yet Mallory and Adams are more sympathetic to the idea in their 1997 encyclopedia of Indo-European culture, noting that the presence of the word in multiple language families of the Near East has discouraged an Indo-European reconstruction but that “this word is thoroughly IE in appearance and plausibly connected with *wei(H)- 'twist, wind' (cf. Latin vītis 'vine').”238 Martirosyan's

2010 etymological dictionary of Armenian is ever so slightly more confident, putting forth a number of theories but concluding that “the PIE origin of 'wine' is more

235 Lehmann (1986) 399. 236 Orel (1998) 500. 237 Zamora (2000) 274. 238 Mallory and Adams (1997) 644.

145 probable.”239 Of recent sources, only de Vaan's 2008 etymological dictionary of Latin confidently accepts the idea of the term's origins as an n-stem in Proto-Indo-

European.240 Curiously, even Beekes's own 2010 etymological dictionary of Greek shows a slight degree of hesitation at positing a Proto-Indo-European origin for the term, although this stems mostly from discomfort with a perceived mismatch of the Indo-

European homeland with early winemaking regions.241 All the same, non-linguists were meanwhile making use of the idea of Indo-European origins as it suited them, as did

Ryan and Pitman in their 1998 book on the flooding of the Black Sea and its subsequent dispersal of populations.242

Thus, despite the important efforts of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov as well as Beekes, the question of the origins of the word for wine remains in some doubt. Although their evaluation of the linguistic data helped to turn scholarly opinion in the direction of favoring an Indo-European origin for the term, work remains to be done. Importantly, no systematic study has been conducted to confirm or refute the hypothesis that the international word for wine is of Indo-European provenance (and just as importantly, to clarify the relationship between the manifestations of the term in various language families). A thorough inquest based on sound linguistic principles like those expounded above is needed to decisively determine the origin of the term. For the remainder of this chapter, we will attempt to do just that by examining each of the major families of the

239 Martirosyan (2010) 214. 240 de Vaan (2008) 680. 241 Beekes (2010) 1058. 242 Ryan and Pitman (1998).

146 ancient Near East in turn which are known to have had this term and coming to a decision as to which, if any, was the home for the word which would be spread throughout so many languages at such an early date.

Egyptian?

We begin with Egyptian, a language ultimately related to the Semitic languages through their common parent, Afro-Asiatic. Yet the branching of these two language groups would have taken place far into prehistory, and it is unlikely that wine or any words for it would have existed at such an early date.243 Thus, we cannot hypothesize this remote genetic link as the reason for which both Egyptian and Semitic possess the word for wine. Egyptian must have either borrowed the word or it must be the source for it. Egyptian is attested from a very early date, specifically around 3000 BCE. The

Egyptian language was famously written using hieroglyphs, essentially pictures which represented one, two, or more consonants. A side effect of this colorful writing system was that vowels were not preserved, and so we can reconstruct only the consonants of the oldest Egyptian.

Nonetheless, it is not difficult to find the word for wine in the hieroglyphs.244

From the time of the Old Kingdom (approximately the last half of the third millennium

BCE), the term wnš is attested to refer to the fruit of the vine (although it may be used to refer also to other edible fruits).245 By adding a simple feminine derivative suffix, the related term wnš.t is created to mean specifically wine. Thus, we see that the Egyptian

243 See the discussion in the chapter on material evidence. 244 The following discussion is based on Erman and Grapow (1955) 325 (wnš) and 115 (ἰrp). 245 See the brief discussion of the term in Poo (1995) 27.

147 language does in fact deploy some native morphology (the common feminine marker in

-t) to distinguish between “grape” and “wine”. Yet this fairly superficial touch-up cannot hide the fact that the word seems to have connections (i.e., cognates or derivatives) nowhere else in the language. We thus might begin to wonder if the term is indeed native to Egyptian. Our suspicions are further aroused when we note that another word for wine and the vine exists, ἰrp, which is in fact the primary word for wine in Egyptian and which appears in several morphological guises with varying shades of meaning (e.g.,

ἰrp.t 'wine-god'). It seems clear that this root is native to Egyptian and was the default term (or rather, set of terms) for wine, the vine, and all of its attendant culture. In fact, the term wnš and its corresponding derivative wnš.t are much less common, with greater attestation at a much later period (despite their unimpeachable ancient pedigree).246 All of this implies that wnš is a term whose existence lay at the periphery of ancient Egyptian wine culture, not at the center. While nothing we have seen necessitates a borrowing of the term into Egyptian, therefore, these morphological and semantic facts would fit quite well with such a scenario. We must move on in our search.

Semitic?

We turn next to the Semitic languages, which include Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic,

Arabic, Ethiopic, Epigraphic South Arabian,247 and Akkadian. The oldest-attested of these,

Akkadian, reaches well back into the third millennium BCE, while Ugaritic is attested

246 In fact, Poo (1995) includes these words in a list of terms used to designate wine primarily in the Greco-Roman period. 247 “Epigraphic South Arabian” refers to a group of four similar languages from southern Arabia preserved only on stone from the 8th century BCE to the 6th century CE.

148 from the latter half of the second millennium BCE and several others (Hebrew, Aramaic) from the early first millennium BCE. The word for wine finds a widespread representation throughout the Semitic languages; in fact, of those listed, only Akkadian and Aramaic do not possess it.248 The Semitic languages are written in diverse ways;

Akkadian is written in a cuneiform script which records vowels, while the others are written in an alphabet of some sort, the earlier exemplars of which record only consonants. The term is attested as follows in several Semitic languages:249

Ugaritic: yn

Early Canaanite vernacular: yenu

Biblical Hebrew: yyn (vocalized later as yayin)

Epigraphic South Arabian: wyn (also attested as yyn)

Classical Arabic: wayn-

Ethiopic: wayn

As we look at this data, we are struck by the relative uniformity of the word for wine throughout Semitic. In all cases but two, the word forms a triconsonantal root—a structure typical of Semitic—and in all cases, it exhibits y and n as its final two consonants. Only the first consonant reveals any differences: it appears as y in Hebrew,

Ugaritic, and the linguistically similar Early Cannanite vernacular250 (as well as sometimes

248 A term īnu is found fleetingly in Akkadian sources (specifically once, in a vocabulary list), but its meaning is unclear. Many (including, recently, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995) have interpreted this word to be the Akkadian cognate of the international word for wine, but the term is obscure and need not mean 'wine' at all; see Chicago Assyrian Dictionary I (1960) 152. See the discussion in Zamora (2000) 270. 249 See Cohen (1996) 534. These terms often mean “grape” or “vine” as well as “wine”; we will discuss this later in the chapter. 250 See Horowitz and Oshima (2006) 31-32. A broken cuneiform tablet, found at Aphek on the Canaanite

149 in Epigraphic South Arabian), while elsewhere the consonant is w. This is an important clue to the history of the word for wine in Semitic, for it reflects a well-known sound change whereby a w at the beginning of a word became a y, but only in the subgroup of languages known as Northwest Semitic. In other words, sometime after the Northwest

Semitic subgroup split from the other Semitic languages but before our first attestation of any language in this group, word-initial *w became y in all words in the language. This change is thought to have happened no later than 2000 BCE.251 Not coincidentally, the three exemplars above of Northwest Semitic (Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Early Canaanite) demonstrate a change of the first consonant from w to y. This shift occasioned a further change in most of the affected languages: while Hebrew maintained the unwieldy and unusual structure yyn, Ugaritic and Early Canaanite simplified the root to yn. The vocalic evidence present in the attested Early Canaanite form yenu suggests that this may have in fact occurred via the monophthongization of *yain- to yen-, not an unusual development from a phonetic perspective.252 In any case, the fact that the Northwest

Semitic exemplars have undergone this sound change of initial *w to y guarantees that the word was present in that group when the sound change took place. This is important

plain and dated to around 1230 BCE, appears to contain a trilingual vocabulary list (Sumerian, Akkadian, and the local vernacular) with the entries GEŠTI]N.MEŠ : ka-ra-nu : ye-nu. 251 Speakers of a Northwest Semitic language first appear on the stage of history in the form of the Amorites, who by the beginning of the second millennium BCE were a distinct presence in Mesopotamia having arrived from the west. Since Northwest Semitic was already recognizable as a subgroup by this point (and was clearly past any point of unity), it follows that any sound change posited at the level of Proto-Northwest Semitic must have already taken place. See Kuhrt (1995) 75. 252 Most of the Northwest Semitic-speaking world may have undergone this monophthongization (the term appears as yn in the Samaria ostraca from 8th-century central Israel), with only the relatively isolated kingdom of Judah maintaining the diphthong (but even then reducing it when not accented). See the discussion in Zamora (2000) 269.

150 evidence, for it rules out any kind of late borrowing into these languages and, in fact, provides secure testimony that the word for wine is of significant antiquity in the Semitic languages. Note also that the southern Semitic languages—Arabic, Ethiopic, Epigraphic

South Arabian—display the original consonant w. If we are to put any stock in geography, we would note that these Semitic speakers would have been in greatest contact with speakers of Northwest Semitic. The fact that the w remains in these southern Semitic languages therefore implies that they inherited this word from an earlier stage of Semitic and did not borrow it from their neighbors to the north at a later date, a possibility we would otherwise find difficult to rule out.253

Thus, the linguistic evidence convincingly shows that the international word for wine was present in the Semitic languages from a very early date, likely as early as the middle of the third millennium BCE. Beyond this point, however, our work becomes more difficult. Conjectures for the date of the break-up of Proto-Semitic vary significantly, so we should be wary of being too dogmatic about any one date. However, if we accept a low date of 3750 BCE,254 we still find ourselves with a gap of over a millennium between the time when we can be confident that the word for wine existed in Semitic and the time that its dialects began to disintegrate. The absence of this particular term for wine in Akkadian does us no favors, for Akkadian is the main representative of East Semitic, the group generally agreed to have branched off the

253 The doublet in Epigraphic South Arabian (wyn/yyn) may indicate that the second instantiation was borrowed from the north but failed to displace the inherited (unshifted) term. However, Lipinski (2001) 121 notes a sporadic interplay of w and y in the language to which this doublet is most likely attributable. 254 See Kitchen et al. (2009).

151 earliest (that is, around 3750 BCE). If Akkadian had this word, we would have an easier time retrojecting the word's existence back to the proto-language; yet since Akkadian lacks the term, we are at liberty to claim that the term did not exist in Proto-Semitic, but instead arose at a stage after the split of East Semitic but before the disintegration of the other dialects.255

Thus, an examination of the status of the word for wine in the various dialects of

Semitic does not prove (or conclusively disprove) that the word was present in Proto-

Semitic. Yet we still must seek to answer the fundamental question of origins: did this word originate in Semitic, or was it a borrowing? If the former, we will much more readily conclude that the word was in fact present at the Proto-Semitic stage and before; if the latter, we will be more likely to explain the absence of the word in East Semitic by positing that it was borrowed into the remaining Semitic dialects before their subsequent disintegration.

As we did with Egyptian, we must first examine other words in the language to see if the word for wine seems to fit in with other vocabulary which is known to be native to Semitic. Much like with Egyptian, we are unable to find any terms that exhibit clear links: in other words, the term has no derivatives and appears to be derived from nothing.256 Furthermore, we are able to note that other wine-related vocabulary exists

255 There is no way to prove, of course, that Akkadian did not have the term at an earlier stage. It simply could have been lost in Akkadian, or even could have been present all along but simply unattested in the cuneiform literature (although the latter seems unlikely given the very frequent mention of wine). 256 One scholar has tried to find such links; see van Selms (1974). His theory that the term y(y)n is connected to a Hebrew root for “squeeze” (ynh) is semantically acceptable, but such a root with such a meaning cannot be projected for Proto-Semitic. Furthermore, van Selms explicitly declaims attempting to trace the term into Indo-European, correctly noting that “the Phoenicians cannot be considered the transmitters, for the Greek and Latin forms suppose the archaic w at the beginning of the word, but

152 across much of the language family. In fact, no less than three roots can be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic which refer to grapes, vines, vineyards, and their alcoholic product, one of which is reflected in the standard Akkadian word for wine, karānum.257 Thus, the evidence of the morphology and vocabulary of Semitic gives us no positive reason to believe that the word for wine originated in this family.

If we examine the phonology of the word, we see that no strictly phonological objections exist to this being a native Semitic word; after all, the family comfortably exhibits all three phonemes [w], [j]258, and [n]. Additionally, we can easily reconstruct the vowel as [a], giving us the complete reconstruction of [wajn-]; [a] is one of the three vowels reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, and so it raises no eyebrows here. However, when we dig a bit deeper, we do note something of potential concern if we wish to claim that this root is native to Semitic. Although the word is triconsonantal, two of the three components (y and w) are precisely the two elements that Semitic used most commonly as a means of enlarging Proto-Afro-Asiatic biconsonantal roots into the triconsonantal system typical of Semitic.259 The fact that two of these consonants appear in the same word *wayn- is mildly curious. Although this can indeed occur in Semitic (e.g., *hawaya

“he was”) and although comfortably Semitic in its present configuration, the root is not what one might term completely regular and could be easily construed as an outlier. We

already in Ugaritic the word begins with a y.” 257 Huhnergard (2011) 2068: “The early Semites cultivated grapes (*'inab-) growing on vines (*gapn-) in vineyards (*karm- or karn-) from which they produced wine (*wayn-, akin to Indo-European words for wine and probably a loanword in Proto-Semitic as well).” 258 In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [j] transcribes the sound customarily written y in English. 259 See Diakonoff (1988).

153 therefore find that we are somewhat discouraged on both morphological and phonological grounds from asserting that the word for wine arose as a native Semitic term.

Thus, the evidence gives us free rein to posit that this root was borrowed into

Semitic: the term does not exist in all branches of Semitic, it shows no morphological connections throughout the language family, and it is phonologically suspect. If indeed the term was borrowed, we are thrown back into the web of uncertainty we spun earlier about precisely when the term was borrowed into this language family. Given that data internal to the family have told us all they can, however, we should press on in the hopes of uncovering other data which might shed light on the situation in Semitic. Having found that the word for wine is not comfortably native to Semitic, the solution likely lies elsewhere.

Indo-European?

We turn now to the Indo-European language family, an extensive group of languages which stretch today from the Atlantic Ocean to India and from the Arctic to the Bay of Bengal (not counting recent colonizations such as Australia and the Americas).

Indo-European is customarily divided into ten subgroups260, all of which are traced back to one common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. There are several different theories as to the location and time-depth of Proto-Indo-European, but the ones most seriously debated focus their attention on the regions immediately north or south of the

260 The ten subgroups are Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Anatolian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and Tocharian.

154 Caucasus, either on the steppes of Russia or in central or eastern Anatolia. Estimated dates range between 6500 and 3500 BCE. As such, despite the current far-flung nature of the family, Indo-European expansion likely took place from an area (and at a time) which falls within the parameters which have been set for the place and time of the origins of wine (as we will see in the next chapter). Therefore, we should from the outset take seriously the possibility that the word for wine may be of Indo-European origin.

Much like with the Semitic languages, the word for wine is widespread if not ubiquitous in the Indo-European languages. It is present in eight of the ten subgroups, being missing only in Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.261 There follows the oldest attested form of the word in each subgroup:

Anatolian: wiyanaš (Hittite)

Greek: woinos (inferrable from Mycenaean wo-no, also Doric)

Italic: uīnom (inferrable from Faliscan ui[no]m)

Celtic: uinom (Lepontic; length of unclear)

Germanic: wein (Gothic)

Armenian: gini (Classical)

Balto-Slavic: vino (Old Church Slavic)

Albanian: venë (Geg)

261 Some older scholars claim as an Indo-Iranian cognate the Sanskrit term vena-, a term whose root means 'love' or 'desire' (cf. Billiard (1913) 36). Although the connection is acceptable from a phonological perspective, the semantics would remain largely unexplained. While the term does exist in early (Rig Vedic) collocations pertaining to intoxicating beverages (e.g., “desire for soma”), it also exists in other collocations unrelated to the topic (e.g., “desire for truth”). As such, the term is no longer cited as a cognate by modern scholars: see Mayrhofer (1954).

155 Whereas the Semitic data exhibited a large degree of uniformity—a triliteral structure, the same consonants and vowels with a few sound changes taken into account—the

Indo-European data is strikingly dissonant. At first glance, some of the words barely seem related—does Armenian gini really belong here? Even the exemplars which are clearly related—Italic uīnom and Greek woinos, for instance—contain some not- insignificant differences of structure or morphology. Once again, we must answer the basic question: which of these words were borrowed and which were inherited? If a given instantiation of the word shows evidence of having followed the sound laws of a given subgroup, then we can assume that the word was passed down from generation to generation within that subgroup. If it does not or if it happens to accord closely with the form the word takes in a neighboring linguistic community, then we might posit a borrowing. In so doing, we will determine the word's antiquity in each subgroup while simultaneously attempting to establish a putative form of the word in Proto-Indo-

European, if indeed it can be shown that the word was not borrowed into each subgroup at a later date.

We begin with the Italic subgroup, whose best-known member in ancient times was Latin. In Classical Latin, the word for wine is well-attested as vīnum, with a long [i].

The -um represents a common ending for neuter nouns, and a well-known sound law leads us to trace the [u] back to an [o]. But the long [i] is more difficult, for we know that such a vowel in Classical Latin could have come from either a genuine long [i] in an older stage of the language or from the diphthongs [ei] or [oi].262 However, evidence from the 262 See Sihler (1995) 52-53, where the word for wine in Latin is thus simplistically connected with the

156 other Italic languages helps us to decide on the correct pre-form of the Latin term.

Crucially, every attestation of the term in Italic exhibits a simple monophthongal , with no trace of a diphthong.263 This is particularly important because the other Italic dialects show outcomes of the diphthongs at odds with Latin and with each other: if this term once had a diphthong in the first syllable, it would exhibit a simple nowhere but in Latin.264 The best explanation for all of the Italic data is that the term was always monophthongal in Latin as well as in the other Italic dialects.265 The Latin data, in turn, vouchsafes the additional important detail of the length of the vowel. As for the consonants, all three are stable and show little change in the Italic languages. Thus, it is sensible to conclude that the various reflexes of the term in the Italic dialects all descend from a form [wīnom] in Proto-Italic- that is, the language from which all the Italic languages descended and which in turn descends from Proto-Indo-European.266 There is thus far no reason to posit a borrowing, although the sound laws which the word was put through in the various Italic languages are non-distinctive enough that we cannot yet entirely rule it out should we be able to find a plausible lending language.

Greek term woinos. 263 As seen above, the Faliscan of c. 600 BCE has vi[no]m; a somewhat later Faliscan inscription has vino. See Blumel (1972) 26 as well as the discussion in Baldi (1999) 123-25. Meanwhile, Umbrian has vinu; Oscan has the proper name Viínikiís, which seems to attest not only the monophthong but the long vowel. See Buck (1904) 21. 264 Specifically, Oscan exhibits no monophthongization at all, while Umbrian and Faliscan show a simple loss of the glide with compensatory lengthening (that is, an apparent development to [ē] or [ō]). See Blumel (1972) 33-34. 265 Some, trying to trace the Latin form back to an Indo-European *woinos (as Greek implies), have held that the word did indeed undergo monophthongization in Latin. However, they are then at a loss to explain the other Italic forms, having to resort to an unlikely or even impossible borrowing from post- shifted Latin. See Buck (1904) 21. Beekes (1987) reasons that a proto-form in long [i] (arising from *wiHno-) is the best explanation for all of the Italic data, and he is almost certainly correct. 266 de Vaan (2008) 692 traces the term to a “PIt. *wīno-”.

157 We move on to the languages of northern Europe, which fall into three groups:

Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic. These branches are attested fairly late, but at their first attestation each of them possesses the word for wine. Our earliest-attested Celtic language, Lepontic, attests uinom around the first century BCE267; later Celtic languages show this same word as the product of various regular sound changes (cf. Old Irish fín or

Welsh gwin). Meanwhile, Gothic, the oldest-attested Germanic language, has wein

(where the digraph reflects a monophthongal [i])268; and Old Church Slavic, hailing from the Balto-Slavic branch, has vino.269 All three of these families attest a pre-form in the shape [win-]. The lack of a final vowel or other declensional ending in Germanic need not concern us, as this conforms to the sound laws.270 Additionally, the writing of the vowel of the Gothic iteration as leads one to believe that this descends from a long [i], precisely what we might expect given the Italic evidence.271 Thus, the word for wine in all three of these languages mimics exactly the shape of the word as seen in

Italic. Given the fact that wine and the vine spread from south to north in Europe, some have theorized that these three branches of central and northern Europe borrowed the word for wine from Latin at a relatively late date (i.e., before their first written

267 Baldi (1999) 146-7. Although there has been controversy in the past about the identity of Lepontic, it is generally regarded as a Celtic language by scholars today. 268 The vowel is attested as long throughout the Germanic languages; see Lehmann (1986) 399. He notes the preponderance of opinion that the word is a borrowing from Latin, although no evidence is given. 269 See Vasmer (1953) for a discussion of the Slavic forms. While conceding the antiquity of the word in Slavic, he notes that most scholars leaned toward positing a borrowing from Latin or a Germanic language. 270 In fact, the form wein in Gothic is precisely what we would expect as the outcome of an o-stem neuter in *-om; cf. waurd. 271 See Lambdin (2006) xiv: “The vowels e, o, and ei are regularly referred to as long vowels since they can usually be traced etymologically to long vowels or diphthongs in PG [Proto-Germanic] or IE [Indo- European].”

158 attestation and the application of appropriate sound laws but after their first contact with wine-trading Romans).272 This cannot be ruled out in every case, but by the same token positing a borrowing is not necessary. It is just as likely that these three language groups came by the word from their common source, Proto-Indo-European (or, in any case, a subgroup of Proto-Indo-European which spawned them as well as Latin). The antiquity of the term in these languages is suggested by the abundance of compounds created using the word for wine, some of which must even be traced back to the proto- language of each respective group.273 For instance, South Slavic attests a term vinjaga

'grape(vine)' which exhibits ancient-looking morphology foreign to Latin placed on a root in vin-. Meanwhile, the Germanic languages attest a host of such compounds, like Gothic weinatriu 'grapevine' and weinagards 'vineyard', as well as more affective terms like weinnas 'drunk'.274 This evidence, while not necessarily conclusive, suggests that the root was not an unintelligible loan into Slavic or Germanic from Latin but was rather a native inheritance displaying versatility with inherited morphology. This evidence seems to tip the scales in favor of genetic descent in each of these families. In any case, we can

272 One scholar, Bonfante (1974: 87), confidently posits Latin as the source of all Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and even Etruscan forms: “Dass das Wort im Etruskischen, Umbrischen, Faliskischen, Volskischen sowie in den nördlichen Sprachen (Kelt., German., Slav.) aus dem Lateinischen kommt, ist ganz sicher...” This is clearly impossible, as many of the attested forms (e.g., Faliscan ui[no]m, c. 600 BCE, not to mention Etruscan vinum from only slightly later) predate any sort of cultural (and hence likely linguistic) influence from Latin, which would not have overtaken Etruscan as the prestige language of northern and central Italy until around the third century BCE. While it is not unreasonable to posit borrowings among the Celtic and Italic languages of northern and central Italy (along with Etruscan), it is hardly tenable to consider Latin as the source of the term in these languages. 273 This is at least the case for Germanic, Slavic, and Italic; see Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) 558. Given this fact, it is unclear why one would posit a borrowing only into Celtic, especially given the fact that Celtic speakers in their heyday inhabited a wide swath of land in central-to-southern Europe on the borders of wine-producing regions. 274 See the discussion in Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) 557-58, especially note 59. For the Germanic evidence, see Lehmann (1986) 400.

159 surely make this claim: all four of these subgroups of Indo-European- Italic, Celtic,

Germanic, and Balto-Slavic- possess a term for wine in [wīn-] of some antiquity.

If we had the evidence of only these four language groups, we might be able to make a neat case for tracing this term—with the noted phonological shape—directly back to Proto-Indo-European. However, complications begin to arise as we examine the other four groups which attest this term. We begin with Greek, whose antiquity sets the other four to shame. As we have noted, the oldest Greek (specifically Mycenaean, attested around 1600 BCE) attests the word for wine as woinos. While the structure of the word and indeed the two root consonants match up, we notice two differences.

First, the declensional ending reveals that the term is an o-stem masculine, not an o- stem neuter as in Latin. Yet we might forgive this difference if not for a bigger issue, the presence of the vowel [o] between [w] and [i]. This immediately makes our job of reconstruction more difficult, for we can no longer posit a simple Proto-Indo-European form in [wīn]-. Something else is going on, and if we are to trace the word for wine back to Proto-Indo-European we must account for this discrepancy. Yet this difference does do us at least one large favor by ensuring that the word for wine was not borrowed from

Greek into Italic, Celtic, Germanic, or Balto-Slavic. Since we know that the incarnation of the word in the latter four groups could not have contained an o where it exists in Greek, we know that those groups cannot have obtained the word via direct borrowing from

Greek. This is an important observation, for the logical direction of borrowing (as judged from the flow of wine and wine-related technology from east to west and south to

160 north)275 would naturally lead one to believe that the Greeks may have been the ones to disseminate the word, if indeed it was disseminated. The case for borrowing takes another hit when we remember that the word for wine in the Semitic languages also contains a vowel between [w] and [i]/[j], in this case [a]. The Phoenicians, speakers of a

Northwest Semitic language and (like the Greeks) great disseminators of the luxuries of the East, are thus also ruled out as candidates for the source language of a putative borrowing of wine into the Indo-European languages of the north and west. The discrepancy in the shape of the word for wine is therefore a double-edged sword: although it makes our task of linguistic reconstruction more difficult, it reveals the sheer likelihood that the word for wine as present in Latin and other northwest Indo-European languages was not a borrowing but is rather present thanks to genealogical inheritance.276 We are thus simultaneously encouraged to attempt an Indo-European reconstruction while being disabused of any notions of its simplicity.

We continue on to the remaining subgroups. The form attested in Classical

Armenian is gini, which at first glance looks as though it has little to do with the word for wine. Yet when we examine the sound laws of Armenian, we find that the term is in fact the outcome of well-behaved rules, specifically one which states that word-initial [w] becomes [g], almost certainly via [gw].277 Thus, the familiar consonants [w] and [n]

275 See the following chapter on material evidence. 276 Etruscan has also been mentioned as a possible source of the words for wine in the western Mediterranean. In Etruscan the shape of the word is conveniently [win-] (possibly [vin-]), and thus (on these grounds alone) it is a much better candidate than Greek or Phoenician as a possible source of the term in the area. Of course, it is also quite possible that this wordshape is due to the fact that borrowing went the other way—i.e., from Indo-European languages of the region into Etruscan. See the discussion below. 277 See the discussion in Martirosyan (2010). The attitude therein is generally favorable toward the

161 resurface. As to the vowels, does the Armenian form accord with our first reconstruction

(*[wīn-]) or our second (*[woin-])? Although the simple may create confusion, the sound laws once again provide welcome clarity: an in an initial syllable can only derive from a diphthong (either *ei or *oi), not from an *i (whether long or short).278

Thus, we can reconstruct either *[wein-] or *[woin-]. Both are sensible from an Indo-

European perspective, but the close connection that Armenian is known to have with

Greek makes the latter more likely. Nonetheless, when we proceed to reconstruct the ending, we find that it cannot be reconciled with the Greek *-os; the final of the

Armenian term must arise from an ending in *-iyo-, something different from anything we have seen thus far. Thus, the forebear of the Armenian iteration of the word for wine appears to have been *[woinijo-]. Although closer to Greek than to any of the northwestern Indo-European dialects, Armenian nonetheless reveals its own unique treatment of the term.279

The Albanian evidence strikes much the same chord as the Armenian. The two

Albanian dialects Geg and Tosk attest venë and verë respectively, with both going back to a form with an [n]. Importantly, the must go back to a diphthong (either *oi or *ai) and cannot continue a long [i]. Thus, Albanian stands with Greek and Armenian in providing evidence for a pre-form with a diphthong. There is little reason from an Indo-

Armenian word descending from a Proto-Indo-European word for wine. 278 Thanks to Jared Klein (personal communication) for his help in untangling the always-devilish sound laws of Armenian. See the reconstruction in Beekes (1987) 22. 279 Olsen (1999) 440 notes that “the Arm. vacillation between wo- and ea- stem may be explained on the basis of an old neuter”. If this is true, the Armenian form would be further differentiated from the masculine form in Greek.

162 European standpoint to posit a diphthong in *ai, and so *oi is almost certainly the correct reconstruction.280 The final <ë>, on the other hand, reflects the usual outcome of

*ā, and so we can reconstruct a proto-form *woinā. Thus, Greek, Armenian, and

Albanian, while essentially agreeing on the vocalism of the root, show three different derivational affixes. This makes it unlikely that any borrowed from each other, and more likely that they all have the word through a process of genetic descent which enabled each to add its own choice of native morphology to a native root.281

Having examined seven of the eight Indo-European subgroups which attest the word for wine, we have noted a remarkable diversity grouped around the basic dichotomy of monophthongal vs. diphthongal root. Yet the strangest is yet to come as we examine the word for wine in Anatolian, the earliest-attested and most idiosyncratic of the Indo-European language families. The evidence from Anatolian comes from two different languages, Hittite and Luvian.282 In each of these languages, a syllabic form of writing is used which serves to (at least partially) obscure the exact phonetic content of the words in question. In addition, the writing system of Hittite employs a cuneiform system which inherited linguistic detritus from both Akkadian and Sumerian. Sumerian 280 Orel (1998) reconstructs the form as *wainā, but such a claim is tendentious, as he wishes to conclude that the form is borrowed from a Semitic form in *wayn-. Meanwhile, Fortson (2004) 395 notes that “sure examples of reflexes of *ai... are unknown”, while Beekes (1987) accepts that the Albanian forms likely go back to *woinā. 281 Orel (1998) cites a parade of scholars who hypothesize different origins of this word in Albanian. Apart from the rather far-fetched possibility of a borrowing from Semitic, scholars have also suggested a borrowing from Latin or from Doric (or Northwest) Greek. This latter possibility is the only tenable one, as Attic οἴνη 'vine' would have existed as *ϝοίνᾱ in those dialects. Still, the semantic difference (presumably at a fairly late date) is troubling- surely the Proto-Albanians would have borrowed the actual term for 'wine', ϝοῖνος- and so it seems more likely that the word in Albanian is no borrowing at all. Beekes (1987) seems to be the first scholar to seriously consider this possibility. 282 I am very much indebted to Craig Melchert (personal communication) for his collation and analysis of the Anatolian data.

163 appears not to have had the international word for wine, instead strictly employing the native word geštin, but when the Akkadians and Hittites took over Sumerian cuneiform they continued to utilize the signs for geštin when writing about wine. Fortunately for us, they did not always do this, and every once in a while we get some genuine phonetic information about the Hittite word for wine. The only fully-spelled out instance of the word for wine in Hittite is a genitive singular wi-ya-na-aš, which can be normalized to wiyanaš;283 the accusative singular is likely represented by an attested GEŠTIN-na-an, which is almost certainly intended to represent wiyanan.284 The Luvian attestations of the word, unencumbered by Sumerian relics, essentially agree with this root shape and lead us to reconstruct for Proto-Anatolian the root *wiyan-.285 Such a reconstruction deviates from our reconstructions of the term in the other seven groups in a number of ways. We see that the Anatolian reflex expressly does not have a diphthong after the initial [w], but it also does not conform to the pattern of the monophthongal groups: rather than exhibiting a structure CVC, it uses two syllables—CVCVC—286to cover the same ground. Thanks to Anatolian, therefore, we can now distinguish three main treatments of the word for wine in Indo-European: those with roots in *[wīn-], those with roots in *[woin-], and the aberrant Anatolian *[wiyan-].287

283 Kloekhorst (2008) 1012 records this and various other attestations of the word(s) in Anatolian. 284 See Neu (1980) 227. 285 Attestations in Kloekhorst (2008) can be checked and expanded in Hawkins (2000). 286 In linguistic parlance, C stands for any consonant and V for any vowel. 287 Oettinger (2003) attempts to trace the Anatolian forms back to a root-shape in *woin-. While seemingly not impossible from a phonological perspective, such a reconstruction is biased by a desire to reconcile the Anatolian root-shape to that of Greek and others (even though such an endeavor fails to explain the divergent evidence from Italic and other northwestern groups and in fact complicates matters further in view of the discussion below). See de Vaan (2008) 680.

164 The Anatolian evidence shakes up our understanding of the Indo-European situation not just with respect to the root but also the stem of the word for wine. In all seven of the other Indo-European subgroups, the ending of the word for wine reflects some kind of standard thematic ending. In the first five we examined, the term is a basic o-stem (whether neuter or masculine); in Armenian, it reflects an ending in -(i)yo-, a standard thematic derivative; and in Albanian, it shows the traditional feminine marker in -ā. The Hittite evidence is ambiguous as to the stem-type of the word for wine, and so the cited form wiyanaš could perhaps descend from an Indo-European o-stem, thus maintaining some degree of concordance with the other branches. Yet the Luvian evidence, much clearer in this regard, disabuses us of any such notions. Several different attestations of the word—a nominative singular in wiyanīš,288 an accusative singular in wīnīn (syncopated from *wiyanīn via a regular sound law of Luvian),289 a dative singular in wīna (again showing syncopation from *wiyana)—290all demonstrate that this term was not an o-stem but in fact an n-stem.291 This is a qualitative difference from anything we have seen thus far. Also significant, a semantic difference exists: this term in Luvian patently means not “wine” but “grapevine”.292 In fact, the usual term for “wine” is maddu-, a word cognate with terms for alcohol in other branches of Indo-European

288 The form is attested in Hawkins (2000) 468. 289 The form is attested in Hawkins (2000) 175. 290 The form is attested in Hawkins (2000) 471. 291 The long i in the nominative and accusative forms is attributable to a phenomenon known as i- mutation discovered by Frank Starke in which an i is added between stem and ending in the nominative and accusative of animate nouns. See Rieken (2005). 292 Hawkins (2000) 468: “The translation “vine” is appropriate to most other attestations [as well as the one under discussion].”

165 (such as Greek μέθυ and English mead).293

It may appear that we have been digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a pit of confusion over the past several pages as we have examined more and more Indo-

European data at odds over the shape of a putative word for wine (or is it wine?) in the proto-language. The Anatolian data would seem to have delivered the coup de grace, and now a linguist with any sense would walk away secure in the knowledge that nothing more can be done except to say, as so many others have, that these words in all of their varying forms must be the result of some mysterious process whereby the word for wine seeped from culture to culture across the Mediterranean, changing along the way appearance and even meaning like a shapeshifter whose existence cannot be explained by any known rationale. Yet, as it turns out, the very data which has thrown us into this ultimate aporia will also be the means by which we begin to extricate ourselves and to build a substantive theory of the origins of this word as an Indo-European lexeme constructed with native Indo-European morphology. The Anatolian evidence, so different from the rest, will be the cipher through which we come to understand all of the other data we have examined.

Until arriving at the Anatolian data, there was no reason to doubt that the root of the word for wine was in the shape wV(V)n-. All of the attestations we have examined thus far—Egyptian, Semitic, Indo-European—exhibit such a shape. Yet Anatolian is different not just in root-shape but in what is included in the root. The revelation that the term is an n-stem in Luvian (and thus likely originally so in Hittite as well) causes a 293 See Starke (1990) 381.

166 significant reanalysis of the shape of the root. Indo-European n-stems are so called because they are formed by the addition of an [n] (along with an ablauting vowel) onto a pre-existing root immediately before the declensional ending. Thus, a typical n-stem noun in Indo-European has the shape root-(V)n-ending. If the word for wine was originally an n-stem—and the Anatolian languages are well-known for providing a glimpse into the archaic situation of Indo-European morphology—then we must reassess the role of the [n] in the term. Rather than being part of the root, it was once simply an item of derivational morphology. If true, this reveals two things. First, the actual root must be shorter, limited to what comes before the [n]. Second, if the presence of the [n] can indeed be explained as a common piece of Indo-European morphology which adds nuance to the basic meaning of the root, we are well on our way to proving that the word for wine is of Indo-European origin.294

What sort of root might we be looking for? We have seen shapes in wīn-, woin-, and wiyan-; now, if we remove the n-stem apparatus, we are left with wī-, woi-, or wiy-.

This is a strange root shape for Indo-European, whose roots typically have the structure

C(R)V(R)C.295 Resonants such as the glide [j] often fall in the second or fourth positions, less often at the end. Yet the long vowel in wī immediately raises our suspicions that a wild-card element may be at play: long vowels in Indo-European most often arise due to the erstwhile presence of laryngeals, sounds which once existed in the language but

294 Beekes (1987) was the first to discuss the term as an n-stem and thus to begin to definitively reveal its Indo-European character. 295 See Fortson (2010) 76 as well as one canonical discussion of root shape in Benveniste (1935). R stands for a resonant, a group of consonants which include liquids and glides (such as [j]).

167 which fell out long ago after creating certain reliable and observable effects. One of these effects is the lengthening of a previous vowel when the laryngeal is caught between that vowel and a subsequent consonant. Thus, an original form *wiH-n-, for instance, would naturally become wīn-. On the other hand, a laryngeal caught between two vowels was likely to simply disappear, leaving the two vowels in hiatus and inviting the introduction of a glide. An original form *wiH-on-, for example, would in fact by regular sound laws yield the root wiyan- which we find in Anatolian. And what about the shape in woin-, which would have to be derived from a proto-form *woiH-n-? As it turns out, a special law of Indo-European, the Saussure Effect, causes laryngeals to disappear without any effect under certain conditions (specifically, the presence of an [o] and a sonorant such as [j] in the same syllable). A form *woiH-n- would have naturally evolved into *woin- with no further changes.296

Thus, positing a root shape *w(V)iH seems to satisfy all of the phonological data while likewise yielding a well-formed root-shape from an Indo-European perspective

(C(V)RC).297 Yet all of this only matters if such a root exists. It is thus with a measure of relief that we find that *w(e)iH298 is in fact a well-attested and uncontroversial Indo-

European root with the meaning “to twist, braid, plait”.299 This root occurs in a number

296 For a recent discussion on the Saussure Effect throughout Indo-European, see Nussbaum (1997). In his 1987 article, Beekes does not credit this effect but nonetheless states that obtaining the desired outcome here is “probably no difficulty”. 297 The first consonant is [w], the vowel (when present) is [o], the resonant is [I] or [j], and the final consonant is the laryngeal. 298 There are (at least) three laryngeals posited for Proto-Indo-European. The laryngeal in the root *weiH is the first, and this accords with the data from the word for wine as well. 299 The word for wine has been hypothetically connected to this root for many years; see Walde and Pokorny (1930). Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) and Beekes (1987) were instrumental in providing greater legitimacy to this theory.

168 of subgroups and is the foundation of the English word weave, as well as the Latin word vieō and the Sanskrit word vayati, both of which essentially mean the same thing.

Having confirmed the existence of this root, we immediately want to connect it to the word whose history we have been following. Is this possible?

Once again, the Anatolian evidence provides the key to unlocking the puzzle. If what we have been calling “the word for wine” really just meant “wine”, we would have a difficult time explaining why it seems to be built off of a root which means “to twist, braid, plait”. After all, there is no obvious connection between these concepts and an alcoholic beverage made from fermented grape juice. But the Anatolian evidence that the original n-stem referred not to the product of the vine but to the vine itself suddenly brings the situation into focus. If one were to invent a name for the grapevine using only meaningful native morphology, one would likely focus on its obvious qualities in attempting to create a name. The grapevine is a notably twisty plant which braids itself around trees, stakes, and the like, and so it is entirely reasonable that early Indo-

Europeans would have named it “the twisty [plant]”. And what about the meaning of the n-stem? Although most of the stem-formations of Indo-European betray no clear semantic value, the n-stem does indeed. It is most often used to particularize or define a trait, as in the Latin name Cicero(n)- (“the chick-pea guy”; cf. Latin cicer 'chick-pea') or the Greek name Plato(n)- (“the broad guy”; cf. Greek platus “wide, broad”).300 A formation such as *w(e)iH-n- would straightforwardly mean “the twisty thing” in Proto-

300 In Germanic, the n-stem took the role of a general particulizer/definitizer and came to be regularly added to adjectives to express as much.

169 Indo-European. This cannot be understated: using native Indo-European morphology, we have arrived at the earliest form of the word for wine. We need look no further for the origins of the term.

The evidence we have examined above thus makes it likely that this term as first coined referred exclusively to the grapevine itself, not to wine.301 We have already noted that the Luvian n-stem refers exclusively to the vine, and, although the evidence is less clear, it is likely that the n-stem in Hittite also referred to the vine and not to wine.302

That this state of affairs is clear only from Anatolian is not surprising, since (as mentioned) the Anatolian languages often preserve valuable information about the early situation of Indo-European. However, there does exist one potential attestation of a relic n-stem for “vine” outside Anatolian, namely in Greek. Hesychius, a lexicographer of the 5th or 6th centuries CE who preserves a number of patently archaic terms, records this: “huiēn: vine(yard). Or huion.”303 This is (as we will see) somewhat difficult evidence for a few reasons, but it merits discussion nonetheless: if true, this would not be the first time Hesychius provided to historical linguists a priceless verbal artifact which is attested

301 Beekes (1987) 25 anticipates this analysis: “...the n-stem may have designated the plant, the 'vine', and the derivatives the 'wine'. This would make the connection with the root *uei(H)- 'to turn, twist' easier. But that would mean that the plant was PIE but not the product, which is improbable.” Yet this is exactly what the evidence suggests—namely, that the proto-language had one fixed term for 'vine' but not for 'wine'. We explore this idea in detail below. 302 For an example of the term clearly referring to a grapevine, see Hoffner (1997) 108-09. As is usual in Hittite, the term is not spelled out phonetically due to the use of the Sumerogram GEŠTIN. The identification of the term as 'vine' and not 'wine' is not only due to context but to the use of the determinative GIŠ, used to refer to items made of wood. 303 The Greek text reads, “ὑιήν· τὴν ἄμπελον. ἢ υἱόν”. Neither Chantraine (1977) nor Beekes (2010) is able to give an etymology for this term, although Chantraine does connect it to the Indo-European root *weiH. Specifically, he associates it with the Mycenaean we-je-we, not an n-stem derivative. Georgiev (1981) 66 agrees with Chantraine on this point, attempting to explain the term as a relic from Arcado- Cypriot. On the other hand, Mallory and Adams (1997) 644 state authoritatively that the Indo- European n-stem for grapevine is “preserved in Grk (Hesychius) ὑιήν 'grapevine'.”

170 nowhere else in the Greek language.

Whether one can accept this term as a genuine reflex of the ancient Indo-

European n-stem for “vine” depends on one's opinion on the issues surrounding its attestation. The difficulty begins with the imprecision of the entry in Hesychius. The lexicographer gives us not one but two forms, huiēn and huion. The second appears to be a normal thematic noun, while the first could be interpreted in a number of ways. It seems clear that Hesychius or his shadowy sources are not sure about the proper form of this word. However, we might guess that the more “normal” huion could have arisen as a regularization of the more archaic-looking huiēn.304 If so, we can simply focus on huiēn, albeit with a degree of hesitation about its accuracy. Another problem now arises:

Hesychius implies in his entry that this term is in the accusative case, not the nominative case. Perhaps he might wish to connect it to a putative well-formed and unremarkable feminine noun *huiē, but if so why the double attestation? Yet this term is clearly odd and non-contemporary, as is apparent from the syllabification of the term in a way foreign to the Greek of Hesychius's time.305 We must therefore entertain the possibility that Hesychius (or his source) glossed the term as an accusative not because it was so but because it was his best guess as to the case-ending of this strange, outdated term.

Yet strange, outdated terms rarely follow contemporary morphological norms, and thus

304 The term huion makes more sense both morphologically and semantically, at least on the level of folk- etymology: huion looks very similar to the Greek term for 'son'. This connection was explained by reference to the fact that vines give birth to other vines, as though to children. See Chantraine (1977). 305 When a word starts with a diphthong, the breathing mark is placed on the second of the two vowels. On this term, it is placed on the first, suggesting that we are not dealing with a diphthong but with two separate segments. This is unusual, and is likely meant to indicate that the initial upsilon was not to be read as a vowel but as a consonant, something in itself unusual (as we will soon see).

171 we should consider that the ending in -ēn may be something else. Specifically, Ancient

Greek had a class of n-stem nouns ending in -ēn in the nominative. These were less common than the usual n-stems ending in -ōn, and so these would have been marked indeed. The possibility thus presents itself that huiēn is in fact the nominative singular of an archaic Greek n-stem for “vine”. If this is in fact true, the phonology of the term vouches for its antiquity: in Koine Greek as well as in the Attic-Ionic from which it is primarily derived, initial [w] was lost before the Homeric era (that is, a millennium and a half or so before Hesychius).306 Yet other Greek dialects which persevered at least into the Hellenistic era maintained this sound. The term huiēn indeed maintains the [w] at the beginning of the word, giving proof of its antiquity and its oddity.307 In sum, it is difficult to prove for certain that this term as recorded by Hesychius is a reflex of the ancient Indo-European n-stem for “vine”, but we should not be surprised if it indeed is.308

From 'Vine' to 'Wine'

While we will tentatively admit the Greek form into evidence as an archaic n- stem, it must be stressed that the Anatolian evidence alone is sufficient to show that

Proto-Indo-European once had an n-stem noun meaning “grapevine”. In fact, we have

306 An Attic cognate, if indeed the word was preserved long enough in that dialect to undergo the sound change in question, must have been *ἰήν. 307 Strictly speaking, the term begins not with [w] but with [h]. This, however, appears to be an oddity of Greek: all word-initial upsilons received rough breathing marks, even if they etymologically lacked them. 308 The ending in -ēn instead of -ōn must also be explained, particularly as the Anatolian reflexes show the latter. It is likely that one of these forms was original, with the term being reassigned from one class to another in either early Greek or early Anatolian. See Sihler (1995) 288-89 for a discussion of the expansion of nouns in -ēn in Greek. Mallory and Adams (1997) 644 reconstruct a form *wiHēn, perhaps based solely on the Greek data.

172 another more indirect witness to its erstwhile presence: the precise contours of both the unity and the diversity in the varying formations of the word for wine in the various

Indo-European subgroups also attest to it. All contain the “twist” root followed by an [n], and yet differ significantly in the morphology appended thereafter. This indicates that they are all built off of the same archaic inherited n-stem formation: they are all derived from the word for “grapevine”. Yet if so, why do they all differ in other ways? How did the Indo-European languages derive 'wine' from 'the vine'? It is to this question that we now turn.

Once again, the Anatolian evidence provides us with an important clue. Although the n-stem term was used by speakers of both Luvian and Hittite to refer to the grapevine, we find evidence in Luvian (with likely concordance in Hittite) that from this n-stem was derived a thematic formation that meant not “vine” but “wine”. The process of derivation was simple, if multifarious. In Luvian, an -iyo- suffix was added to create a noun that, in its base form, means “of or pertaining to the grapevine”.309 Such a noun, attested as an ablative/instrumental wīnīdi (from *wiyaniyadi via syncope), could easily come to refer to the primary product which is “of or pertaining to the grapevine”- that is, wine.310 Hittite, on the other hand, appears to take a different tack to derive a word for “wine” from the n-stem for “vine”. Although the cited form wiyanaš could potentially be the genitive singular of a genuine n-stem, the fact that it clearly means “wine” and not “vine” in context leads us to believe that it is something else. Specifically, wiyanaš

309 See Starke (1990) 381. The term could conceivably mean anything pertaining to the grapevine, including grapes. 310 The form is recorded in Hawkins (2000) 177.

173 can be explained as an occurrence of hypostasis of the genitive, where an original genitive is reanalyzed as an a-stem (Indo-European o-stem) noun meaning “that of X”.311

Thus, a reanalyzed wiyanaš might mean “that of the grapevine”- in other words, “wine”.

Thus, in both cases, the evidence admits of an explanation whereby from the original n- stem meaning “vine” was derived a distinct noun to refer to the product of the vine. If this analysis is correct, the two nouns lived side-by-side in Anatolian, creating a pair whose semantic and morphological content would have been entirely transparent to speakers.

Thus, the Anatolian evidence demonstrates two distinct processes by which a word for wine could be created in Indo-European. The fact that Luvian and Hittite derive the term in different ways is vital, for it strongly suggests that at the time of the break-up of Proto-Anatolian there was not one widely accepted method of deriving a word for wine from the n-stem meaning “vine”. Clearly, more than one method was acceptable. If this was the case at the level of Proto-Anatolian, it was all the more true at the level of

Proto-Indo-European, its immediate ancestor. We thus have an explanation for why the word for wine in each Indo-European branch looks similar but is not reduceable to one precise proto-form. When the period of Proto-Indo-European unity was over, no one formation had won out among all the speakers of the language. Each dialect, when cut off from the others, eventually made its own choice of a definitive word for wine drawn from the basic building blocks of morphology inherited from their common ancestor.

Widely differing dialects might make the same morphological choice: like Luvian, 311 See Puhvel (2011) for a discussion of this phenomenon.

174 Armenian also chose to add an -iyo- suffix to the term for “grapevine” to derive a word for wine. Meanwhile, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic, and Greek all chose the same strategy, namely adding a thematic vowel to create an exocentric derivative of the n-stem.312 Yet even so they differed on the details: while the derivative was neuter in the first four subgroups, it was masculine in Greek. Meanwhile, Albanian settled on the feminine equivalent of such a thematic derivative.

Beyond the basic agreement among the subgroups of deriving the word for wine from an n-stem meaning “vine” and their quibbling over precisely how to do it, further isoglosses emerge. The first is the loss of the archaic n-stem formation meaning

“grapevine” in every subgroup except Anatolian (besides the Greek term found in

Hesychius, which was clearly moribund). Once an n-stem meaning “vine” and a corresponding thematic derivative meaning “wine” (such as Greek woinos or Latin vīnum) existed side-by-side, there likely arose a friction between the two over time, especially as sound changes (the loss of the laryngeal, syncope in some languages, etc.) conspired to make the terms less distinct. The thematic derivative likely won out for two reasons. First, every non-Anatolian Indo-European language experienced a significant growth in thematic nouns at the expense of consonant stems, and so the former simply had a greater chance at survival than the latter given the trends visible in the history of each language. Second, the term “wine” might have been more common than the term

312 Nussbaum's (1986: 13) discussion of the term for 'horn' in Indo-European (*k(e)r-n(o)-) adduces a provocative parallel: “Somewhat more interesting is the observation that both 'wing' and 'horn' forms in -no- are of two types. Each set includes both 'mechanically' thematicized forms and forms in which the thematic vowel has a function—that of marking a resulting -n + o- formation as an exocentric derivative of an n-stem.”

175 “vine”, thus making the latter more susceptible to replacement.313 On both morphological and semantic grounds, therefore, the archaic word for “vine” was vulnerable.

Yet the loss of this term took place after the final split of the dialects, as we can see from the fact that the various subgroups replaced the term in various ways. In

Greek, the word for “vine” was simply remodeled as the feminine equivalent of the word for wine: hence from oinos was derived oinē.314 In Germanic and Slavic, various morphology was added to the root of the term for “wine” as it existed in those groups

(i.e., *wīn), yielding forms such as weinatriu or vinjaga.315 Latin took a particularly interesting route by going back to the drawing board (morphologically speaking) and drafting a form vītis into service; this term derives from the same root *w(e)iH but with an entirely different nominal suffix, -ti-.316 Given the cognates this form has in other subgroups, it is likely that this particular formation is of Indo-European date; earlier on

313 If we envision a lengthy period of migration for the Indo-European tribes from their homeland to their eventual destinations, we must also envision a period when these Indo-Europeans were not cultivating vines (which require labor to tend and years to bear fruit). A number of the areas proposed as waypoints for the Indo-Europeans on their migrations lie outside of vine-producing climates in any case. Yet during this period, these same Indo-Europeans need not have been entirely deprived of wine, given the apparent vibrancy of the wine trade in very ancient times. This fact alone helps to explain why the original term “vine” came to be vestigial while the derivative “wine” remained a thriving term —and why, later on when Indo-European tribes arrived at their destinations and settled down in vine- producing areas, they came to create new terms for “vine”, often on the model of the old term for “wine”. In another vein, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995: 557, note 56) note “the greater stability of the term for the basic food product relative to that of its source, which undergoes frequent lexical replacement in the course of dialect evolution”. Witness English wine (an inheritance from an earlier stage of the language) and vine (a more recent borrowing from a neighboring language). 314 Even this term was archaic by the classical period, but was still well-remembered, perhaps due to its attestation in Hesiod; see the quote in the first paragraph of this chapter. The typical classical term for 'vineyard' was ampelos. 315 See above. 316 Although this is the most common term for “vine” in Latin, there was significant lexical variation, cf. vīnea 'vine(yard)' and vīnētum 'vineyard'. Each of these terms is explicable by the addition of morphology to the pre-existing root shape of the word for wine in Italic.

176 (and in other subgroups), it referred simply to a nondescript twisty item of botanical extraction.317 In Latin, semantic evolution led it to become specialized in the sphere of the grapevine, and in so doing it took the place of the archaic n-stem for 'vine'. This process may well have been encouraged by speakers' recognition even at a relatively late date of the connotations of twistiness latent in the root *wī-. Of course, this lexical replacement would also have been aided by the fact that the first syllables of vītis and of the word it was replacing were likely identical or very similar.

Another important isogloss is the ablaut grade of the root. In Italic, Celtic,

Germanic, and Balto-Slavic, the term is attested via a form in wīn-, revealing that the root is in zero-grade; yet in Greek, Armenian, and Albanian, the term can be traced back to a form in *woin-, which exhibits o-grade. These two groupings could not reflect more precisely the observations of Indo-European dialectologists: the first four groups share a number of other traits, whereas the latter three (especially Greek and Armenian) are considered to be closely-related dialects.318 While strengthening the idea that these two groups of dialects cohere in some substantive fashion, this isogloss in the word for wine also encourages us to posit that this mutually exclusive set of similarities is due to the fact that the ablaut grade of the root was set in stone after the break-up of Indo-

European but before each of these two groups of dialects themselves lost any

317 See Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) 559-60 for a list of such terms in Indo-European. These include Avestan vaēiti- 'willow withies' , Lithuanian vytis 'willow withies', and Old Irish féith 'fibers'. 318 Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) differentiate the four northwest dialects to the point of giving them the name 'Ancient European' (see 558, footnote 61). Fortson (2010) 283 briefly comments on the possible connection between Greek, Armenian, and Albanian; the link between the former two is disputed very rarely.

177 semblance of cohesion. Incidentally, this means that we can predict the shape of the word in Indo-Iranian, a dialect closely connected to Greek and Armenian: despite its lack of an attested word for wine from this root, we may posit that the ancestors of the Indo-

Iranians not only had such a word but had it in o-grade. Meanwhile, Anatolian had broken off long before and maintained a form with a root in zero-grade.319

The fact that the word for wine exists in two different ablaut grades (one could posit three if there was greater reason to reconstruct an Armenian form in e-grade) is easier to observe than to explain. Although individual n-stem lexemes could exhibit different grades of the root in Indo-European, the root itself did not show ablaut throughout the n-stem paradigm.320 In Anatolian, the root wi- is in zero-grade in the n- stem, and accordingly derivatives of that root (i.e., the “wine” words) also exhibit zero- grade of the root. If all of the derivatives in the other subgroups showed zero-grade, there would be nothing to explain, but the presence of o-grade in at least one and likely three subgroups asks for explanation. We are at least comforted by the fact (as mentioned above) that these subgroups cohere together linguistically and historically: whatever happened to introduce o-grade into this formation likely only happened once, while they were still in contact. One could, of course, posit that in this group of dialects o-grade was introduced into the n-stem for “grapevine”, thus impacting all of its

319 The position of Tocharian among the Indo-European dialects is unclear, and so it is difficult to predict where it may have fallen. 320 Not all agree with this analysis. Beekes (1987) reconstructs an n-stem paradigm whereby the nominative singular in fact has full-grade of the root while other cases have zero-grade. This does not get him (or us) any closer to explaining the o-grade of the root in this term or any derivatives, but Beekes suggests that o-grade may have been original in the root of the nominative of the n-stem (although no explanation is given for why this might be). The ablaut grade of such a form would then have been normalized across the board in the dialects which show such an outcome.

178 derivatives.321 Yet there are other potential explanations. One possible parallel is the root

*swep ('sleep'), which shows up in various subgroups with (perhaps significantly) a stem in *-no-. For reasons that remain beyond us, the root shows three different ablaut grades in different subgroups: the term arises (among other attestations) as swefn <

*swep-no- in Old English, as k'owm < *swop-no- in Armenian, and as hupnos < *sup-no in Greek.322 At least two other roots which take a -no- affix also show this kind of ablaut.323 While we have analyzed the word for wine as ultimately being derived from an archaic n-stem, it is nonetheless the case that from a synchronic perspective the word can be analyzed as a root plus a stem in -no- in five of the seven non-Anatolian subgroups (Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, and Greek).324 The connection is tantalizing, even if it is difficult to say more with certainty.

Yet the evidence allows us to say one thing with certainty: the pan-

Mediterranean word for wine arose among speakers of Indo-European who used a native root and native morphology to create a term which made sense to them. That such a process occurred is no surprise: as we have seen, Egyptian, Semitic, and Sumerian all had their own native words for the vine and wine. If the word for wine had simply been handed down within the Indo-European languages with little to no attestation in

321 The Greek term huiēn would seem to be a strike against this analysis, as it appears to show the old n- stem in zero-grade in a language where the derivatives are in o-grade. 322 This is described in Fortson (2010) 131. 323 Aside from the problem of ablaut in the root, there is a well-attested group of nouns with derivatives in -no- from a root in accented o-grade; see Rasmussen (1989) 199-203. 324 From a semantic perspective, speakers could certainly have made the connection between the extant n-stem meaning 'vine' and the word for wine as a thematic derivative. Nonetheless, this does not preclude a casual treatment of the collocation as a -no- stem. Speakers are not always the scientists we linguists wish them to be.

179 other groups, it is likely that it would long ago have been recognized as Indo-European.

Yet the fact that the term is present in so many non-Indo-European language families— two of which we have already discussed in Egyptian and Semitic—has understandably clouded the picture. In the conclusion to this work we will discuss the wider ramifications of this fact, but for the remainder of this chapter we will discuss the linguistic side of this issue. If the wine word was native to Indo-European, then it must have been borrowed into every other group where it is present. Besides Egyptian and

Semitic, two others are worthy of mention, Kartvelian and Etruscan. In the following paragraphs, we will examine whether a borrowing into these groups is plausible.

Semitic Revisited

We start by returning to Semitic, the family which attests the most data about the borrowed term. As we have seen, the various attested forms in Semitic can be traced back to a proto-form *wayn-, with Semitic declensional morphology appended thereafter. Being unaware of the morpheme boundary between root and stem present in Indo-European, Semitic speakers predictably heard this term as monomorphemic. All the same, they adapted the ending to fit their own declensional system, lopping off whatever Indo-European morphology was present and adding their own. This implies that they were able to analyze and separate off the Indo-European declensional morphology, something which would have been easier to do if the same root was used with varying endings. We will return to this idea below. With regards to phonology, we see that the root in Semitic exhibits a vowel before the [i]/[j]; this implies that it was not

180 borrowed from a form in zero-grade. Here we might seem to run into trouble, for we have of course reconstructed no form [wajn-] for any branch of Indo-European, only a form [woin-]. The well-known phonetic similarity of [o] and [a]325 might lead us to allow for a form [woin]- to be heard as [wajn-] and borrowed as such, but we can do better still. In Proto-Semitic and its immediate descendants, there was in fact no o-vowel present in the language at all, with only a, i, and u being reconstructed. Thus, a form

[woin-] would have sounded completely foreign to a speaker of Semitic. Given the phonetic closeness of [o] and [a] and their general tendency toward conflation cross- linguistically, it is sensible to posit that the native Indo-European form [woin-] was simply reshaped into the more Semitic-sounding [wajn-] when it was borrowed into the latter family. In fact, such a reshaping would arguably be the most likely outcome of such language contact given the circumstances.

The semantic quality of the term in Semitic is perhaps more difficult to explain.

While the term exclusively means “wine” in several Semitic languages (Hebrew and

Ugaritic), the root also has connotations of “vine”, “vineyard”, and “grape” in several others: in Arabic it primarily means “black grape”, and in Epigraphic South Arabian

“vineyard”.326 Furthermore, in Ethiopic, the term can encompass all three of these meanings. Such semantic diversity must be traced to the original borrowing of a term whose scope of meaning spanned the entire spectrum from beverage (wine) to plant

325 These two vowels often fall together cross-linguistically, one major reason being that they are made with adjacent parts of the mouth. More particularly, they fall together in many Indo-European daughter groups, including Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, and Albanian. 326 See Cohen (1996) 534.

181 (vine) to location (vineyard). Remembering that in Indo-European the terms for “wine” and “vine” were kept distinct, how can we explain this? One answer might be that these words were all built to the same root and thus would have sounded similar (or even interchangeable) to a non-native speaker. In other words, a Semitic speaker in contact with Indo-European speakers may have perceived these two words as one and collapsed their semantic content into one root. Yet we can improve upon this explanation if we remember the crucial detail that it was no proto-form that was borrowed into Semitic, but a form whose ablaut grade was in *o. If our discussion above is correct, such a vowel was not introduced into the root until after the period of Proto-Indo-European unity, at a time when different dialects were experimenting with different collocations to create a word for “wine”. We also know that most dialects would eventually replace the word for

“vine” with something else, oftentimes something built in the image of the word for

“wine”. Greek is (for our purposes here) a perfect example, replacing the old n-stem huiēn with (w)oinē on the model of (w)oinos at an early date (i.e., at least by the

Mycenaean era). Given that we know that the Semitic form must have been borrowed not from Proto-Indo-European itself but from an Indo-European dialect in the o-group

(as we delineated above), we are therefore free to hypothesize that the target language had also by the time of the borrowing analogically replaced the old n-stem for “vine” with a new matching term with a root in o-grade, just as Greek did. And if this was the case, the Semitic borrowing of a root in *woin- could have simultaneously been a borrowing of the target language's terms for “wine” and for “vine” (and for that matter,

182 “vineyard”), once the declensional morphology was removed. As we noted above, the fact that such morphology (e.g., the -os ending of woinos) was not borrowed speaks well for the possibility that it was recognized as not integral to the root by speakers of

Semitic, and this in turn implies that they were exposed to multiple words with slightly different endings (such as, for instance, woinē and woinos).327

So, which Indo-European dialect was responsible for transmitting the word to

Semitic? We have already narrowed it down to a language which had the term in o- grade, which rules out the northwestern subgroups as well as (more significantly)

Anatolian. Of the subgroups which fit the description, the Greeks and Armenians were certainly in contact with Semitic speakers at a later date (second millennium and after), but if we remember that the term was likely present in Semitic by the middle of the third millennium BCE, we would be left in a considerable bit of doubt as to whether the contact between those groups and Semitic could have happened early enough to account for the borrowing.328 Yet we need not restrict our list of suspects to the Greeks,

Armenians, and Albanians if we remember that Indo-Iranian, a widespread subgroup whose speakers tend to appear in unexpected places at archaic dates (e.g., the

Mitanni)329, would likely also have had a form in o-grade as it split off from the other subgroups.330 We thus might consider crediting an archaic Indo-Iranian dialect with the

327 It is also worthy of note that the primary terms for “wine” in Akkadian and Sumerian (karānum and geštin, respectively) are also polysemous, meaning either wine, vine, or grape (Powell (1995) 101). One could thus posit an areal feature to explain the multiplicity of meanings for *wayn- in early Semitic. 328 Of course, we do not know for sure. This data could be used as evidence that the early Greeks and Armenians were in fact in contact with Semitic speakers, although such a conclusion is not necessary. 329 See Kuhrt (1995) 289 ff. 330 The fact that the term is not attested in any recorded Indo-Iranian language should not be used as evidence that the term was never present in that subgroup. Since Indo-Iranian uncontroversially

183 transmission of the word to early speakers of Semitic. If this is the case, it may allow us to refine our explanation for the appearance of the term in Semitic. Above, it was argued that the vowel in Semitic *wayn- would be the expected outcome of a borrowing from a term *woin- due to the lack of an o-vowel in early Semitic. While this remains true, considering the term to be an Indo-Iranian borrowing allows us to explain the vowel in a different fashion. All recorded Indo-Iranian dialects exhibit a sweeping sound change of

*o > a, suggesting that this shift took place at the time of Proto-Indo-Iranian. If indeed we are dealing with an Indo-Iranian dialect which split off from the Indo-Iranian language community and came into contact with early Semitic speakers, we might also expect that the dialect in question had already undergone this sound change. If so, the reflex of the term would have been *wain-, and the term's borrowing into Semitic would have required no phonological accommodation whatsoever. However, this must be considered pure speculation in light of the plausible accommodation of *o > a in early

Semitic. In any case, the time-depth of the borrowing is an issue if we attempt to credit an early form of Indo-Iranian (or, for that matter, of Greek, Armenian, or Albanian) with the transmission of the term: these subgroups may not have fully split off from one another until some point in the third millennium BCE, possibly after the term was

descends from Indo-European, and Indo-European certainly seems to have had the term for 'grapevine', it follows that Indo-Iranian must have simply lost the term somewhere along the way. Such a loss may have been the result of geography; if the Indo-Iranians invaded the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent from the north (as the currently prevailing theory holds), we might hypothesize that the term became extinct during their potentially long sojourn in the dry and largely vineless areas north and east of the Caspian Sea. In any case, it is important to emphasize that the contact which delivered the word to Semitic speakers must have happened at least a millennium before the Indo- Iranians burst onto the historical scene; a thousand years is more than enough time for a word to be lost in a subgroup. See the conclusion for further discussion.

184 already transmitted to Semitic.331 Thus, the most precise answer may be to simply credit the dialect group comprising the forebears of Indo-Iranian, Greek, Armenian, and

Albanian with the loan into Semitic.

Egyptian Revisited

We move on to Egyptian. As we have seen, the Egyptian form is attested as wnš, with a derivative wnš.t. Due to the lack of recorded vowels, we have a much more difficult time in ascertaining which Indo-European subgroup might be responsible for transmitting the word; although the Egyptian spelling would most easily be explained by a form in zero-grade, we cannot entirely rule out a diphthong. Yet it is the final consonant that is the most interesting, for it seems to show the Indo-European declensional ending in *-s. This reveals that, unlike the Semitic borrowers of the term, the Egyptians who borrowed it were unable to analyze it—or at any rate, did not care to do so. Also of great importance, this observation guarantees that the borrowing of the term into Egyptian could not have come through Semitic. In other words, the Egyptian term must have been borrowed from Indo-European independently of Semitic, something rather unexpected for those who know their geography. Indo-European speakers were almost certainly never in contact with Egypt by land at an early date (and

331 It is worth noting that a number of other languages which likely arose out of this group (besides Albanian, the scarcely attested Thracian, Daco-Mysian, and Pelasgian, if we can believe Georgiev (1981)'s reconstructions from scanty data) also show a change of *o > a. In fact, only some dialects likely once located near the western end of the o-grade group—namely Greek, Armenian, and Phrygian —do not show this innovation (see the conclusion for more discussion on dialect geography). One might entertain the possibility of a sound change *o > a which swept from east to west throughout the group, falling short only at the end. In that case, our data would not prove the Indo-Iranian identity of the tribes in question, but only that they came from the eastern side of the o-grade group. This would allow for a borrowing after the shift *o > a but before any period of Indo-Iranian unity, which would solve the potential problem of time-depth. However, we are at this point deep into speculation.

185 it is an early date indeed required for this borrowing, by the middle of the third millennium BCE), and so the contact in question must have taken place over the wine- dark seas of the Mediterranean. This significantly limits the options as we attempt to ascertain which Indo-European group was responsible for transmitting this term to

Egyptian.

The meaning of the term in Egyptian is also worthy of note. The basic term wnš in fact means 'grape(vine)', while the derived term wnš.t means 'wine'. Given that the derivation is done internally via native Egyptian morphology, we might wonder if the term as borrowed simply meant 'grape(vine)', with a later extension (perhaps based on further contacts with Indo-European speakers) to 'wine'. If this is the case, we will find it more difficult still to identify a group of Indo-European speakers capable (geographically and linguistically, as well as temporally) of transmitting such a term to the Egyptians. The subgroup which seems to have the best chance of fitting all of the criteria is Anatolian. In certain contact with the Mediterranean at a very early date, the Anatolian subgroup also maintained as primary the original term 'vine' with 'wine' as a clear derivative (as in

Hittite *wiyaš 'vine' and wiyanaš 'wine'). In fact, it is worthy of note that, after syncopation, the Luvian term for 'vine' would have been wīnīš. This looks almost too good to be true, but it may nonetheless be the case that it (or some similar form in another Anatolian dialect) is the source of the Egyptian term.332

332 It may be a bit ambitious to retroject Luvian syncope to the first half of the third millennium BCE. All the same, Luvian is conveniently located on the southern coast of Asia Minor, an ideal jumping-off point for contact with Egypt.

186 Kartvelian

Thus, we have accounted for the borrowing of the term into both Semitic and

Egyptian. We now move farther north to discuss the Kartvelian group, whose speakers have lived for millennia in the area of the Caucasus. Given the great antiquity of wine production in that region, speakers of Kartvelian must have been involved in the culture of the vine since time immemorial (as we will see in the chapter on material evidence). It is curious, therefore, that we find not a native word but an Indo-European borrowing to refer to 'wine'. Yet the term is clearly present, being attested in the four major languages of Kartvelian (Georgian γvin(o)-, Mingrelian γvin-, Laz γ(v)in-, Svan γwin-). These terms are traced back to a Proto-Kartvelian form *γwin(o)-.333 Given the shape of the word, we would be hard-pressed not to consider this as a borrowing from Indo-European, and indeed after earlier attempts to consider the Kartvelian word as native (as did Hommel; see above), scholarly opinion has swung in that direction.334 The initial voiced velar fricative is unusual, being represented nowhere else either in Indo-European or any other family. Besides blaming the shape of the form of the form *γwin(o)- on the vagaries of borrowing, how might we explain this? We immediately suspect the influence of the Armenian language, which has been adjacent to the Kartvelian

333 See Klimov (1998) 227. Although the term is cited without parentheses around the , I have included them on my own analysis. This is based on the fact that such a final root syllable is only attested for Georgian, and, as Klimov says, “The word final vowel in Georgian is not stable (cf. its genitive form γvin-is).” 334 Klimov (1998) 227: “The lexeme must be treated as a very early Indo-European loanword....” Yet Klimov envisions not an Armenian borrowing but an earlier one. See the excellent discussion in Martirosyan (2010: 214) for the likelihood of the term as a borrowing from Armenian. There is no reason (phonological or morphological) from either a Kartvelian or an Indo-European perspective for a voiced velar fricative to be appended to this (or any) term; the explanation of borrowing from an Armenian pre-form is the only good explanation for the appearance of such a sound.

187 languages for perhaps over three millennia. As we have seen, the Armenian language was affected by a sound change *[w] > [g], with *[gw] (or even *[γw]) as a likely middle form. The word for wine clearly underwent this sound change between its pre-form

*[woin-] and its modern form gini, and so it is quite likely that at some point in

Armenian prehistory the word for wine in that language existed as some form between the two, such as *gwin-. The fact that we can reconstruct such a form for a language adjacent to Kartvelian makes it likely that the Kartvelian form *γwin(o)- is in fact the result of a borrowing from the Armenian form at a particular stage in its development.335

The meaning of the term supports such a relatively late borrowing from Armenian. The root *γwin(o)- simply means “wine” in Kartvelian, with no connotations of “vine” or

“vineyard”.336 Unlike the Semitic languages and Egyptian, therefore, Kartvelian seems to have borrowed this term from a later stage of Indo-European when the meaning “vine” had receded into the background.337 Armenian fits the bill quite well, having replaced

335 Precisely when this might have happened is the subject of considerable uncertainty, for the dating of relevant events (i.e., sound changes in Armenian, the first contacts between Armenian and Kartvelian speakers, or even Proto-Kartvelian unity) must proceed on very little data. Our terminus ante quem must be the 5th century CE, when Armenian and Georgian both are first attested along with their respective words for wine; likely we must date the borrowing at least several centuries before that. A terminus post quem is more difficult to establish, and it hinges on our answers to several of the above questions, which we will not discuss here. Klimov (1998) claims that the term “cannot go back to Armenian gini because the change *w > g probably must have been accomplished there long before the first Kartvelian-Armenian contacts in the 7th-6th centuries B.C.” and cites Diakonoff, but both the dating of the sound change and the dating of the first contacts are simply not secure. If anything, the linguistic evidence, fairly compelling as it is, should permit us to construct an accurate relative chronology of these events. Martirosyan (2010) adduces the additional evidence of Armenian gi 'juniper' beside Proto-Kartvelian *γwi- 'juniper'; the Armenian term stems from an Indo-European root *wi(H), and the Kartvelian term is quite likely a borrowing. If so, the borrowing of the word for wine from Armenian into Kartvelian must be considered entirely uncontroversial. 336 The term can also reportedly mean “vinegar” in Old Georgian (see Klimov), but this is explained easily enough as an extension of the original meaning of “wine”. 337 This fact also makes more difficult any hypothesis of a borrowing from Anatolian.

188 any cognate term for “vine” long ago.338 Yet when we go to find the Kartvelian word for

“vine”, we come upon a bit of a surprise. The term is attested as venax- in Georgian, binex- in Mingrelian, binex- in Laz, and wenäq- in Svan; these can be traced back via regular sound changes to a Proto-Kartvelian form *wenaq- meaning 'vine' or

'vineyard'.339 Once again, we see the familiar shape of the word for wine, yet this time without the voiced velar fricative at the beginning. This implies the possibility of not one but two borrowings from Indo-European, one of a term for 'vine' and (perhaps later) one of the early Armenian term for 'wine'. Where might the root in *wenaq- have come from? The [e] is unexpected, although it could perhaps be explained as a monophthongization of *oi, or else some prehistoric modification of *i (likely but not provably long).340 Since we have almost no way of telling what Indo-European dialect this might have been borrowed from (or even from Proto-Indo-European itself?), we can only speculate. More interesting is the final syllable -aq, which we have not seen thus far. One suggested connection is with the Slavic form winjaga 'vine(yard)', although this is tenuous.341 In any case, we might expect this borrowing to be fairly early, given that it was almost certainly not from Armenian but from another Indo-European language in

338 A term raz is the common word for 'grapevine' in Armenian and Persian, with Kartvelian also attesting a form vaz. The former term is likely a borrowing into Armenian from Persian. 339 See Klimov (1998) 51. This term need not be connected to the Indo-European root, but we are right to consider the possibility in any case. It is impossible to connect this term with the Kartvelian word for wine from a native perspective; no affix in *-aq exists, nor any regular alternation between *γw- and *w-. I am thankful to Alice Harris (personal communication) for sharing her expertise on Kartvelian phonology and morphology. 340 Alternately, the [e] could be explained as a simplification of *[ei]. However, we have avoided positing the existence of a root-shape *wein- thus far, and this form would not seem to give us sufficient grounds to do so. 341 This is suggested by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995) 558-59.

189 the area of the Caucasus at an early date.342 To conclude our discussion of Kartvelian, therefore, we can posit not just one but two borrowings from the Indo-European term for “vine” and “wine” into Kartvelian, each from a different dialect and at a different time. Incidentally, the difference in the phonetic shape of the Kartvelian roots *γwin(o)- and *wenaq- seems to put to rest any theory of a native Kartvelian origin for such terms, for there is no known native alternation between *γw and *w in Kartvelian.343

Etruscan

Finally, we move on to discuss the word for wine in Etruscan. Etruscan is not a well-attested language, and so our discussion will be fairly brief. Also, there is less to explain: the word for wine occurs straightforwardly as vinum (with occasional syncope to vinm). This term is attested in Etruscan from no earlier than the 5th century BCE, slightly later than its earliest attestation in the Italic languages of the region.344 Thus, we have no inherent reason to doubt the borrowing of this term from Indo-European into Etruscan on temporal grounds. When we turn to linguistic evidence, we see that the term occurs exactly as we would expect if it was indeed borrowed from Italo-Celtic .

Etruscan is a four-vowel language, with no distinction made between and ; as

342 One potential group is the Scythians, speakers of an Iranian dialect who roamed the steppes to the north of the Caucasus in the time of Herodotus (and for centuries before and after). These Scythians would have been in contact with Slavic tribes to their northwest; a collocation such as *wenag- (whatever the precise phonology) would not be the only shared form resulting from this particular instance of language contact. We also know that the Scythians partook of wine, and thus might be credibly believed to have had a word for “vineyard” during the first millennium BCE; see (among other references) Herodotus 4.66. 343 Rather, one positing that the terms are native to Kartvelian would have to concede that they bear no connection within the language, while denying that their sensible connection with Indo-European morphology was anything but coincidental. 344 See Gras (1985) 268.

190 such, the Etruscan term would naturally occur as if it was a borrowing from an

Italic or Celtic term ending in -om.345 Such an adjustment of to is well-attested for borrowings into Etruscan; compare the term qutun 'jug' as borrowed from Greek kōthōn.346 Etruscan also (once) attests a term vina, which seems to mean “vineyard”.347

After having gone through so much data, such an alternation begins to look familiar. The interchange of -um and -a means nothing in Etruscan, but it could represent the difference between a neuter and a feminine in a target Indo-European language. We have seen that one of the favored methods of deriving a word for “vine(yard)” from the word for “wine” across the Indo-European languages was to simply create a feminine noun based off of the native root-shape of the word for “wine” (cf. Greek oinos ~ oinē or

Latin vīnum ~ vīnea). Thus, we see that the pair of Etruscan terms can be well-explained on both phonological and morphological grounds as borrowings from the surrounding

Indo-European linguistic milieu of northern and central Italy. As there is nothing in native Etruscan morphology (to the extent we understand it) which might give us reason to believe that these terms belong to Etruscan, we can safely conclude our discussion of

Etruscan on this note.348 345 It could have likewise been borrowed from an Italic term ending in -u(m), such as Umbrian vinu. While a borrowing from Latin is theoretically as possible as a borrowing from another dialect of the area, there is no a priori reason to privilege Latin over any other Italo-Celtic dialect as the source of the Etruscan term. 346 See Bonfante and Bonfante (2002) 112. 347 See Bonfante and Bonfante (2002) 220. 348 There is a lively debate about the origins of the Etruscans; see the brief discussion in Baldi (1999) 109- 112. There is some evidence that the Etruscans arrived in Italy from the east during the Iron Age, and the discovery of a language similar to Etruscan on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea has led many to theorize that the Etruscans were in fact once native to Anatolia. If this is the case, the possibility remains open that they brought their word for wine with them from the east, perhaps having acquired it from an Anatolian dialect. If so, the root in vin- could arise from a form syncopated from wiyan-. However, the endings -um and -a are more easily explicable via Italic than Anatolian morphology.

191 Conclusion

Thus, we have examined virtually all of the linguistic evidence for the word for wine from its earliest attestations in third-millennium Egypt to its late appearance in

15th-century Albanian. Each of the language families and subgroups of families have something to tell us, and by paying attention to the data and analyzing it in a systematic fashion we have been able to arrive at a wide-ranging conclusion. Not only have we ascertained with some degree of certainty the origins of the international word for wine, but we have also shown how that word was passed down within that language family.

Furthermore, we have demonstrated how the word most likely came to be borrowed into the other language families which show evidence of it. Unlike the more speculative studies of a hundred or even forty years ago, this inquiry has been guided by scientific principles of regular sound change, of morphological consistency, and of relatively stable borrowings. When such principles are followed, we find that the data can be explained in a compelling manner.

Specifically, we have made an argument of great importance to the question of the origins of wine: the international word for wine is of Indo-European origin. However, the term was not of Proto-Indo-European date, but rather was coined in individual daughter languages (or groups of daughter languages) via a transparent process of

Another theory, that of Georgiev (1981), holds that Etruscan not only came from Anatolia but is itself an Indo-European language of the Anatolian subgroup. In such a case, we would certainly expect the Etruscan word to arise from a process of syncopation (wiyan- > vin-), although the endings would (again) require explanation. Pending any kind of breakthrough on the question of Etruscan origins, the theory of a borrowing from one of the local Indo-European languages of Italy is linguistically preferable.

192 derivation from the Indo-European word for “vine”, a term which was of Proto-Indo-

European date. Once coined, the term was borrowed into a number of other language families. From an Indo-European group which coined the word for wine in o-grade the term was borrowed into an early stage of Semitic, probably between 3750 and 2500

BCE, while Egyptian likely received the term from Luvian or a related language by 2500

BCE. The Kartvelian form of the word represents a borrowing from an early stage of

Armenian, while the Etruscan version of the term appears to stem from an early Italic or

Celtic language. So it is that the international word for wine was coined and spread.

By making the case that the word for wine is of Indo-European origin, we must also make parallel claims about the culture (as well as location and time) of early Indo-

European speakers. Not only must we be impressed by the early and vibrant attestation of the root in Indo-European, but we must also find notable the eagerness with which the terminology for wine and the vine was borrowed from Indo-European into other languages (rather than, say, the other way around). The linguistic data thus carries implications of great historical and anthropological value, to be discussed in our conclusion. Yet we cannot conclude this study without first examining the important material testimony relevant to the topic. Having augmented our literary and linguistic evidence in this way, we will finally be in a position to synthesize the data we have seen into a coherent answer to the question of the origins of wine.

193 CHAPTER 5: MATERIAL EVIDENCE: PALAEOBOTANY, ARCHAEOLOGY, AND WINE

CHEMISTRY

In the previous chapters, we have examined what can be determined about the origins and spread of wine from the written evidence left to us. We have sifted through the ancient texts of the Greeks and Romans, noting their myths (and the occasional fact) about the spread of wine into their respective regions. We have looked into the scanter literature and records which survive from the ancient Near East, noting their own ideas of the origins of wine and the evidence their writings provide for the presence and importance of wine in that region at an early date. Finally, we have traced the history of the international word for wine throughout a number of language families, arguing that it ultimately stems from a term in the tongue of ancient Indo-European peoples. Having examined all of this written evidence, we have made significant progress toward answering the question of the origins and spread of wine. However, our story would not

(and cannot) be complete without a look at the corresponding material evidence which touches on the topic. In this chapter, we will examine what has been discovered by scholars in a number of disciplines, including archaeology, palaeobotany (the study of the origins and spread of plants), and chemistry. When we have examined all of this evidence and conferred it with the philological evidence we have already seen, we will at

194 last have the complete story of the origins of wine, or at least as complete a story as we can write with the evidence currently available.

Material Evidence: Types and Uses

Before beginning a discussion of the evidence itself, we will discuss the various types of evidence which pertain to our topic and the necessary caveats which come along with each type. Unlike the evidence found in writing created by humans (which has a presumed definite meaning, albeit sometimes less than obvious), physical forms of evidence do not speak for themselves; rather, they must be uncovered or discovered by scientists, carefully handled and preserved, and interpreted in a responsible fashion.

Before discussing the evidence and its ramifications, we will first take a look at the different witnesses to the origins of wine (that is, the types of evidence) as well as the limitations of each. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no silver bullet to answering the question at hand, but a responsible appraisal of all of the evidence does indeed lead to likely conclusions.

There are multiple paths one can take to answering so basic a question as

“Where did wine begin?” Yet simple reflection would cause one to realize that there are some basic ingredients which must be present for winemaking to arise. The first, and perhaps the most obvious, is the presence of the wine-grape, Vitis vinifera. Although there are a number of species worldwide which belong to the genus Vitis, it is from the sole member of this species native to Europe and western Asia (vinifera, Latin for “wine- bearing”)349 that the vast majority of grape wine in human history has been created. In 349 Species names were, of course, given only in the period following the Renaissance; this would have

195 modern times, wine has come to be created from many types of grapes, so why is it that this one species so predominates in the history of wine? The answer must largely be one of happenstance: it just so happens that the vinifera grape was the only one growing between the Atlantic Ocean and eastern Asia.350 When humans in this area came up with the idea to make an alcoholic beverage out of grapes, they had few options. Incidentally, this fact also assures us that the industry of winemaking began somewhere in this broad region, although such a conclusion is not a particularly precise one. All of this serves to raise another question: with various species of grape so widespread across much of the inhabited world (and indeed, with the vinifera grape found across such a broad spectrum of the Eurasian continent), might it not be a fool's errand to inquire as to where wine was first made? After all, we should surely expect that early humans who lived within the range of the wild grape were familiar with it as a food source and exploited it on a regular basis. Furthermore, unlike other alcoholic beverages such as beer, whose production from raw ingredients requires an intentional and less-than- obvious process, wine can be made from grape juice purely by accident. It just so happens that on the skin of grapes live various types of mold and bacteria (but especially yeast) which, when allowed to mix with the juice inside the grape, will begin the process of turning that juice into wine in a matter of days. In other words, humans could have discovered (and surely did discover) wine in a number of times and places simply by crushing grapes, leaving the pulpy and juicy mess somewhere for a few days, and then almost certainly been the only species of grape known to Latin speakers of ancient times. 350 For a map of the modern range of the wild grape, see Zohary (1995) 24.

196 attempting to drink it. It likely would have tasted odd to them at first, but given enough of it they might have appreciated the result. With winemaking so transparently easy, even a caveman could do it: we must imagine that groups of early humans made wine from grapes (in reasonably small quantities) on a regular basis. Thus, we should not imagine that we are engaged here in a quest to discover the first wine made by humans ever, period.

Yet there were notable limitations on such sporadic exploitation of the grapevine by early humans. If a group of humans was mobile, it would have to naturally locate grapevines before engaging in winemaking. (As we will see below, finding grapevines with grapes suitable for winemaking may not have been easy, even within the plant's natural range.) Furthermore, the group would have to be willing to wait a number of days for the grape juice to ferment into wine, a task made more difficult before the invention of pottery in the middle of the Neolithic era.351 Without stoneware in which to carry fermenting grape juice around, a group would likely have to wait around a puddle or pool of grape juice for it to ferment. For a mobile society, this may have often been an intolerable inconvenience. In other words, humans engaged in the lifestyle of hunter- gatherers would not have taken naturally to consistent and intentional winemaking. It would likely have been too much hassle, and the payoff too small. The systematic exploitation of the grapevine for winemaking would have to wait for the dawning of a

351 Pottery first arises in the archaeological record of the Near East in the latter half of the seventh millennium BCE. The Neolithic era in the Near East customarily extends from 8500 BCE (after the end of the last ice age) to 4500 BCE (when more advanced cultures began to arise at the beginning of the Chalcolithic era).

197 new era in human history, the rise of sedentary societies. Only during the Neolithic era, with the dawn of agriculture and the invention of pottery, could winemaking begin to be a notable reality.

Thus, it is perhaps not going too far to say that civilization and wine were made for each other: one is, in any case, far less convenient without the other. Yet the truth of this statement applies still further. Winemaking itself must have been a tiresome process before humans chose to settle down in sedentary societies, but perhaps even more tiresome would have been the constant necessity to search out fruitful vines which gave plump and juicy grapes. Such constant effort likely gave an impetus to the rise of agriculture, for the planting of fruits (along with other staple crops) seems eventually to have been deemed to be more practical than the constant search for a juicy grape.

Tending grapevines along with other crops in a fixed location was easier than always being on the move, and so it is that the grape played a role in the process by which sedentary societies were born.352

Yet the road to the proverbial well-tended vineyard was paved with much trial and error, and likely too with much frustration on the part of would-be vintners.353 The grapevine is a naturally recalcitrant plant; for starters, it takes between three and five years from the time it is planted to begin giving fruit, and even then it regularly gives only small and tart berries in its wild iteration. The early process of selection on the part of humans likely involved finding the best-producing vines and bringing them back to the

352 For one important study of the rise of civilizations, see Diamond (1999). 353 See the discussion in Olmo (1995).

198 garden. Yet such well-intentioned (and indeed, logical) actions on the part of the first grape-farmers would have been likely to backfire for the simple reason that the wild grapevine is dioecious, or sexually distinct. That is to say, each wild grapevine is either male or female, with hermaphrodites created only by rare mutation.354 This suits the grapevine perfectly well, for it only takes a hungry animal or bird to cross-pollinate the two and create a new generation. However, early humans failed to grasp the finer points of genetics, and they would have no doubt been nonplussed to know that even their plants were created male and female. To these early would-be imbibers, it seemed as though some vines (those that were female) gave fruit, and some vines (those that were male) remained stubbornly sterile. The male vines would have been naturally ignored or eradicated, while the productive female vines would have been tended or removed to safer locations. Yet once separated from their masculine counterparts, the female vines would have abruptly ceased to give fruit. We can only imagine the exasperation of a

Neolithic human as the well-producing grapevine he had brought home promptly ceased to yield fruit thereafter. Grapevine domestication was not for the faint-hearted.355

Nonetheless, a small fraction of the fruit-bearing vines would have continued to bear grapes year after year. These were the hermaphrodites, the small fraction which due to a genetic mutation were simultaneously male and female. Without fully

354 See Zohary and Spiegel-Roy (1975). 355 This may be giving too little credit to Neolithic humans. Evidence from the domestication of the date palm in the Near East (approximately during the seventh millennium) indicates that there was indeed some awareness of the dioecious nature of certain plants. However, the issues faced during the domestication of the grapevine would have been tedious no matter the awareness of this fact, and the adoption of the hermaphroditic vine would have been the clear answer regardless. See the discussion in Zohary (1995) 26.

199 understanding why these vines acted as they were supposed to when so many others did not, early humans would have dutifully given up on the female vines and began the cultivation of hermaphrodites. These rare hermaphrodites were in turn passed on through cuttings—that is, through cloning. Thus, the domestication of the grapevine, consisting of the very purposeful selection of vines with luscious berries and the unwitting selection of hermaphroditic vines, need only to have happened once.356 Once it took place, the domesticated grapevine would come to be quite different from its wild counterpart. For starters, one was dioecious (that is, each individual was either male or female); one was hermaphroditic. Yet with the further refinement of the domesticated grapevine under human agency, the very morphology of the plant grew to be quite different from the one found in the wild.357 Today, wild and cultivated grapevines can be distinguished in a number of ways: the cultivated grapevine has larger leaves, larger fruit clusters, and larger berries. Most notably, however, the shape of the seed found in each type of grape is generally different.358 While the seeds (or 'pips') of the wild grape are nearly round (with a length-to-width ratio close to 1), the pips of the cultivated grape are narrower (with a much lower length-to-width ratio, often closer to .5; that is to say, pips of the cultivated vine may be as much as twice as long as they are wide).359

The fact that the cultivated and the domesticated grapevine are so recognizably different helps us in a couple of ways as we seek the origins of concentrated

356 We will see below that it may have happened at least twice, although that changes very little. 357 See Olmo (1995) 32 for a complete list of differences. 358 See the pictures provided by Renfrew (1973) 128. 359 The first to note and measure this distinction was Stummer (1911).

200 winemaking. First, we see that there would have been an objective distinction even in very ancient times between peoples living casually off of the grapevine and peoples who intentionally tended it for wine and for other purposes, given that the latter group would almost certainly be in possession of the domesticated grapevine. And while the domesticated grapevine could be re-created by patience and ingenuity as it must have been at least once, it was far easier to acquire cuttings of the domesticated grapevine from nearby cultures which already possessed it. Thus, when we speak of the spread of

“wine culture”, we are speaking of a thing which has its basis in pragmatics: cultures without the domesticated grapevine (and hence without any great quantities of native wine) would be introduced to this botanical innovation through contact with older winemaking cultures and would then come into possession of the tools (including knowledge of grape-growing and winemaking, of course) to initiate their own winemaking industry.360 All of this leads to the following conclusion: despite the fact that the origins of grape exploitation and of sporadic winemaking are untraceable, the origins of intentional and systematic winemaking are indeed traceable through this recognizable sign, the possession by a culture of the domesticated grapevine.

Most of the evidence for the possession of the domesticated grapevine in antiquity has long since disappeared. Wood and leaves rot away in time, as do grapes themselves. Only under exceptional conditions do we find remnants of these things.

360 This process is connected with the so-called Neolithic Revolution, during which humans in increasingly far-flung areas began to tend a number of crops. Ancient literature records the later stages of this revolution; see (for instance) the story of the Cyclops in Odyssey 9, discussed in the chapter on classical literature.

201 However, grape pips themselves are felicitously much more resistant to the ravages of time, and it is not uncommon for archaeologists digging at a wide variety of sites to discover such pips.361 These grape traces, at the very least, provide firm evidence for the exploitation of the grape at a given site and in a given time period. Yet as mentioned above, we may be able to glean still more from such finds. Since the appearance of pips from wild grapes differs from the appearance of pips from domesticated grapes, we can also ascertain from such finds whether or not a given site was exploiting the wild or the domesticated grapevine—and if the latter, when they acquired it.

Such evidence must be considered of the greatest importance for our project since, as mentioned, the coming of the domesticated grapevine to a region opens the door to intensive cultivation and thence to winemaking. Indeed, as we go through the material evidence in the pages below, seed evidence will often be the first thing we highlight from a given area. The length-to-width ratio of wild versus domesticated seeds is generally accepted by botanists, and it provides a good rubric for ascertaining whether the pips found in an archaeological dig come from wild or domesticated vines. Given the large number of pips found at hundreds of sites across Europe and the Near East, one might endeavor to chart the spread of winemaking on this evidence alone.

Yet for all of its usefulness, seed evidence is not without its caveats. Although seed measurements can give us a general idea of whether it was the wild or the domesticated grapevine in use in a certain place at a certain time, they cannot provide absolute data. One reason for this, recognized very early, was that there is a zone of 361 For a broad overview of finds throughout the Mediterranean, see Nuñez and Walker (1989).

202 overlap between domesticated and wild seeds. That is to say, while very squat seeds are almost certain to be from domesticated vines and very round seeds are almost certain to be from wild vines, those that are in the middle could conceivably belong to either group. Furthermore, as there is a range of variation within each group, no one individual seed can provide sufficient evidence to make a judgment about the use of seeds in a given ancient community; rather, a sufficient quantity of seeds must be found that a statistically significant average can be taken. Finally, the possibility must be kept open of a community in which both wild and domesticated vines were in use, perhaps for different reasons; this state of affairs is especially likely when a community has first been introduced to the domesticated vine and is beginning to make the transition. Thus, seed evidence must be treated carefully and responsibly, even though it is so helpful.

Further research within the past generation has complicated the picture still more with regard to the evidence which can be gleaned from grape pips. Most of the grape pips found in archaeological digs are carbonized; that is to say, they have been charred by undergoing burning. Recent experiments have shown that the charring of grape pips not only reduces their size (itself not an insurmountable problem) but also reduces their length-to-breadth ratio.362 In other words, pips whose ratios may once have fallen comfortably within the range assigned to cultivated seeds may, as a result of charring, come to ultimately appear more like wild seeds. This blurs the line between the two types of seeds even further. Galvanized by this challenge, others began to seek more foolproof methods for distinguishing the pips that come from either wild or 362 See Smith and Jones (1990).

203 domesticated vines. Some proposed the stalk as another possible indicator: grapes from cultivated vines have longer stalks than grapes from wild vines. One scholar pointed out that only the domesticated grapevine produces undeveloped seeds when ripe.363 Others came up with more complex equations to determine the provenance of the pips in question.364 Thus, while pips have continued to be an important piece of evidence for determining the presence of winemaking at a given location in antiquity, the evidence they provide must be accompanied and buttressed by other types of evidence. Grape pips alone cannot tell the full story.

Fortunately, ancient civilizations left behind a number of other tell-tale signs of wine production which can be found by modern archaeologists. As already mentioned, the invention of pottery in the Near East not too long before 6000 BCE was an important development which aided the birth of the wine industry. Besides allowing for ease of portability, large pottery or storage jars (known as amphoras after the Greek term) also served as convenient receptacles in which to place and store grape juice as it underwent the process of fermentation. Once the juice had fermented into wine, the jars could be easily used as decanting vessels. Yet wine cannot be left out in the open air too long, for it will eventually turn into vinegar. Thus, its long-term preservation requires an airtight

(or mostly airtight) storage container. Here, too, amphoras served the wine industry well: during the second millennium BCE, the so-called “Canaanite jar” would come to be the premiere storage and transport jar for wine across the Near East and eastern

363 Kohl (1999). 364 See Mangafa and Kotsakis (1996).

204 Mediterranean.365 The Canaanite jar was a special kind of amphora designed with a wide body and a narrow neck, ideal both for storage and for sealing when the time came.

Although the Canaanite jar represented the pinnacle of amphora development in the ancient world for some time, its formal predecessors also served quite well to store and seal wine, and thus archaeologists can, with relatively little difficulty, identify jars which would have been suitable for wine storage. Yet the amphora was not the only ceramic container which was associated with a wine culture; after all, a culture which habitually drinks is in need of cups and smaller decanting vessels for beverages. These, too, are often found in archaeological digs at ancient sites, and they serve to show that a culture took drinking seriously. Of course, cups alone cannot prove the presence of wine, for all humans drank water and many partook of other alcoholic beverages such as beer in ancient times. Nevertheless, it is often the presence of ornate cups which tips us off to a culture's attitude about drinking; and such cups often show that a culture is interested in drinking not just as a banal activity but one of high social significance. This, in turn, indicates that the beverage is not water or even beer, but rather wine, always a high- class beverage but especially so in ancient times.366 Thus, we can gain a window into a culture's drinking habits by the pottery—specifically, the amphoras and the drinking cups—it leaves behind.

Yet scientists can do even better than this. Finding pottery which may be

365 See Leonard (1995) for a discussion of the Canaanite jar, which was also certainly used to transport goods other than wine. 366 For an excellent discussion of the social importance of wine in ancient Mesopotamia, see Stromach (1995).

205 suggestive of wine consumption is useful in our search for the origins of wine, but ultimately the evidence it provides must fall into the category of educated conjecture.

However, the discovery of actual wine in pottery vessels would constitute evidence for the presence of wine-drinking at a given time and place which would be nearly incontrovertible. As it turns out, archaeologists have for many decades reported often finding reddish residues in pieces of pottery from the world of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean; each time it was hypothesized that this residue represented the remnants of what must have been a sizable amount of wine in these vessels, since evaporated. Once, some pottery containing such residue was left out in a rainstorm; when the rain filled up the jars, observers noted that the resulting liquid (a mix of rainwater and the concentrated residue) very much looked, smelled, and tasted like wine.367 Yet for decades the tests on such residues could hardly be conclusive, for scientific technique had not yet evolved to the point of being able to determine precisely what had once been in the jars. Instead, archaeologists would oftentimes taste the residue (or scant remaining liquid) in lieu of a more scientific test, giving their subjective judgment but destroying the sample in the process.368 However, over the past several decades, a number of techniques have been developed to analyze the molecular structure of even tiny bits of residue which may be found on the interior of pottery.369 As these tests become more and more precise, our ability to demonstrate beyond a

367 See Stronach (1995) 185. 368 McGovern (2003) 51. 369 For a detailed discussion of these techniques, see McGovern and Michel (1995); Singleton (1995); McGovern et al. (1995); and McGovern (2003).

206 reasonable doubt the presence of wine in millennia-old pottery has become more and more certain. Essentially, the tests hinge on the presence of tartaric acid, a compound present only in certain naturally occurring substances, of which one is the grape (two other important ones are the tamarind fruit and pulp from the baobab tree).370 The tamarind fruit and the baobab tree did not grow in the area of the Mediterranean or the ancient Near East; thus, the discovery of tartaric acid in or on a piece of pottery (or, for that matter, in or on anything else) serves as powerful evidence that it once contained grape juice, wine, or another grape product (such as vinegar).

Yet given the fact that grape juice and vinegar were certainly used in the ancient world, we cannot by this test alone prove that a particular object was used to hold or store wine. Rather, this test must be used in conjunction with the evidence already noted, specifically the shape of the jar and other considerations. It was unlikely that grape juice would need to be stored in jars requiring a stopper (and it would, in any case, begin to turn into wine quickly), while vinegar would likewise not need a stopper but would also not likely be needed in the large amounts often implied by archaeological finds.371 In any case, the confirmation of tartaric acid in a jar or other item does prove the presence of the grape in a society as well as its intentional exploitation, and from there it takes little imagination to believe that the society in question was also in the business of making wine, whatever the society's other uses of the grape and its products.

370 Singleton (1995) 68. These are tropical plants or trees native to Africa and southeast Asia. 371 See McGovern (2003) 57.

207 A final type of material evidence for the origins, spread, and presence of wine came about less incidentally and more intentionally. As ancient cultures developed, they began to develop the capacity to express themselves in various enduring ways. One of these ways was in writing, and we have spent much of this dissertation in discussing the testimony provided by such philological evidence. However, ancient cultures also left a wealth of visual evidence of all sorts, ranging from carvings to paintings to other non- literary artistic representations. Although such art is scarce to non-existent in very early cultures, it becomes quite common in Egypt and in Mesopotamia from the 3rd millennium BCE, and in Anatolia and points west in the 2nd millennium BCE and thereafter. Fairly often, such art depicts representations of individuals drinking in a communal fashion, often from the ornate cups we find in archaeological digs at such sites. The people portrayed in the art may seem to be drunk, thus causing us to suspect that the beverage in their cups is in fact alcohol. Oftentimes the art even includes the representation of amphoras, a hint that the imbibing of wine is specifically being depicted. Sometimes, the grapevine itself is used as a trope, indicating further that grapes and wine are at the center of the feast. (Even greater certainty can be reached if the art is accentuated by writing which proclaims the presence of wine, not an uncommon occurrence.) Such art, expensive as it is, is almost exclusively commissioned by the upper class of a culture, and in ancient as in modern times those with the means to afford it lived a life of luxury. In the ancient Near East this took the form of royal banquets, often flowing with wine (an expensive beverage for those with rich tastes); in

208 the early Mediterranean (particularly Greece), it would evolve into the custom of the symposium, perhaps a bit more democratic but still with an aristocratic flavor. By tracing the spread of this custom from east to west through pictorial representations, we are also able to credibly trace the spread of wine.

Thus it is that we have a number of types of material evidence at our disposal as we attempt to trace the origins and subsequent spread of wine from place to place and from culture to culture. Visual evidence (as just mentioned) tells its own story and provides important attestation to the presence and social importance of the beverage.

On the other hand, the seed evidence provided by palaeobotany lays the groundwork, for it can provide secure evidence for the presence of the grape and good evidence for its cultivation and exploitation. Yet it is chemical testing which must be called the most powerful tool at our disposal to confirm the presence of wine in ancient cultures, for it provides virtually incontrovertible evidence of this fact. This chapter takes into account each of these types of evidence to attempt to paint a holistic picture based on the material evidence at hand. Of course, archaeologists are always at work, and new finds continue to be made. The current study is limited only by its inability to see the future; our picture of the origins of wine has been substantially altered within just the past two decades by new evidence, and it would be naïve to think that the next twenty or fifty or hundred years will not likewise bring to light important new evidence. Yet it is perhaps not too ambitious to make the case that it is only now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, that the picture has become clear enough in all of these fields to

209 begin to attempt a comprehensive work such as this one. With time, the picture will no doubt become clearer, but such knowledge does not preclude us from describing the picture as it first swims into tolerable focus.

Material Evidence: Region by Region

For the remainder of this chapter, we will present the most important material evidence for the origins of wine and its spread into the various regions which are under discussion in this study. The evidence presented below is not meant to be exhaustive; rather, the most important and notable finds from each area have been selected for mention. It is not necessary to provide a comprehensive list of the material evidence for the origins and spread of wine, for the story can be told by highlighting key testimony and ample bibliography will direct the reader to further information. The discussion of the evidence is structured by region; that is to say, we will focus on one geographical area at a time, focusing on what can be known about the origins of wine in that region before moving on to another. The regions are discussed in roughly chronological order, from those with the earliest attestation of wine to the latest.372

372 It is notoriously difficult to date events prior to the first millennium BCE with any kind of precision, and so a caveat is in order concerning all dates cited throughout this chapter. The problem is not simply one of imprecision, but is in fact far worse: there are essentially three dating systems which are cited (far too often interchangeably or sloppily) in the literature. The first set of dates are those of uncalibrated radiocarbon (C14) years; these are traditionally cited in archaeological literature to avoid confusion. However, all agree that these figures must be calibrated (although naturally not all agree on how), and thus arise the second set of dates, calibrated radiocarbon years. It is worth noting that calibration adds about 500 years to an uncalibrated date of 4000 BP (Before Present), with the adjustment growing heftier as the dates grow older. Yet it is the third set of dates which causes the most problems: these are historical dates calculated not via carbon dating but by data gleaned from historical (i.e., written) sources. These simply do not match up with dates yielded by carbon dating; for instance, the latter method suggests that the Bronze Age began in Mesopotamia not around 3200 BCE (as historical sources, as currently interpreted, suggest) but closer to 4000 BCE. See the excellent discussion of this problem in Hasel (2004). This dissertation, regrettably, cannot solve all of the problems of ancient chronology, and so it must live amidst the ambiguities. To the best of my ability, I

210 Transcaucasia

We begin our tour of the material evidence for the origins and spread of wine in the region of Transcaucasia. For our purposes, we will define Transcaucasia as the region encompassing both the Caucasus mountain range and the relatively well-watered upland to its south. This upland serves as a strategic crossroads for much that is important in human history, for it borders a number of crucial geographical and cultural regions. To the south lies Mesopotamia, the drier and flatter region in which humanity's earliest civilization would arise in the last half of the fourth millennium BCE. To the west is Anatolia, itself exhibiting extremely early evidence of agriculture and human settlement. To the southwest is the Levant, a crucial highland route between the aforementioned area and the other premiere civilization of the ancient Near East, Egypt.

To the east and southeast is the upland plateau of Persia, dry and cold but in the rainshadow of mountains such as the Zagros running along the spine of Mesopotamia.

Finally, to the north and across the towering Caucasus range, the open Pontic-Caspian steppe extends for hundreds of miles in all directions, providing ease of movement from the forests of Europe to the snowy mountains of central Asia. At the center of all of this lies the tableland to the south of the Caucasus.

From a perspective of physical and cultural geography, therefore, this region is

have cited calibrated radiocarbon years for the prehistoric era, even if that means calibrating (via the website www.calpal-online.de) the uncalibrated dates provided in the sources (when they are courteous enough to label them one way or the other). However, as it seems standard to follow historical (rather than radiocarbon) dates when referring to eras such as the Chalcolithic or Bronze Ages as well as to times more securely attested by historical evidence (naturally), I have generally followed suit. Most of all, I have attempted to use sweeping generalizations wherever possible (“the first half of the fourth millennium BCE”, not “January 15, 3856 BCE”) so as to accurately convey our scholarly aporia.

211 truly in a central location, easily accessible to all of the areas important to the early human history of the West. Yet this would simply be of passing interest to us if not for another important fact, namely one of climate and (more specifically) of botany. The grapevine can only thrive in certain conditions of climate (that is to say, temperature and rainfall); the wild grape will not grow in conditions that are too hot, dry, cold, or wet. The vine also rarely grows at high elevations (above around 5000 feet or 1500 meters). Given such limitations, the wild grapevine does not grow today in the Middle East except in a narrow swath of land which rims the Black Sea and Mediterranean coasts of Turkey, with a tendril extending inland through the moderately high terrain of southeastern Turkey to northern Iran and Iraq and another tendril encompassing the southern vales of the

Caucasus and the immediate southern shore of the Caspian.373 With cooler and wetter conditions prevailing six to ten thousand years ago, it is likely that somewhat more of this region was suitable for the wild grape to grow, but all the same we must envision an ancient Near East in which the wild grape simply could not be found in Egypt,

Mesopotamia, Persia, or much of central Anatolia and the Levant. It was only in the region south of the Caucasus, favored with more rainfall by its moderately high elevation and with a somewhat temperate climate by westerly winds from the Black and

Mediterranean Seas, that the wild grapevine could not only grow but thrive.

If we are to look for areas likely to innovate a winemaking culture, we would expect to find at least two factors present. The first, naturally, is the presence of the wild grape, presumably in abundance. The second is the early impact of civilization, if by that 373 See the map in Miller (2008) 940.

212 term we mean the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle and the cultivation of fruits and grains for food (that is to say, agriculture). Only where both of these factors were present could a winemaking culture arise. In the ancient Near East, it was primarily here, in Transcaucasia, where these conditions were met: only in neighboring Anatolia might we even begin to find a similar confluence. This region, therefore, serves as a crossroads for the history of wine, for it brings together all of the necessary ingredients—climatic and cultural—to stimulate the birth of an industry.

Yet all of this is simply conjecture. Demonstrating that the climatic and cultural ingredients were present—perhaps uniquely so—in this region at an early period for the founding of all that must go into a winemaking industry does not in fact prove that such an industry first arose here. After all, as previously discussed, the grapevine was surely exploited by humans in many parts of the world in which it grew naturally, and we could easily imagine a scenario in which culturally advanced groups in certain places set themselves to the tending and ultimately to the domestication of the grapevine with an eye toward the making of wine. If we are to crown Transcaucasia as the birthplace of winemaking, we must find evidence to that effect. And since the dates in view are far before the advent of writing, our evidence must necessarily be of the material sort.

During the past 25 years, the scientific community—archaeologists, palaeobotanists, chemists—have come together in a remarkable way to uncover and examine evidence relating to the early wine culture of Transcaucasia. Although the evidence provided by these disparate groups is not always entirely harmonious, it

213 nonetheless paints a picture in broad terms of the birth and growth of an early wine culture radiating outwards from the plateau to the south of the Caucasus. Thus, it appears that the material evidence does indeed allow us to go beyond mere conjecture and to make the claim that the industry of winemaking began here. We give an overview of the evidence for early winemaking in this region below.

The grape appears to have been present in Transcaucasia for a long time indeed.

It is likely that the vine grew here even during the Ice Age (before 10000 BCE), when the

Black Sea (smaller though it might have been) and the Caucasus range would have sheltered the region from polar conditions on the steppe to the north. Thus,

Transcaucasia may have served as a shelter for the grapevine and other plants during a climatically difficult period in the planet's history, providing ample warmth and rainfall for growth. In any case, the grapevine was certainly present in the early Neolithic period, as pollen from the grapevine has been found in sediment dating from 10000 BCE to 6000

BCE in several large lakes of the region, including Lakes Van and Urmia.374 As previously mentioned, the earliest evidence of pottery in the ancient Near East dates from the last half of the seventh millennium BCE; thus, at the time of its invention, it might well have been immediately put to use to ferment and store wine. This is not simply a conjecture, for chemical testing has confirmed the presence of wine in pottery found in modern-day

Georgia and dated to around 6000 BCE.375 These jars, found at a site called Shulaveris-

Gora, appear to be ideal for wine, exhibiting a narrow neck. Even more compellingly,

374 See Miller (2008) 938. 375 McGovern (2003) 75.

214 they appear to contain carvings which evoke the image of grape clusters. Taken together, this evidence seems to confirm a wine culture in nuce present in Transcaucasia at the very dawn of the pottery era. It would appear that it did not take the enterprising humans of the Neolithic era long to put their pottery to good use in the service of winemaking.

The presence of a reasonably well-developed wine culture in the region at such an early date raises the question as to whether the Neolithic inhabitants of

Transcaucasia had domesticated the vine or were simply making use of the no-doubt abundant wild vines in the region. 6000 BCE would, after all, be an early date for the domestication of the grapevine. Yet the evidence supports the idea that the grapevine was indeed domesticated in the region by this time. Six seeds found at Shulaveris Gora with domesticated-like features have been carbon-dated to approximately 6000 BCE,376 while seeds found at Chokh in Dagestan just across the Caucasus range also give evidence of domestication from a similar time period.377 Thus, the evidence from palaeobotany, pottery, and chemistry all agree that a wine culture had arisen in the region of the Caucasus by the beginning of the sixth millennium BCE. The basic ingredients—civilization plus the grapevine—appear to have indeed come together to give birth to what may well be the first concerted winemaking in history.

We have made the case above that domestication of the grapevine need only have happened once in human history. Once domesticated, it would have perhaps been

376 McGovern (2003) 24. 377 McGovern (2010) 576.

215 easier for neighboring cultures to “borrow” the domesticated vine from those near them than to undertake the painstaking process of domestication themselves. All the same, it would nonetheless remain possible for the latter to have occurred at some other time and in some other place. The evidence for one hypothesis or the other lies in the study of plant genetics, which can compare the similarity of plant genes from various regions and can thus paint a picture of plant migrations as those plants were carried by animals, including (and in our case, especially) humans.

Several recent studies have addressed this issue, attempting to determine the origins of Vitis vinifera by studying genetic samples of its exemplars from a number of different regions. Perhaps paradoxically, two studies that were done in 2006 came to rather different conclusions. One, a study largely based on modern grapevine samples from the Middle East, concluded that grapevines from western Europe often have more in common (genetically speaking) with those growing in the modern-day country of

Georgia than with those in any other location in the Middle East, suggesting that the domesticated grapevine arose in Georgia and was then transplanted from place to place across the Mediterranean until arriving in western Europe.378 Yet another study also done in 2006 noted something quite different, finding that grapevines located at the extreme west (i.e., the Iberian Peninsula) and the east (i.e., the Middle East) of the range of Vitis vinifera each exhibited different genetic traits, with their differences blending together in the middle.379 This dualistic differentiation indicated potentially two locations

378 Vouillamoz et al. (2006). 379 Arroyo-Garcia et al. (2006).

216 of archaic grapevine domestication, one in the east and one in the west. To be sure, both of these studies supported the hypothesis of one original domestication of the grapevine in the region of the ancient Near East, focusing on the region of Transcaucasia: this is important evidence in itself. Their major difference was in their perspective as to whether there was another, independent center of domestication in Iberia, something we have seen would be impossible to rule out without evidence in any case. Fortunately, another study in 2011 provided a measure of common ground, finding that vines in various parts of Europe showed evidence of local influence while nonetheless maintaining a strong indication of a Near Eastern origin.380 This study suggested that the grapevine, originally domesticated in the Near East, was subsequently carried from region to region across Europe. Once arriving in each region, it was crossed with local wild vines, thus producing the hybrids we find in each location between regional wild

Vitis vinifera and the domesticated version imported from Transcaucasia. This can explain some amount of Iberian genetic influence, but it neither proves nor disproves a separate original domestication in western Europe; we will discuss that possibility in the appropriate section below.

Regardless of the possibilities of more than one original domestication of the grapevine, all three of these studies agreed on something noteworthy, specifically that the grapevine was domesticated once in the Near East in ancient times. From this original source, the domesticated grapevine was carried from place to place throughout the region and ultimately transported across the Mediterranean to make its genetic 380 Myles et al. (2011).

217 mark on the grapevines of other regions. Furthermore, as we have seen, one study pinpointed the region of Transcaucasia as the source of this original domestication, specifically the modern-day country of Georgia on the southern slopes of the Caucasus range beside the Black Sea. This genetic evidence accords remarkably well with what we have already seen via the material evidence of a very early wine culture in this area.

When taken together, all of this testimony gives us good reason to believe that by 6000

BCE, the Neolithic inhabitants of Transcaucasia had successfully domesticated the grapevine and had begun making wine from its fruit. From here, knowledge of grape- growing and winemaking, together with the all-important prize of the domesticated grapevine, would radiate outward to other parts of the ancient Near East.

The next evidence for the production of wine comes from a site known as Hajji

Firuz Tepe, located to the southeast of Georgia in modern-day northwestern Iran and at the fringes of the range of the wild grape.381 Archaeology has been a difficult undertaking in Iran since the revolution of 1979, but luckily archaeologists had been busy excavating mountains of evidence in the preceding decades. At Hajji Firuz Tepe, excavators discovered a group of jars set next to each other, one of which exhibited a yellowish residue. A shard was brought back to the United States and rested in storage for years until it was re-excavated from strorage in the mid-1990s, when it underwent chemical testing. This shard, dated between 5400 and 5000 BCE, tested positive for tartaric acid, thus strongly suggesting that it had once held wine. Hajji Firuz Tepe is not located so far afield that it provides evidence for the spread of wine culture out of the 381 See McGovern (2003) 67 ff.

218 immediate area of Transcaucasia, but it nevertheless shows that wine was being produced at the region's southeast fringe at the end of the sixth millennium. This is important, for an expansion of wine culture would soon proceed in this direction.

Our first evidence for the growth of the grapevine outside of the range of the modern wild vine comes from Lake Zeribar, a small lake located around 200 kilometers southeast of Lake Urmia and not much less from Hajji Firuz Tepe. Lake Zeribar is an upland lake in the Zagros Mountains which run down modern Iran's western fringe.

These mountains are barely too dry to support the grapevine in the wild, but unlike the

Mesopotamian lowland to the southwest, they can nonetheless support its growth with only a small amount of irrigation. The Zagros range thus represents a natural zone for the extension of the grapevine by humans into an area where it did not previously grow naturally. The type of grapevine to be transplanted would presumably have been of the domesticated variety, and we might expect that this was done with the expectation of making wine. The evidence from Lake Zeribar is of the pollen variety, and it indicates that, while the grapevine was certainly not present before 5000 BCE,382 it was growing in the region by 4300 BCE.383 Thus, if we are to date the beginning of the spread of wine culture from the uplands of Transcaucasia into neighboring regions, we must estimate based on current evidence that this occurred in the first half of the fifth millennium BCE.

Other evidence from as early as the fifth millennium BCE for winemaking in the region of Transcaucasia is scarce, but having established the beginnings of wine culture

382 McGovern (2009) 111. 383 Miller (2008) 938.

219 at an early period we need be less worried about the procurement of a parade of evidence for its transmission to future generations in the region. Rather, we will be more interested in its subsequent spread to other regions, something we have already begun to note. All the same, worthy of mention is the discovery in a cave complex at Areni in modern-day Armenia of an installation said to be a winepress by the archaeologists who found it.384 Dated to the end of the fifth millennium BCE, this winepress was chemically tested and exhibited the presence of tartaric acid. The winepress, described as a platform with raised edges slanting toward the mouth of a large jar, was surrounded by other storage jars as well as grape seeds and (for lack of a better term) other paraphernalia of the wine industry. This installation is indicative of more than just casual winemaking, but rather exhibits a well-developed technology capable of efficiently producing large quantities of wine. From 4000 BCE, therefore, we may envision the spread of wine as a commodity, produced not simply for local consumption but for trade and for profit. Indeed, the profit motive is an excellent explanation for the intentional transplantation of the grapevine from its natural habitat into new territory: having once tasted imported wine (and likely paid dearly for it), cultures outside the grapevine's wild range ultimately desired to create (and perhaps to export) their own wine.

If the expansion of the grapevine and of winemaking began in the fifth millennium BCE, it truly began to take off during the fourth millennium BCE. As the centuries go by, we find evidence of the spread of both of the vine and wine down the spine of the Zagros and ultimately into what is today southwestern Iran. One of the most 384 See Barnard et al. (2010).

220 sensationalized finds related to the history of wine took place at Godin Tepe, a site in the mountains with easy access to the very early lowland culture of Sumer. The settlement at Godin Tepe is dated between 3500 and 3100 BCE, at the very dawn of human civilization as it is often reckoned (most notably by the invention of writing). Here in one room were discovered a number of jars suitable for wine, one of which when chemically tested revealed the presence of tartaric acid.385 The room was hypothesized to be not just a room for wine storage but also the hub of a trading center, as the site lay on an important east-west trading corridor between lowland Sumer and points east. In fact, the settlement at Godin Tepe matches the profile of a number of other known sites located at some distance from Sumer which seem to have served as trading outposts for that civilization, funneling resources back to the center and profiting from the control of important trade routes.386

If this is indeed the case with Godin Tepe, we can theorize that the evidence for wine consumption (and perhaps production and trade) at Godin Tepe highlights the lowland civilization's economic and material interest in the commodity of wine at this early date. As the grapevine would not have easily grown in the Sumerian homeland located in dry lowland Mesopotamia, the upland outpost at Godin Tepe would have served an important purpose by tending the grapevine and producing wine both for sale along the trade routes and for import back to the heartland. In any case, Godin Tepe is located well out of the range of the wild grapevine, and so the presence of wine and its

385 Badler (1995). 386 See Algaze (1995) 91.

221 paraphernalia at this location provides certain evidence that during the latter half of the fourth millennium the grapevine (again, likely the domesticated variety) was being intentionally transplanted to new regions for what could be described generally as economic motives. The well-developed trade network of the lowland civilization indicates that a mercantilist economy was alive and well in this period, and we may surmise that wine was a notable commodity of the period.387 In fact, we may go a step further: just as we noted earlier that civilization (that is, a sedentary lifestyle and the adoption of agriculture) was necessary for the creation of a wine culture, we may also say that civilization (in this case, the development of trade and of power structures we might today recognize as 'government') was necessary for the spread of that wine culture from its natural homeland into areas to which it was originally foreign. Wine and civilization, it seems, have always been inextricably linked to one another in the western world.

The grapevine continued to spread to the south and east in the latter half of the fourth millennium BCE and on into the third millennium. At this time, it reached the territory of the Elamites, whose empire flourished during the third millennium. At Susa, a single grape pip has been found from the late fourth millennium BCE, providing evidence (if slender) that the grapevine was being exploited in the Elamite capital.388 As

Susa and the rest of Elamite territory is prohibitively far from the natural range of the grapevine, we must posit that the vine was procured from the northwest, perhaps from

387 See the discussion in Algaze (1995). 388 McGovern et al. (1997) 16.

222 the area of Godin Tepe. Further to the southeast, at Anshan (modern day Malyan, Iran), the existence of the grapevine is attested via scant seed evidence in earlier levels (dated from 3400 to 2600 BCE), but serious exploitation does not commence until the last half of the third millennium, when over a hundred carbonized seeds appear in the archaeological record.389 Thus, we can say that the grapevine had reached modern-day southwestern Iran by the end of the fourth millennium BCE, but came to be a fully integrated part of the local economy only in the subsequent millennium. The third millennium proved to be a pivotal era for the expansion of the domesticated grapevine: although outside the purview of our study, it is worth noting that seed evidence for its transplantation shows up even in isolated well-watered pockets of eastern Iran and points north by the dawn of the second millennium BCE.390

Mesopotamia

Thus, current evidence allows us to tell a compelling story of the origins and spread of the wine industry in Transcaucasia and the Zagros between the sixth and third millennia BCE. Yet it was from Mesopotamia, the dry but urbanized lowland to the south and west of this region, that much of the economic impetus for the spread of wine culture might have come during the fourth millennium. Mesopotamia had a problem: although its inhabitants seemed to like wine, they could grow the grapevine only with great difficulty. While evidence exists for scant tending of the grapevine, it appears that much of its produce was used as fruit (often destined to become raisins).391 Beer was the

389 See Zettler and Miller (1995) 126. 390 Zohary (1995) 29. 391 See Powell (1995) 104.

223 primary alcoholic drink of the lowlands;392 winemaking would forever be the province of the highlands to the east, north, and west. Yet we will nonetheless briefly discuss the evidence for the spread of winemaking into Mesopotamia.

The grapevine occurs to this day in the wild on the northern fringes of

Mesopotamia, in a narrow east-west band stretching along the border between Turkey to the north and Syria and Iraq to the south. This band bisects the courses of both the upper Euphrates and the upper Tigris. Given the likelihood of increased rainfall in the region six to eight millennia ago, we may extend this band slightly to the south into modern-day Syria and Iraq. If we examine archaeological finds from this region, we perhaps not surprisingly find evidence of the wild grapevine from time immemorial.

Seeds conforming to the expected norms for those of the wild grapevine have been discovered from as early as the Mesolithic era (that is, from before 10000 BCE) at sites such as Abu Hureyra, located near the Euphrates in modern-day northwest Syria.393 A plethora of other sites exhibit seed evidence of grapevine exploitation in this region from the Neolithic period, dating to before 4500 BCE.394 Yet all of this is to be expected given the known presence of the wild grapevine, and it does not necessarily give us any clues to the beginning of domestication or the production of wine.

Extensive archaeological work carried out at the site of Kurban Höyük in modern- day southeastern Turkey provides interesting evidence which may shed light on the growth of the wine industry at the fringes of northern Mesopotamia in the Chalcolithic

392 Powell (1995) 106. 393 McGovern (2003) 78. 394 For a list, see McGovern (2003) 78-79 and Zettler and Miller (1995) 125.

224 and Early Bronze Ages (c. 4500-2500 BCE). Unexpectedly, seed evidence is completely absent at this site until the latter half of the fourth millennium BCE, around the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia. However, scant seed evidence in the older layers gives way to the rapidly growing presence of grape pips as the third millennium wears on, with the time around 2500 BCE showing an especially marked rise in evidence for grape exploitation.395 Furthermore, seeds from the third millennium are found pressed together, a state more likely to result from the grapes being pressed for juice than eaten one at a time.396 Such evidence suggests that winemaking as an industry may not have begun in northern Mesopotamia until after 3500 BCE, with a gradual period of growth reaching well into the following millennium. The nature of the seeds from this period is described as “transitional” between domesticated and wild seeds, although it is unclear what precisely is meant by this; most likely, it simply means that the seeds fall within the uncertain range between the two extremes.397 If intensive grape cultivation was indeed occurring in this area (as the evidence suggests), we would certainly expect the grapevines to be of the domesticated variety.

Further south, in the drier lowland areas of Mesopotamia, the grapevine did not grow naturally and (once introduced) only grew under conditions of intense human oversight. In fact, there is essentially no seed evidence for this region; this may be due both to archaeologists' lack of interest in concentrating on seeds in this area and in the

395 See Miller (2008) 942. 396 Zettler and Miller (1995) 126. 397 See Gorny (1995) 136.

225 poor preservation of such seed evidence in the sands.398 Yet evidence of another kind comes to the rescue and assures us that those living in this area at the dawn of

Sumerian civilization did indeed both know of and enjoy the fruit of the grapevine. A jar from the Late Uruk Period (3500-3100 BC) was found and, when chemically tested, exhibited evidence of tartaric acid.399 This jar, found at Warka in southern Mesopotamia, seemed to be designed for the decanting of beverages, making it likely that wine and not vinegar was the original contents. This jar need not be taken as proof of the presence of the vine in lowland Mesopotamia at this period; in fact, it may be better taken as proof of something we already noted, namely the existence of trade between the highlands to the east (better suited for growing the grapevine) and the center of civilization in the lowlands. Far to the northwest, in modern-day southeastern Turkey on the periphery of

Mesopotamia, similar jars from the Uruk period clearly made to hold and decant liquids have been found at Arslan Tepe; these jars, although far from the heartland, also show evidence of Uruk manufacture.400 Thus, we appear to find evidence of an extremely wide arc of Uruk trade and economic exploitation stretching from northwest to southeast in a broad sweep across the highlands, radiating both inward toward the center and outward toward what might be considered (in modern parlance) foreign trade partners.401 As such, the economic influence of the lowland Uruk civilization may be responsible both for encouraging the beginning of intensive winemaking in the natural grape-growing

398 See Zettler and Miller (1995) 123. 399 See Badler (1996). 400 See Algaze (1995) 95. 401 For a discussion, see McGovern (2003) 162-63.

226 country at the northern fringes of Mesopotamia and the extension of the grapevine further south along the spine of the Zagros, as previously seen. In any case, we can be sure that the Uruk civilization benefited from the expansion of the wine industry in this period, even if it only stimulated it in part by providing a market for winemakers (via trade) to sell their goods.

Although the evidence for wine-drinking is fairly scarce in Mesopotamia proper throughout the third millennium and into the start of the second millennium, we can be sure that it continued, in no small part because of the written evidence provided by the cuneiform texts which begin to be abundantly attested in this millennium (see the chapter on Near Eastern literature). Yet we do notice in the archaeological record a change in the type of cups used in Mesopotamia in the Early Bronze Age (from the beginning of the third millennium BCE onward), with an emphasis on chalices with narrow necks.402 As mentioned above, such cups reflect the attitudes of a society toward drinking, and it is likely that the wide-scale production of such cups reflects the rise of a high-class drinking culture. While beer is always a possibility for the beverage in question, it is more likely that wine would have been a drink of the upper classes throughout Mesopotamia, exotic as it must have seemed and expensive as it must have been to import from the periphery of the region. We might envision the third- millennium Sumerians (and later Akkadians) enjoying wine both for its flavor and social value and as a status symbol.

The importance of wine in Mesopotamia in later periods can be seen by a brief 402 See Gorny (1995) 136.

227 excursus on the material evidence for the beverage in the later Bronze Age and on into the Iron Age. The discovery of the city of Mari on the banks of the Euphrates in northern

Mesopotamia revealed a host of evidence which pointed toward the importance of that site as a trading center for wine, with the beverage coming down the Euphrates from the highlands to the north and being distributed further south to the cities of southern

Mesopotamia. In the palace at Mari, a number of storerooms were discovered which seemed to have the purpose of holding wine jars; some of them actually held jars still present when the site was discovered.403 While it is true that some of these jars may have held oil instead of wine, the concomitant discovery of written records attesting to the importance of wine at Mari might lead us to believe that at least some of these jars

(and storerooms) were set aside for wine. Later material evidence for the importance of wine in Mesopotamia becomes even more compelling in the early first millennium, with the rise of the great Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians left behind many stone reliefs on which were often carved scenes of feasting or of royal banqueting. Revelers, including

(and especially) the king, could be seen drinking from bowls; it is almost certain that the beverage in the bowls was wine.404 We are led to believe this by the written evidence which often accompanies these images, but especially by the graphic depictions of grapevines growing up around the king like a canopy.405 In general, these reliefs attest to the importance of wine and of the vine in the culture of the empires of Mesopotamia: it was no doubt the rarity of the fruit and its corresponding beverage in this region that

403 Zettler and Miller (1995) 127. 404 See Stronach (1995) for a discussion and depiction of these bowls in reliefs from Assyria. 405 McGovern (2003) 192.

228 made it such a status symbol. These reliefs are also important for their clear depiction of the “drinking party”, with wine (rather than any other alcoholic beverage) at its center; this motif, of course, spreads to the west (and indeed, by the time of the Assyrian

Empire has already spread to the west) along with civilized wine culture.406

The Levant

Having discussed the originally vine-deprived region of Mesopotamia, let us return to regions which certainly exhibited evidence of the wild grape in ancient times.

Continuing the discussion from grape-growing areas on the northern fringes of

Mesopotamia, let us look west and south to the region of the Levant, constituting the seaboard stretching from modern-day Syria into Lebanon and Israel. Today, the wild grape grows in this region only in a thin band right on the coast of Syria and Lebanon, but during certain parts of the Neolithic period the Levant experienced greater rainfall and could thus support the growth of the wild grapevine further south and further inland. This is evidenced by several very early finds of wild seeds, including four seeds at

Tell Aswad near Damascus in Syria407 and significant evidence from Jericho in the Jordan

Valley.408 The former find is dated to around 7000 BCE, while the latter is no later than the ninth millennium. Seed evidence continues to appear in subsequent archaeological levels at Jericho down into the Chalcolithic period (4th millennium BCE) and onward.409

Thus, we have ample evidence of the widespread growth of the wild grapevine

406 McGovern (2003) 199. 407 See Powell (1995) 100. 408 See Renfrew (1995) 256. 409 Núñez and Walker (1989) 218.

229 throughout much of the Levant in very ancient times, even though the area is today simply too dry for the grapevine to grow without irrigation or the like.

We saw that the spread of the domesticated grapevine out of Transcaucasia and down the spine of the Zagros to the southeast seemed to begin sometime after 4500

BCE, although it did not proceed in earnest until the following millennium. It is somewhat more difficult to establish a seemingly neat chain of transmission for the domesticated grapevine into the Levant, at least partially because the Levant does not lie so close to those areas which were certainly producing wine in the sixth millennium

BCE. Our task is complicated somewhat by the fact that no very early seeds of the clearly domesticated variety have been found in the Levant, making it difficult to determine if seed finds from the late Neolithic indicate exploitation of the naturally-occurring wild grapevine or the coming of the domesticated grapevine from the north. Yet just as we have seen that seed finds in northern Mesopotamia (a likely waypoint between

Transcaucasia and the Levant) begin to intensify in the middle of the fourth millennium

BCE, so also do we begin to find convincing evidence for actual grapevine cultivation in the Levant roughly around that time. This evidence comes in the form of charred pips at

Tell esh-Shuna in the northern Jordan Valley, pips whose measurements (despite the charring) may be argued to fit the profile of domesticated seeds.410 Meanwhile, grapevine remains begin to pop up in the following centuries at a number of sites further south (or further inland) in the Levant, such as at Lachish in south-central Israel

410 Zohary (1995) 28. The find is described as “mid-fourth millennium bc” uncalibrated radiocarbon time, yielding an approximate calibrated date of 4000 BCE.

230 and at Numeira in Jordan.411 There is no evidence to suggest that the wild grapevine ever grew in the dry climate of the southern Levant, and thus we might conjecture that the spread of the grapevine as well as its more intensive cultivation both herald the arrival of the domesticated grapevine into the Levant. At the same time, a new type of jug or cup appears in the area which seems well-suited to wine-pouring or wine-drinking; it may be no coincidence that the advent of this type of pottery dovetails with the increasing palaeobotanical evidence for wine.412

If the presence of winemaking in the Levant in the 4th millennium BCE must be inferred from relatively scant evidence, the fact of its existence quickly becomes more secure in the following millennium. The first indisputable evidence for the production of the beverage is a winepress found at Tell Ta'anach in north-central Palestine dating from around 2700 BCE.413 Such evidence naturally guarantees that winemaking was relatively well-established by that date, indicating that the estimation of a fourth-millennium beginning for winemaking in the Levant is not an unreasonable projection. Meanwhile, testimony to the Levant's increasing importance as a center for viticulture continues to mount as we head into the second millennium BCE: an amphora found at Beth Shean from the first half of the millennium was tested and found to contain traces of tartaric acid.414 Meanwhile, a huge storeroom of wine jars was recently found during the excavation of a Canaanite palace at Tel Kabri in northern Palestine from around 1700

411 Zohary (1995) 28. 412 McGovern (2003) 219. 413 See Leonard (1995) 235. 414 McGovern (2003) 235.

231 BCE; not surprisingly, these jars also proved to have contained wine. Such jar finds from the Levant are to be expected, for it was in this era—the second millennium BCE—that the already-mentioned Canaanite jar arose in the region, a design soon to be exported across the Mediterranean. Although antecedents to this jar's design may have arrived from Mesopotamia, it was in the Levant that the design was perfected, indicating the region's importance as a source of merchant goods and of wine in particular.415 With the development of the Canaanite jar and the corresponding rise in fame of the Phoenicians as the Mediterranean's merchant marine, the Levant would in subsequent centuries come to be associated with wine and the wine trade by peoples from Cyprus to the

Pillars of Hercules.

The evidence for such a wine trade lies in large part at the bottom of the ocean, where a number of ancient shipwrecks of Phoenician ships have been found.416 Very commonly, these ships are full of Canaanite jars, or amphoras, giving us a glimpse into the trading empire of the Phoenicians in the second and first millennia BCE. Although we must be careful not to assume that amphoras always included wine—in fact, the Ulu

Burun wreck from the 14th century BCE gives evidence of a number of different commodities being shipped in these containers, including olives417—it is nonetheless quite likely that many of them did. Thus, there is no doubt that the Levant of the second millennium BCE was awash in wine.

Such were the circumstances at the time of the rise of the familiar nation-states

415 Leonard (1995) 239. 416 See, for instance, Ballard (2002) for a discussion of two wrecks full of amphoras dating to c. 750 BCE. 417 See Leonard (1995) 250.

232 of the first millennium BCE, namely Phoenicia, Israel, and Philistia, and the material evidence for these groups' enjoyment of wine abounds. There is especially significant testimony to the Philistines' production and enjoyment of wine; large vats have been found in the excavation of the ancient city of Ashkelon, perfect for treading the grapes.

Meanwhile, a number of wine-jugs have been found in the area of the Philistine pentapolis (as well as other jugs further afield which can be shown to have been made in

Philistia).418 The Philistines' love of wine makes sense from a cultural perspective, as much evidence points to them being immigrants from Greece; as we will see below, the evidence for the importance of wine in the second-millennium BCE Aegean is incontrovertible, even apart from the written evidence we have already noted.

Egypt

The Levant serves as a natural highway for peoples, goods, and ideas from

Mesopotamia and points north to Egypt, and so it is in the latter direction that we will turn before returning north to follow the story of wine through Anatolia and onward to points west. Much like in the majority of the Levant, the vine did not grow naturally in

Egypt in prehistoric times; the climate was simply too hot and dry. Thus, the arrival of evidence for grape-growing in the archaeological record of Egypt also serves as good evidence for the arrival of winemaking in Egypt, as we would expect (as we saw in the area of the Zagros) that the grapevine was ultimately transplanted to new areas for economic motives. We have essentially no evidence of an intermediary period in Egypt where wine was imported from other areas but was not yet grown and produced in 418 See McGovern (2003) 226.

233 Egypt, although this phase surely must have taken place. Instead, evidence for the presence of the grape in Egypt appears suddenly in the form of pips from the 4th millennium at El-Omari, located in northern Egypt near modern-day Cairo.419 As the dynastic period in Egyptian history begins around 3100 BCE, this indicates that wine and the vine had already arrived in Egypt before the start of recorded Egyptian history. Given the likely links between Egypt and the Levant in this period (as in all subsequent ones), we might suspect that this commodity came to Egypt from the northeast. Such a connection would in turn strengthen the hypothesis that the wine industry was in evidence in the Levant by the mid-fourth millennium BCE.

In fact, the next set of material evidence which highlights the existence of wine in

Egypt points explicitly toward connections with the Levant. A tomb from Dynasty 0 (c.

3150 BCE) was found at Abydos near Memphis in Upper Egypt which contained, among other things, an entire wine cellar full of amphoras apparently intended to fortify the king in question (named Scorpion) well into his stay in the afterlife.420 These amphoras were chemically tested and exhibited tartaric acid, proof that they did indeed hold wine

(and a large quantity of it at that). The discovery of grape pips at the bottom of a significant minority of the jars only provided more evidence for the erstwhile contents.

The presence of such large quantities of wine at such an early date so far up the Nile suggests that wine had been known in Egypt for some time. Yet there is another twist in the story: neutron analysis of the jars themselves indicates that the jars were made from

419 James (1995) 199. 420 For a narrative discussion, see McGovern (2003) 91.

234 clay originating not in Egypt but in the southern Levant, even though the seals or stoppers inserted into the mouths of the jars were made of native Egyptian clay.421 The fact that these jars were made in the Levant and imported to Egypt might indicate a number of things, but at the very least it securely establishes very early trade links between the two regions.

But what might we hypothesize about wine in particular from this evidence? As we have seen, we have good reason to think that the grape had already been transplanted into Egypt some time before 3150 BCE, and we can therefore assume that winemaking was going on in Egypt in at least some capacity. That is to say, Egypt must already have been past the point of needing to import its wine; it could produce its own.

Additionally, the fact that the seals or stoppers found on the wine jars arose in Egypt dissuades us from asserting that these jars were imported full of wine from the Levant; if this had been the case, we would surely expect that the jars would have been sealed in the Levant to prevent spillage, spoiling, etc. Thus, it is probably best to hypothesize that these jars were imported empty from the Levant into Egypt, where they were filled with native wine produced in Egypt, whether in Lower Egypt or far to the south in upper

Egypt where they were found.

In any case, these inferences suggest the following scenario which must have held true near the end of the fourth millennium BCE. Egypt was in possession of the grapevine (as we have seen from other evidence), and was capable of producing a non- negligible amount of wine. However, its links with the Levant were strong, making 421 See McGovern (2001).

235 possible the mass importation of wine jars from that region. And why did Egypt not yet make its own jars for wine? A number of reasons could be posited, but one possibility is that the Levant was still at this early date a more advanced center of winemaking (and its attendant technology) than was Egypt. Although the vine and winemaking techniques had arrived in Egypt, Egypt still depended on what was perhaps the older winemaking cultures of the Levant to produce jars suitable for the purpose of storing wine. Thus, the find at Abydos suggests that toward the end of the fourth millennium BCE Egypt was in the process of being weaned off of dependence on the Levant for accoutrements related to its winemaking industry.

This early evidence from Dynasty 0 is only the first trickle of what soon becomes a flood of evidence for winemaking and wine-drinking in early Egypt. Grape pips continue to show up (and do so more frequently) in the early dynasties, vouching further that grape-growing played a role in the earliest civilizations in Egypt.422 The tomb at Abydos, although the earliest tomb to attest to the role of wine in Egyptian funerary practices, is hardly the last; another set of sealed jars is attested from tombs dated soon thereafter in the 1st Dynasty. A tomb at Saqqara, from the 2nd Dynasty, provides more evidence of jars which likely once contained wine.423 Although these later jars have not been chemically tested, it is likely that they contained wine due to certain peculiarities they exhibited, specifically the apparent perforation of their seals to allow gases to escape and their subsequent re-sealing (“secondary fermentation locks”).424 Thus, the

422 See James (1995) 200. 423 See Nuñez and Walker (1989) 217. 424 McGovern (2003) 88.

236 evidence of pips and jars alone attests to a thriving winemaking industry at the dawn of the dynastic era.

Yet the evidence for such early winemaking in Egypt extends far beyond the basic evidence of pips and jars. With the rise of Egyptian civilization, there arose the creation of artifacts and art of various sorts by those in power. Among such artifacts, an astounding number attest in one way or another to the importance of wine in Egyptian society even at this early date. Hieroglyphs, originally a system of pictorial representation, exhibit a clear representation of a winepress even from the time of the

1st Dynasty.425 A large number of cylinder seals (placed on the top of wine jars like the ancient version of a label) have also been found which bear the imprint of the hieroglyph for “vine” as well as a range of other information such as the king's name under whom the seal was made; given our knowledge of the time during which each pharaoh reigned, this allows us to date the seal to a fairly narrow range of years, providing definite evidence for the production of wine throughout the years.426 These seals begin in the 1st Dynasty and become more detailed as the centuries pass.

Meanwhile, pictorial representations (beyond the ultimately literary hieroglyphs) become common during the era of the Old Kingdom in Egypt; a stela from the late 2nd

Dynasty displays a large number of wine bowls together with an individual named Imti, apparently so as to guarantee him an unending supply of wine in the afterlife.427 In short, there is no shortage of material evidence which attests to the production and enjoyment

425 Nuñez and Walker (1989) 217. 426 See James (1995) 199. 427 James (1995) 202.

237 of wine in early third-millennium Egypt.

The pictorial evidence continues unabated throughout the period of the Old and

Middle Kingdoms (that is, the third millennium and the first half of the second millennium). A number of excavated tombs show evidence of winemaking scenes on the walls, including virtually all aspects of the process. Some scenes show the picking of grapes off of the vine, others the treading process; still others demonstrate further steps in the process of wine production, such as pressing. Ultimately, the frescos show the filling and sealing of the wine jars with the finished product.428 It would seem that the

Egyptians were intent on making sure that archaeologists of the future would have every reason to believe that they were competent (and prodigious) producers of wine. Yet their pictorial representations also demonstrate that they continued to import wine in the early period: a relief from around the 25th century BCE depicts a ship full of Asiatics bearing a number of what appear to be wine jars.429

At the end of the Middle Kingdom, Egypt was invaded by peoples from Asia called the Hyksos, likely a Semitic group. This disrupted life in Egypt and seems to have brought changes to elements of its wine culture as well. Evidence for this comes from an analysis of wine-jars from the Hyksos period, which (like their ancient forebears found in the tomb of Scorpion at Abydos) show evidence of having been made in the southern

Levant and imported into Egypt.430 Perhaps the Hyksos had in some way curtailed the winemaking capacity of Egypt with their incursion, or perhaps they simply longed for

428 For a sampling of such images, see James (1995) 205-211. 429 Stager (1987) 179. 430 See McGovern and Harbottle (1997).

238 wines from their homeland; in any case, wine once again became a regularly imported item in this period. Yet with the expulsion of the Hyksos and the rise of the New

Kingdom, winemaking in Egypt came back stronger than ever. The analysis of jars from the time immediately following that of the Hyksos shows that wine jars were once again being produced in Egypt, indicating the revitalization of native Egyptian winemaking.431

Meanwhile, more evidence for winemaking in Egypt appears than ever before: an impressive array of winemaking scenes from New Kingdom tombs have been uncovered, including one sophisticated cartoon scene belonging to the Royal Herald Intef (Theban

Tomb #155) which both depicts and narrates the various stages of the winemaking process.432 Meanwhile, wine jars from the period have been found in abundance, often with labels which even go so far as to note the precise year of the vintage.433 One depiction of a port scene found in the Tomb of Kenamun even includes a clear representation of Canaanite jars, suggesting that despite Egypt's successful (and perhaps insular) homegrown industry there was some degree of import (and possibly export) of wine even in this period.434 More specifically still, another scene appears to show men from across the Sea (perhaps from Crete) presenting wine to the ruler of Egypt (or rather to his vizier, Rekhmara) in Canaanite jars, suggesting that wine was flowing into Egypt from both east and north.435 Even better, an actual winemaking installation has been uncovered at Avaris in the Nile delta and dated to the 18th Dynasty, or the beginning of

431 McGovern (2003) 119. 432 See Lesko (1995) 217-18. 433 Lesko (1995) 220. 434 See Leonard (1995) 246. 435 See Younger (1966) 46.

239 the New Kingdom.436 All of this combines to give us all the material evidence we could hope for to attest to the presence (and the utter significance) of wine in such an archaic culture as Egypt's. Present from the time of the earliest dynasties, the importance of wine in Egyptian society was in the end only revitalized by the incursion and subsequent expulsion of the wine-loving Hyksos in the first half of the second millennium BCE. We would indeed be lucky to have such a slate of testimony to tell the story of wine in any other culture.

Yet in some ways, Egypt is a dead-end in our attempt to trace the path of wine to new lands and cultures: while we can certainly conclude that wine and the vine were brought there at an early date, we cannot be sure that Egypt served as a jumping-off point for the spread of the domesticated grapevine and of winemaking to new regions.

This is partially a function of geography: the lands to the west and south of Egypt are essentially inhospitable to the vine, making them poor candidates for transplantation. To the north lay the Mediterranean, but Egypt was never a great seafaring culture, making it unlikely that Egyptians on Egyptian ships took wine culture far across the sea. Thus, to continue our journey, we must return north back to a latitude (and a climate) which supports the wild grapevine and the domesticated grapevine better.

Anatolia

To the west of Transcaucasia (and north of the Levant) lies the region of Anatolia, a somewhat dry region which nonetheless supports the growth of the wild grapevine in certain areas, primarily along the coasts and in well-watered environments throughout 436 McGovern (2003) 19.

240 the heartland. Our evidence for the origins of wine in Anatolia is somewhat scantier than in many other areas; this may be due to the fact that plant evidence was often thrown out during archaeological digs until fairly recently.437 Nonetheless, it is clear that the wild grapevine was native to a large cross-section of the region. Very early evidence comes from Çayönü, a site in modern-day southeastern Turkey near the juncture of the regions of Anatolia, Transcaucasia, and Mesopotamia. Here, seed evidence (predictably wild) was found from as early as the ninth millennium, ensuring that the vine was wild in eastern Anatolia at an early date.438 Evidence from the early Neolithic (7200-6500 BCE) was found at Can Hasan, a site further to the west in modern-day south-central Turkey

(ancient Cilicia), extending our evidence for the ancient range of the wild grape yet further.439 Evidence of the grape in the Neolithic period throughout the rest of Anatolia is scarce, but these finds give us the confidence to posit that the wild grapevine could be found throughout much of Asia Minor, even as it is today.

Our seed evidence begins to increase in the Chalcolithic period (4500-3200 BCE), and more so toward the end of that era. Two sites in far eastern Anatolia, at Korucutepe and at Tepecik, each exhibit seed evidence from the Chalcolithic. The seeds found at the former are potentially wild, but the seeds found at the latter certainly fall within the range of potential domestication.440 Meanwhile, seeds found at nearby Arslantepe

437 See Gorny (1995) 162. Apparently this was the practice at many sites (including those in Mesopotamia), but a great abundance of seed evidence presumably could not help but be noted at places such as, for instance, Jericho in the Levant. 438 Gorny (1995) 135. 439 Gorny (1995) 162. 440 Gorny (1995) 162.

241 dating from the very end of the Chalcolithic period seem to represent a mixture of the wild and domesticated variety.441 In any case, the fact that all three of these sites lie outside of the range of the modern wild grape suggests that the domesticated grapevine may have been transplanted to the region in the fourth millennium, with a transitional period occurring in the latter half of the millennium. It should also be noted that both of these sites are only slightly to the north of Kurban Höyük, a site already discussed when dealing with the origins of wine in Mesopotamia. It will be recalled that evidence of the grapevine first appears at Kurban Höyük in the middle of the fourth millennium; we might thus envisage the spread of the vine from north to south, being cultivated first at

Tepecik and then making its way toward the fringes of Mesopotamia at Kurban Höyük. If this is the case, we might posit that the domesticated grapevine spread to more northern and eastern parts of Anatolia during the middle of the fourth millennium, although given the proximity of this region to Transcaucasia (which, as we have already seen, likely domesticated the grapevine some two thousand years earlier), it is contrary to expectation that the eastern fringes of Anatolia had no knowledge of the domesticated grapevine until after 4000 BCE. Yet the material evidence, such as it is, seems to indicate that an expansion of winemaking to the south and west of

Transcaucasia was not undertaken with any degree of rigor until the fourth millennium

BCE. Another set of evidence coincides with the seed evidence for the growth of wine- drinking in this area: an expansion of drinking vessels in eastern Anatolia can be dated to

441 Belisario et al. (1994) 81.

242 this period, thus indicating more sophisticated attitudes toward drinking.442 As we have already noted, the rise of such ceramic evidence can frequently be indexed to the rise of wine as a central element in a culture.

Thus, it appears likely that winemaking came to eastern Anatolia before the rise of the great lowland empires of Mesopotamia. Yet the situation for central and western

Anatolia is much murkier; beyond being sure of the presence of the wild grapevine, we can say little about when wine came to these regions. Reports of seeds of the domesticated variety dating from the mid to late third millennium BCE come from the site of Troy, as well as other material evidence from the site (further south) of

Beycesultan which might lead to the conclusion that winemaking was proceeding apace in northwestern Anatolia well before 2000 BCE.443 However, chemical testing has not been conducted, and the evidence is not above question.444

It is not until the rise of the Hittite Empire, around 1700 BCE, that certain material evidence begins to appear. The Hittite Empire was centered on central Anatolia, encompassing much of the central highland and in its heyday ruling as far east and south as northern Mesopotamia. While no evidence for viticulture has been found in the

Hittite heartland (specifically at the capital of Hattusa, modern Boğazköy, located on a dry and cold plateau relatively unsuitable for the vine),445 a series of very important wine-related constructions are indeed found at various other sites across the empire.

442 Gorny (1995) 136. 443 McGovern (2003) 257. 444 Gorny (1995) 162: “While vinifera was allegedly found at Troy and Beycesultan..., this report is somewhat problematic.” 445 Gorny (1995) 162.

243 These are the so-called “bathtubs”, or large basins, whose placement in rooms would indicate a use besides the storage of water. It is thought that these were installations for the production and/or the storage of wine; in fact, a chemical analysis of a “bathtub” from third-millennium northern Mesopotamia (not far from the site of Kurban Höyük) indicated the presence of wine.446 Such bathtubs are found at Kültepe (in central

Anatolia south of Boğazköy) dating from the early Hittite period, strongly suggesting that wine production had indeed penetrated at least some portions of the Hittite Empire during its formative period.447

Besides these “bathtubs”, the Hittites obliged us by leaving other artifacts which indicate the presence (and importance) of wine in their society. One is a notable vase found at Inandik, a site northwest of Boğazköy, which dates to the 17th century BCE and which depicts scenes of drinking out of wine-jar-like containers.448 Another is the graphic representation of a supplication scene which portrays the libation of a certain beverage, almost certainly wine.449 Besides these are the usual array of paraphernalia associated with a symposiastic society, such as fancy cups in the shape of a bull's head (known as rhyta), shallow bowls, and an array of wine jars.450 All of this material evidence combines to assure us that the Hittites were a wine-drinking society, even as the cultures of the

Mesopotamian lowlands had been for over a thousand years prior to the rise of the

Hittites. Nor does the evidence for wine-drinking in the region cease with the fall of the

446 McGovern (2003) 182. 447 Gorny (1995) 164. 448 See McGovern (2003) 175. 449 See Gorny (1995) 165. 450 For images, see McGovern (2003) 184-85 and Gorny (1995) 165-69.

244 Hittite Empire at the end of the Bronze Age; the political successors of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia continued to place societal value on wine-drinking, as exemplified by the carving of the storm-god Tarhunta holding a cluster of grapes dating from the eighth century BCE.451 We cannot be sure precisely when the domesticated grapevine and winemaking arrived in much of Anatolia, but we can be certain that after the time of the

Hittite Empire it was established for good in the region.

Greece and the Aegean

From Anatolia, it is only a short journey across the Aegean Sea to Greece. In contrast to the paucity of evidence for early cultivation of the vine in western Anatolia, there is an abundance of evidence attesting to vine-tending and winemaking in prehistoric Greece. This disparity of evidence should almost certainly be chalked up not to real conditions on (or rather, in) the ground but rather to the greater focus of archaeologists in Greece on the topic at hand; there must certainly be much evidence waiting in the soil of modern-day Turkey which simply has not seen the light of day. Yet a thorough treatment of the material evidence for the origins of wine in Greece should also help us to understand its origins in western Anatolia, for those two regions seem always to have been closely connected.

Much like Anatolia, Greece lies squarely within the favored latitude of the wild grapevine. Yet Greece is generally better-watered than Anatolia, ensuring that the grapevine can grow throughout a greater percentage of the region. Very ancient grape remains have been found at the Franchthi Cave in the Peloponnese dating to the 451 See the image in Gorny (1995) 161 (also in Hawkins (2000) Plates 294-95).

245 Mesolithic period (no later than the ninth millennium BCE), thus ensuring that the grapevine has been present in Greece from a very early period.452 Other ancient pips

(these from the Neolithic period) have been found around throughout Greece, making it likely that native inhabitants of the region of the Aegean would never have been too far from the nearest grapevine.453 What early inhabitants of the Aegean did with the grapes in their midst is more a matter of conjecture, but further evidence comes from the site of a burned house at Dikili Tash, located in the region of Thrace in modern-day northeastern Greece. Here were found the remains not just of grape pips but of skins loosely attached to the pips, suggesting that these grapes were not eaten whole (or made into raisins) but were squeezed for juice.454 These remains, dating from 4460 to

4000 BCE, represent the earliest evidence for winemaking in the Aegean, if indeed the juice was allowed to ferment rather than consumed fresh. In any case, the large number of grape pips found at the site (over two thousand) provide strong evidence of the systematic exploitation of the grape by humans in the very early Aegean.

The site at Dikili Tash hardly represents the only site in Greece which attests to the presence of the fruit of the vine in archaic times. Also in Thrace is the site of Sitagroi, an important Neolithic habitation containing five levels of settlement dating from the sixth to the third millennium BCE. All five of these levels exhibit the presence of pips, demonstrating that exploitation of the grape was a consistent fact of life in the northern

Aegean from generation to generation. Yet this diachronic array of seeds also provides a

452 See Hansen (1991). 453 See Renfrew (1995) 260. 454 See Valamoti (2007).

246 crucial window into the next important question: when did the domesticated grapevine arrive in the region of the Aegean? This question has been more fiercely debated concerning seed evidence in Greece than perhaps that in any other region; disconcertingly, various scholars have arrived at various conclusions, although the most common conclusion is that the pips from the Aegean of the fourth and third millennium demonstrate some indeterminate degree of mixture between certainly wild and possibly domesticated seeds.455 The evidence from Sitagroi, although perhaps too meager to reach a conclusion, suggests that the domesticated grapevine had no presence at the site during the first three levels of habitation (that is, until the first part of the fourth millennium); it is only in the fourth level of habitation, dating from the end of the fourth millennium BCE, that seeds resembling those of the domesticated grapevine begin to appear.456 Meanwhile, pips found at Dimitra in the same region of Greece and dating to no later than 2800 BCE exhibit measurements likely to indicate the seeds of a domesticated grapevine.457 Likewise, pips found in the region of Attica which date from the Early Helladic period (ranging anywhere from 2800 BCE to 2100 BCE) also appear to be of the domesticated variety.458 Thus, while the evidence from seed ratios seems unable to provide us with a firm answer on when the domesticated grapevine was introduced to Greece, it can provide us with a range: broadly speaking, we might expect

455 See the discussion in Nuñez and Walker (1989) 223 as well as in Hansen (1988) 47-48. 456 Nuñez and Walker (1989) 223; see the exact measurements in Renfrew (1995) 261-62. Nuñez and Walker give uncalibrated dates of 4550-4300 B.P. for the fourth level; when calibrated this equates to between 3300 and 2950 BCE. 457 See Renfrew (1995) 261; of 48 seeds found, 35 appear to be domesticated. 458 See McGovern (2003) 257.

247 that the wild grapevine was slowly replaced by the domesticated grapevine between the end of the fourth millennium and the middle of the third millennium BCE.459 The confusion of seed evidence from this era may indeed testify to the heterogenous nature of grapevine cultivation in the Aegean in this period; given that exploitation of the wild grape was already (as we have seen) a well-established fact in Greece, we might expect that the imported domesticated grapevine may have replaced what was apparently a successful fruit crop only rather slowly. That is to say, many inhabitants of the Aegean may have gone on enjoying wild grapes even as the domesticated grapevine slowly took hold, literally and figuratively. In this case, we might envision a transitional period of several hundred years in which both were tended side by side.

Yet as we have seen, the coming of the domesticated grapevine to a given region presages (for practical reasons) a boom in wine production. Certainly by around 2500

BCE, the domesticated grapevine had come to be widely cultivated throughout the

Aegean, and with that the region began to take its rightful place as a great center of winemaking. At this point, in the middle of the third millennium BCE, other material evidence begins to appear which testifies to the beginnings of a significant wine industry in Greece. Although much of the evidence we have discussed above has been focused on mainland Greece (and especially on the region of Thrace at the northern end of the

Aegean), it is on Crete that some of our earliest material evidence for the production of wine in the Aegean appears. At the site of Knossos, a city which would serve as one of

459 In any case, this transitional period likely predates the arrival of the Greeks themselves to Greece (probably sometime around 2000 BCE).

248 the major centers of civilization in Minoan and Mycenaean Crete,460 there is a notable rise in the presence of small cups and other drinking-ware beginning in the mid-third millennium; this rise is likewise noted at other sites around Crete. Meanwhile, the same sort of “bathtub” installations found in eastern Anatolia also begin to appear in the area.461 When all of this evidence is taken together—the apparent gradual change of seeds from wild to domesticated, the dramatic rise in cups, and the appearance of an installation thought to be intended for making wine—we stand on fairly firm ground in saying that winemaking had fully arrived in Greece by around 2500 BCE. Again, much of this evidence comes from Crete and not mainland Greece just yet, but Crete was also perhaps the most advanced civilization of the region in this period.462

Having established the rise of winemaking in the Aegean by the middle of the third millennium BCE, we lack only the actual physical evidence of wine residue as ascertained by chemical means. Fortunately for us, this arrives relatively soon thereafter.

The site of Myrtos, on the southern coast of Crete, has been extensively studied for its late-third millennium settlement at which a number of pieces of pottery have been found. This pottery, dated to around 2200 BCE, exhibits traces of tartaric acid, vouchsafing the presence of wine at this early Minoan site.463 Myrtos also yields other evidence for winemaking, including tubs and large jars likely used for the holding of

460 Greece was not inhabited entirely by “Greeks” (in the modern sense of that ethnographic term) until around the middle of the second millennium BCE. The Minoan civilization, as well as any civilizations of the area which preceded it, were ethnically and linguistically “pre-Greek”. See Finkelberg (2005). 461 McGovern (2003) 259. 462 Crete likely enjoyed connections with Egypt during the third millennium, thus likely aiding in the rise of Cretan civilization as well as Cretan wine culture. 463 See McGovern et al. (2007) 180.

249 wine.464 Pottery found at Myrtos also exhibits evidence of vine-leaf impressions, proving yet further that the grapevine was present in Bronze Age Crete while showing that its leaves were used for cushioning or for other uses. As a clincher, a number of grape pips have been found at the site, some with loose stalks and empty grapeskins still attached.

Such morphology indicates that the grapes were pressed for juice, further leading to the conclusion that wine was being produced at Myrtos. The nature of the pips is said to be indeterminate, but the likelihood is that these are pips from the domesticated grapevine.465

Material evidence continues to mount on both Crete and the mainland in the early second millennium BCE. Pips from this era can be found throughout Greece, trending ever more decisively in the direction of domesticated proportions.466 Yet as an increased level of civilization takes hold throughout all of Greece, so also do the accoutrements which can tip us off to the presence of wine. The Minoan and

Mycenaean civilizations appear to have reserved a significant role for wine in their society, and the material evidence makes it clear that it was in this period that the banquet (whether one may call it a symposium at this period is open to debate) arose as a status symbol in Greece.467 Finely wrought chalices begin to appear in the archaeological record, often with grape clusters painted on the side to eliminate any doubt as to what they were meant to hold.468 Meanwhile, a painting found in the Palace

464 See Leonard (1995) 235. 465 See Renfrew (1995) 263. 466 See Renfrew (1995) 265. 467 See the discussion on the symposium in the chapter on classical literature. 468 See the images in Wright (1995) 289-92.

250 of Minos known as the “Campstool Fresco” shows seated men holding up such chalices in their hand as if in toast; it seems that we are meant to understand that we are witnessing a gathering of the well-to-do.469 On a somewhat more banal level, jars for holding wine become common; in fact, at Pylos in the Peloponnese a 'wine magazine'

(that is, a medium-sized building largely dedicated to the storage of wine jars) was found in the so-called Palace of Nestor.470 Various such jars from around Greece have been chemically tested and have betrayed the tell-tale signs of wine.471 The Canaanite jar also appears at a number of sites during the middle of the millennium, including Mycenae; this suggests that wine was also likely an item of trade.472 The discovery of a large, industrial-sized winepress at Kato Zakros in Crete dating to about 1500 BCE may indicate that wine was in fact an export of the region even at this relatively early date.473 Thus, if we are to paint a picture of the role of wine in Mycenaean and Minoan Greece from the material evidence alone, we would describe a world where wine was produced, traded, stored in large quantities, consumed by those who could afford it, and showcased at social gatherings as a status symbol. Remembering that wine also played much the same role in advanced Mesopotamian cultures of the same and previous eras, we might guess that at least some of this cultural similarity was due to the transmission of the idea of wine as a status symbol from east to west, beyond even the fundamental economic realities which lay behind (and legitimated) this social construct. Yet it is worth noting

469 See Wright (1995) 292-93. 470 See Palmer (1995) 280-81. 471 McGovern (2003) 260. 472 Leonard (1995) 243. 473 See McGovern (2003) 252.

251 that there was significantly greater potential for small-scale production of wine in

Greece; whereas few in Mesopotamia could afford to grow the vine or to import wine, many in Greece could grow the vine and enjoy its fruit at least in small quantities. The idea of the symposium as a status symbol, therefore, is more at home in Mesopotamia than in Greece, and it makes more sense as a cultural import than as a native construction. In Classical Greece, the symposium would indeed be democratized in a truly Greek fashion, but during the Greek Bronze Age it appears to have exhibited all the markings of aristocracy.474

Peripheral Eastern Europe

The material evidence for wine in Greece extending through the Dark Ages and into the Classical period is substantial and must be all but taken for granted here.475 Yet before leaving the world of the Aegean and continuing west to Italy, it is necessary to examine a few other areas within the sphere of Greek contact. First we turn to consider

Cyprus, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean west of the Levant, south of

Anatolia, east of Crete, and north of Egypt. Cyprus thus stands in the middle of four regions we have already considered, and we would be surprised if there was no evidence for wine and the vine from this island. We are not disappointed, for the island shows evidence of wild grape pips dating from the Neolithic period into the Bronze

Age.476 Seed evidence continues on into the Iron Age, but pip measurement produces

474 See the discussions in Hitchcock et al (2008). 475 Consider, for instance, the famous sixth-century vase of satyrs producing wine as produced by the Amasis Painter (for the image, see McGovern (2003) 252). 476 See Nuñez and Walker (1989) 219.

252 ambiguous results with respect to the nature of these seeds. Thus, we cannot pinpoint with certainty when the domesticated grapevine was brought from the mainland to

Cyprus, although given the certain links between the island and all four directions of the compass we should suspect that this occurred at an early date. In any case, other material evidence related to wine-drinking begins to appear in the second half of the second millennium BCE. Canaanite jars have been excavated from over a dozen sites around Cyprus, indicating that Cyprus was (as we would expect) at the center of a trade network which must have included wine.477 Meanwhile, a painted amphora dated to the ninth century BCE shows scenes of drinking,478 while an eighth-century tomb yielded two cauldrons possibly used for holding wine.479 Yet even these latter two items can be used as evidence not for wine, per se, but for the existence of another type of alcoholic drink, possibly a mixed beverage. Thus, it must be admitted that the evidence for the origins of wine on Cyprus is scanty at best. More work needs to be done to identify when winemaking and wine-drinking arrived at this crucial crossroads of the Mediterranean.

The northern coast of the Black Sea, specifically the region of the Crimean

Peninsula, also lies within the climatic zone favorable to the wild grapevine. Here, too, more work needs to be done, but grape seeds are attested in the Crimea as early as the start of the first millennium BCE.480 With the arrival of Greek colonists after 600 BCE, seed evidence begins to become more common, as does other evidence pertaining to

477 See Leonard (1995) 248. 478 McGovern (2003) 275. 479 McGovern (2003) 197. 480 Nuñez and Walker (1989) 219.

253 wine such as a series of winemaking installations from the fifth and fourth centuries.481 It seems very likely that the Greek colonists brought their vines and their winemaking knowledge with them to the north coast of the Black Sea; while seeds from the colonial era do not show clear evidence of domestication, this may be due to the fact that the

Greeks crossbred their transplanted vines with local wild vines to produce a hardy strain of grapevine.482 In any case, it is quite likely that, while the wild grapevine grew on the northern coast of the Black Sea from time immemorial, it was the Greeks who brought the sedentary lifestyle and the other technical knowledge necessary for winemaking to the region at the time of colonization.

As in the Crimea, the grapevine grew wild in the region of the Balkans, especially along the coast of Dalmatia and points inland. Wild seeds from the area have been found from sites dating from the Neolithic era on into the Bronze Age.483 However, our archaeological evidence for the introduction of wine to the region is even more scarce than the evidence relating to the northern coast of the Black Sea. While we may surmise that wine began to be produced in the region no later than the middle of the first millennium BCE (again by Greek colonists), we have no direct evidence for this hypothesis. In fact, archaeological evidence of wine production (in the form of winemaking installations) dates only to the time of the Roman Empire's consolidation of control over the region in the time of Augustus.484 Thus, we can say little about the

481 Savvonidi (1993) 228. 482 Nuñez and Walker (1989) 219. 483 Nuñez and Walker (1989) 224. 484 See Matijasic (1993).

254 beginnings of winemaking in this region, although further archaeological finds may shed greater light on the situation.

Italy

As we continue west to Italy, we stand on firmer ground with respect to the material evidence for the origins of wine. A plethora of grape pips from very archaic times have been found from the Alps in the north to Sicily in the south, including pips from the Mesolithic era at the Grotta del'Uzzo in Sicily.485 Pips continue to be well- attested throughout the Neolithic era and into the Bronze Age, which begins in Italy in the latter half of the third millennium BCE.486 It is not entirely clear, however, when or how the domesticated grapevine appeared in Italy. While most pips from the era before

1500 BCE seem to be of the wild type, there is some evidence that the domesticated grapevine was present, whether as an import or as the result of native attempts at domestication, during the third millennium.487 This evidence, coming largely in the form of domesticated-like pips from the early part of the millennium, may be explained as a local attempt at domestication, although it could perhaps be the result of early contact with the Aegean at the very time in which that region was likely being infused with the domesticated grapevine from points east. The latter hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that the putative early domesticated seeds were found in Apulia on the heel of Italy, the region of Italy closest to the Aegean.488 In any case, it is clear that the domesticated

485 Renfrew (1995) 256. 486 See the list in Nuñez and Walker (1989) 224. 487 See di Pasquale and Ermotti (2013) 61. 488 Forni (2007) 73.

255 grapevine had only a sporadic presence in these early years, and there is no evidence that native Italian cultures of the period were involved in winemaking in any substantive fashion. However, this situation begins to change around 1500 BCE, apparently due to increased contacts between southern Italy and the Mycenaean Greek culture to the east. Mycenaean drinking vessels begin to proliferate in Sicily and southern Italy during this period, and with them comes a greater concentration of domesticated seeds.489 The evidence thus seems to suggest that Mycenaean traders (or perhaps even small-scale colonizers) brought both the knowledge of winemaking and the custom of wine-drinking to southern Italy (particularly to Sicily) in the period before the collapse of the

Mycenean world around 1200 BCE. Once firmly established on Italian soil, the domesticated grapevine moved north, arriving as far up the peninsula as Florence soon thereafter.490 Whether the Mycenaeans were responsible as well for this rapid move up the peninsula is more difficult to say; whether winemaking began in the north as it seems to have done in the south is likewise an open question.

We have seen that wine and civilization depend one upon the other in a symbiotic relationship. Thus it is interesting to note that the calamity which shook the entire civilized world of the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE also silenced our

(already meager) evidence for a growing interest in wine in Italy. Contacts with the

Mycenaean world abruptly ceased for the simple reason that the Mycenaean world was largely no more, and thereafter we cease to find significant evidence for drinking or even

489 See Russo (2011) 208. 490 Forni (2007) 73.

256 of use of the domesticated grapevine for several hundred years. Although the domesticated grapevine had been irreversibly brought to Italy, its systematic exploitation seems to have gone to seed; with the stimulating impulse of foreign contact removed, the production and enjoyment of wine once again retreated into the background. Yet these false starts would lay the groundwork for the rapid rise of wine in Italy by ensuring the dissemination of the domesticated grapevine throughout the peninsula as well as

(perhaps) some residual appreciation for the beverage created from the fruit of the vine.

When civilizations once again arose in Italy, they would have little trouble in developing a thriving wine culture in a short amount of time.

Centuries after the collapse of the Mycenaean world, the Greeks would come again to Sicily and to southern Italy. When they did, they brought (yet more) vines and wine with them, although the land they found was already brimming with the former and ripe for the latter. The famous Nestor's Cup, dated to the last quarter of the eighth century and found at the site of Pithekoussae, is prima facie evidence that drinking had been re-introduced to Italy in force. Meanwhile, domesticated grape pips found at a site in Sicily dating from the seventh century BCE confirm that the vine was indeed being cultivated here.491 Yet for all of the Greek influence in southern Italy and Sicily, it was the rise of Etruscan culture in the north which touched off the beginnings of a truly native wine culture in Italy. The domesticated grapevine begins to be evidenced again in northern and central Italy in the ninth century BCE at a few sites such as Bolsena; in the

491 See Setari (2013) 112.

257 following century, it would become indisputably widespread throughout the area.492 Yet if the rise of a wealthy civilization was a spur to vine-tending and winemaking in northern Italy, so also were contacts with a mature wine-drinking culture, namely the

Phoenicians. Imported Phoenician wine became a status symbol in early Etruscan civilization, and it may have been this cultural impetus which ultimately pushed the

Etruscans to tend their own vines and begin their own winemaking industry.493 The impetus for wine-drinking as a social status symbol may also have been spurred on by contacts with the Greek settlers to the south,494 and so we can envision a scenario in which the Etruscans, blessed with a land not only favorable to the vine but also already provisioned with its domesticated variety, were enticed into the formation of a wine- drinking culture by contacts with not one but two wine-drinking cultures, the

Phoenicians and the Greeks.

Thus it was that the Etruscans became a new center of wine culture based in northern and central Italy. Undoubtedly influenced by the Etruscans were the early inhabitants of Rome; archaeological digs of tombs beneath the Roman Forum have affirmed the presence of grape pips as well as other wine paraphernalia (such as cups and even amphoras) from no later than the early seventh century, suggesting that grape- growing and some modicum of winemaking was known at Rome in the period which later mythology would call its foundational epoch.495 As with the Etruscans, this nascent

492 See Forni (2007) 73-74. 493 See Gras (1985) 319, as well as the scrupulous catalog of amphoras from various civilizations throughout his book. 494 See Ridgway (1997). 495 See Gras (1985) 368 and Stager (1987) 181.

258 wine culture was likely influenced by the importation of “high-class” wine-related items from other cultures, but its rise was also facilitated by the availability of the domesticated grapevine in the area. In fact, Rome was caught in the middle of Greeks,

Phoenicians, and Etruscans, wine-drinkers all; it is a curiosity that the Roman wine industry did not truly come into its own until the Romans had surpassed all three of these cultures in many other ways.

The Western Mediterranean

The Etruscans' influence was felt not only to the south but also to the west. The

Mediterranean coast of what is now southern France was as hospitable to the grapevine as many other regions we have discussed; pips have been found from as far back as the

Mesolithic era at sites such as Terra Amata.496 However, there is no evidence of early winemaking, either in the form of domesticated pips or other material evidence. In fact, it appears that it was the Etruscans who first introduced wine to the region via trade contacts. In the latter half of the seventh century, a good deal of Etruscan pottery begins to appear in the valley of the Rhone; significantly, much of this pottery takes the form of

Etruscan wine amphoras, strongly suggesting that a burgeoning wine trade existed at this time between the Etruscans of northern Italy and the native tribes of southern

France.497 We may surmise that at this early stage the influence was purely mercantile; that is to say, the Etruscans likely only supplied wine rather than the means and knowledge for the natives to make their own. (It may well be the case, of course, that

496 See Renfrew (1995) 256. 497 See Dietler (1990) 353.

259 the natives had no interest in making their own.) However, things would soon change with the founding of the Greek colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseilles) on the southern coast of France around 600 BCE. A significant find of domesticated pips from the sixth century BCE at Massalia allows us to claim that the Greek colonists brought the domesticated grapevine as well as their winemaking knowledge with them, and thus it was that in the first half of the sixth century BCE southern France became a wine- producing region for the first time.498 From the middle of the sixth century BCE, local pottery produced by the Greek colonists of Massalia comes to be in evidence; like the

Etruscan pottery, much of this pottery takes the form of wine jars.499 Some of this pottery found its way up the Rhone, suggesting that the Greeks were producing their own wine and ultimately taking charge of the regional wine trade.500 In fact, the presence of Etruscan pottery dwindles to a very small minority in the fifth century and thereafter, suggesting that the Greeks of Massalia had successfully defeated their commercial rivals in the race to profit from trade with the interior.501 Meanwhile, the first winepress from southern France dates from the last quarter of the fifth century, thus providing clinching evidence that winemaking had arrived in the region.502

The Mediterranean littoral of North Africa (modern-day Morocco, Algeria, and

Tunisia) likewise lies within the climatic zone of the wild vine. Wild pips have been found

498 McGovern et al. (2013) 5. 499 See Bertucchi (1992) for a discussion of the amphoras of Massalia, including chemical analysis of their contents. 500 See Dietler (1990) 355. 501 See Formenti and Duthel (1995) 79. 502 See McGovern et al. (2013) 5.

260 in this region dating as far back as the third millennium BCE, assuring that the vine was present well into prehistory.503 However, much like in southern France, evidence for winemaking does not appear until the region comes into contact with another civilization. In the case of North Africa, this was the Phoenicians, who founded the colony of Carthage in modern-day Tunisia likely in the eighth century BCE. We can assume that the Phoenicians brought wine and the domesticated vine with them, and indeed amphoras have been found at Carthage dating to the eighth century BCE.504

However, seed evidence is more sparse, and it is not until as late as the fourth century

BCE that we find our first domesticated grape pips at Carthage.505 Thus, the material evidence allows us to posit what we might otherwise assume to be true—namely, that the early Carthaginians were the first to produce wine in North Africa—but it does not conclusively prove it. Future finds may change this.

Having now traversed the entire Mediterranean coastline from east to west, we finally come to land's end at the Iberian Peninsula. As this region is further west than any regions so far discussed (and so ostensibly at the end of the line when it comes to the transmission of technology and culture from east to west), so also might we expect that it was one of the last areas under discussion to receive the domesticated vine and to begin to make wine. However, it is here more than anywhere else we have surveyed thus far that there is controversy concerning the origins of domestication (and perhaps also of winemaking). As in many of the regions above, the wild grape is native to Iberia,

503 Nuñez and Walker (1989) 217. 504 See Ballard et al. (2002) 161. 505 See Greene (1995) 313.

261 being securely attested throughout the Neolithic and well back into the Mesolithic; on this point all agree.506 However, during the third millennium BCE we begin to find some evidence suggestive of more than just the browsing of wild grapevines that might be expected from local hunter-gatherers or pastoralists. A spike in grape pollen occurs at

Laguna de las Madres in modern-day southwestern Spain dated to the beginning of the millennium or even a bit before; this can be explained in terms of local cultivation.507

Meanwhile, a few hundred years later, the site of El Prado in modern-day southeastern

Spain shows evidence of a number of grape pips, some but certainly not all of which appear to fall within the range of cultivated pips. The same site also yielded small drinking cups, although these have not specifically been tied to the consumption of wine.508 Taken separately, each of these pieces of evidence might be dismissed; yet when conferred, they must at the very least cause us to wonder if domestication of the grapevine and some degree of winemaking began without outside influence during the third millennium in the Iberian Peninsula. Here we must also remember the aforementioned 2006 study of grapevine genetics which indicated that there were two independent locations of grapevine domestication, one at the western end of the

Mediterranean and one at the eastern end.509 Is this, then, the correct account? At this moment, a consensus seems not to have been reached; some prominent scholars still lean toward a single domestication of the grapevine in the Near East with a transmission

506 Nuñez and Walker (1989) 225. 507 See Nuñez and Walker (1989) 226. The uncalibrated date is 4480 BP, which when calibrated yields a date around 3200 BCE. Other dates cited may be calibrated between 3000 and 2500 BCE. 508 See the discussion in Nuñez and Walker (1989) 228. 509 Arroyo-Garcia et al. (2006).

262 westward ultimately to Iberia.510 Yet we might here say that it is consistent with all of the evidence to posit a scenario where the grapevine was indeed domesticated independently in prehistoric Spain, with a concomitant pioneering of limited winemaking. When the domesticated grapevine of Near Eastern origins arrived in Iberia, it ultimately mixed with the local variety; this is consonant with the 2011 genetic study which indicated both a definite Near Eastern origin for the domesticated grapevine and significant genetic influence from local cultivars.511

Yet whatever the truth of an early local winemaking industry, it seems to have had little impact on surrounding regions. After this early third-millennium evidence, we must wait millennia for new developments in the story of Iberian wine. As was the case with southern Italy, pottery finds suggest that Mycenaean traders may have made their way to the coasts of Iberia before 1200 BCE, but the Spanish evidence is more meager and less certainly connected to winemaking.512 In fact, it is not until the eighth century when significant material evidence begins to appear, brought by Phoenician traders. This material evidence comes in the form of amphoras of undoubtedly Phoenician origin; these likely indicate both the beginnings of a wine trade between Phoenicia and Iberia and (even more likely) the provisioning of the Phoenician colonists who settled the area in the eighth century.513 These amphoras continue to be in evidence at several sites in

Iberia until the sixth century BCE, when the colonies began to go into decline (together,

510 See the argument in McGovern (2003) 37. 511 Myles et al. (2011). 512 See Guerrero Ayuso (2009) 90. 513 See Guerrero Ayuso (2009) 92-96.

263 perhaps, with their motherland). At this time there arises a new type of amphora which appears to be of local design and production, indicating that the decline of Phoenician influence led not to a decline in wine production but rather a redoubling of efforts to make Iberia self-sufficient in the winemaking industry. At two sites, Cancho Roano in southwestern Spain and Alto de Benimaquia in southeastern Spain, a significant number of local sixth-century amphoras have been uncovered, as well as a winemaking installation at the latter.514 The material evidence thus confirms that winemaking was well-entrenched in the Iberian Peninsula by the eighth century BCE, with likely a continuous tradition of winemaking ever since regardless of the many political changes which have come to the region.

Thus we may conclude our survey of the material evidence for the origins and spread of wine, from its earliest beginnings in the Near East to its most recent introductions by colonists from the eastern Mediterranean. The material evidence allows us to tell a compelling story of when and where, but it helps us somewhat less with the questions of who? and how? To understand the whole story, we must put together everything we have looked at—the literary, the linguistic and the material evidence—to arrive at an all-encompassing conclusion on the origins and the spread of wine. It is to this task that we turn in the conclusion to this study.

514 See Guerrero Ayuso (2009) 102-107.

264 CHAPTER 6: THE ORIGINS OF WINE: A SYNTHESIS

We have now considered virtually all of the important evidence available to us which touches upon the question of the origins of wine. We have looked at the literary testimony, which, although late at times, nonetheless preserves important cultural memories; we have examined the linguistic testimony, which records for us a tale of contact and migration; and we have seen the material evidence, which shows us in general terms just when and where winemaking began and spread. Having examined all of this, it remains only to bring all of our evidence together to tell a coherent tale of the origins and the spread of wine. Each type of evidence has a story to tell, and by listening to it all we will be able to produce a thorough account of our topic.

We are fortunate in the fact that no one type of evidence we have examined seems to entirely contradict the others. This is, in fact, somewhat unexpected given the widely diverse sources of testimony we have examined. It is true that no one source possesses the complete story; but when we put them all together, we find that they are largely complementary. True, if any one source could be said to be potentially the most problematic, it would be the literature. Yet this should not surprise us: after all, a society's literature can only record its cultural memories of a distantly-remembered past even as it constructs that past in conversation with the present. Yet ancient cultures and

265 modern scholars alike have missed important clues about the origins and spread of wine because of the striking diversity of the way it happened. We must take into account a trichotomy of origins: there is the origin of the vine and hence of very basic winemaking, there is the origin of the culture which glorifies the fruit of the vine and its (usually high- class) consumption, and there is the origin of the linguistic terminology used to refer to wine and the vine. These three spheres—nature, culture, and language—may and sometimes do tell diverse tales of origins in a given society. It is this fundamental lack of unity which has thwarted so many students of the topic, both ancient and modern, as they have attempted to trace wine backwards from where they stand. Here, we attempt to give appropriate respect to each sphere of evidence; and as we do, we find that we can weave a unified story of origins which incorporates the unique testimony presented by each of them.

If we are to fully tell the tale of wine, we must begin at the beginning. As demonstrated by the material evidence, that beginning came around 6000 BCE in the region of Transcaucasia (that is, the area south of the Caucasus range consisting of modern-day Armenia, Georgia, eastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran). We know very little about those living there at the time except that they almost certainly belonged to neither of the two great language families of later antiquity, Indo-European and Semitic.

Here there came together all of the ingredients needed to spark humanity's first concerted effort to produce wine, namely the presence of the wild grapevine, the recent invention of pottery, and a sedentary society which could afford to spend the time

266 necessary to bioengineer an uber-productive subspecies of grapevine and to spend long years tending to it and its fruit. Our ancient literary sources almost universally attest to the primacy of wine in this region; from the tale of Noah's planting of the vine on Ararat as found in the Bible to the accounts of Armenia's brisk export of wine as found in

Herodotus and in Near Eastern sources, ancient cultures were quick to associate

Transcaucasia with wine. On their own, such accounts can be taken as ad hoc or as specious legends; when combined with the material evidence, they are seen to be genuine attestations of Transcaucasia's importance as a center of wine production throughout the years.

One question which will rightly be asked is this: to whom do we owe thanks for all of those years of patience and vision as the wild grapevine was slowly transformed into the domesticated variety which we take for granted today? This, regrettably, is a question which our evidence does not allow us to conclusively answer. Of our various sources, the linguistic evidence seems to give us the most hope of providing an answer: we have seen that Indo-Europeans were intimately involved in the spread of wine at an early date. Yet as we will discuss more fully below, the linguistic evidence which gives credit to the early Indo-Europeans for the spread of wine must almost certainly likewise exclude them from its invention. The tribes of Transcaucasia who tamed the grapevine and built the first wine culture left no linguistic evidence for us to analyze, and so we can do nothing but render our thanks to an unknown people for their services to humanity.

We might expect that the domestication of the grapevine and the societally

267 entrenched enjoyment of its fruits would quickly spark a culinary revolution amongst the neighboring sedentary cultures of the Near East. However, the archaeological evidence curiously suggests that this is not the case. Rather, we find that material evidence for both the domesticated grapevine and for winemaking remains confined to the region of

Transcaucasia for nearly two thousand years after its first attestation (that is, between roughly 6000 and 4000 BCE). Given the phenomenon that wine would soon become, this might seem astounding. However, we must keep in mind that trade and contact between groups in disparate areas was likely more limited in the Neolithic period than it would ultimately come to be at a later date. It seems therefore that we must envision wine-drinking as nothing more than a local custom at this point, an ethnic marker of

Transcaucasian culture just as various foods and drinks are associated with various ethnicities today. The length of time for which this state of affairs continued—almost two millennia—suggests that it was well-entrenched and not easily subject to change. A visitor to Earth in 4500 BCE would have no reason to think that vine-tending and wine- drinking would ever become more than a Transcaucasian oddity.

Yet near the end of the fifth millennium, something upset this state of affairs and led to a veritable revolution in the history of wine. The first sign of the changing times was only a small one: for the first time, the domesticated grapevine was intentionally transplanted outside of its native area, presumably for the purpose of making wine. This assertion rests on the pollen evidence from Lake Zeribar, only a few days' walk southeast from the range of the wild grape. Perhaps this alone meant little, but it presaged much.

268 As the fourth millennium dawned, so also began what would become a mass exporting of the domesticated grapevine and the attendant custom of drinking wine throughout the ancient Near East. The archaeological evidence suggests that it was during the last two-thirds of this millennium—broadly speaking, from 3700 to 3000 BCE—that vine- growing and winemaking made the crucial jump from curious local custom to widespread upper-class habit. During this period we find evidence of the domesticated grapevine's spread in two directions, to the southwest and the southeast. To the southeast, we see it move down the spine of the Zagros Mountains and all the way to

Elam by the end of the millennium. To the southwest, we see it in evidence at eastern

Anatolian sites such as Korucutepe and Tepecik as well as at sites in the Levant such as

Tell-esh-shuna no later than the third quarter of the millennium. From the Levant it must have spread to Egypt, and by the dawn of recorded history there around 3150 BCE wine was already in evidence as a luxury item. Thus it is that during the fourth millennium

BCE, wine took the ancient Near East by storm.

Having noted this sudden and unexpected expansion of wine culture from its long-established home, we must ask: why did this happen when it did? Put another way, what upset the equilibrium in the ancient Near East to such an extent that one region's local custom was spread far and wide to become what could by the end of the millennium be called an international indulgence? Perhaps we can answer this question in a general way by noting that contact and trade between regions surely improved as time went on, and it did so all the more throughout the fourth millennium. This was the

269 era of the first organized states of the Fertile Crescent, and their economic impact surely cannot be understated. Not only might they have allowed for the dissemination of knowledge of wine throughout the ancient Near East at an increased rate, but the class stratification surely engendered by the rise of civilization would have created a need for status symbols to be wielded by the upper class. As an enjoyable yet exotic (and hence expensive) beverage, wine fit the bill and fit it well.

Thus it is sensible to claim that the growth of the wine industry in the fourth millennium was aided by its ability to fill a niche in the new economic structure of the region. Yet this cannot be the entire explanation for a number of reasons. First, the spread of wine from Transcaucasia began before, not after, the rise of the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia. The rise of these civilizations may have encouraged the spread of the wine industry, but it did not initiate it. Second, the path of the spread of the domesticated grapevine was not restricted to those areas where it might be most easily exploited by the powers of the lowland empires, namely the northern and eastern fringes of Mesopotamia. Rather, winemaking also spread through eastern Anatolia and the Levant, regions where no central power ruled and hence no real upper class existed.

What we find in the archaeological evidence is an almost simultaneous thrust to both the southwest and southeast of Transcaucasia roughly in the mid-fourth millennium which brought the domesticated grapevine to new regions and new peoples. This can be better described as an indiscriminate spread than a premeditated and economically- driven occurrence. Why, then, was winemaking spread far and wide in a short time out

270 of the land of people who had done a good job of keeping it to themselves for so long?

Fortunately, this is not a question without an answer, for additional evidence from archaeology and linguistics helps to illuminate not just why this happened but who was responsible. During the last half of the fourth millennium, a new type of burial made its appearance in Transcaucasia. This type of burial, known as the kurgan, is represented by a burial shaft covered with a mound. While previously unattested south of the

Caucasus, this funerary practice was commonplace among the tribes living on the steppes to the north of the Caucasus in the fourth and third millennia BCE.515 These tribes are widely considered to be speakers of an early Indo-European language, making it therefore likely that Indo-European speakers were penetrating from the steppes into

Transcaucasia roughly around the time period under discussion.516 Yet burials reflective of steppe customs do not stop in Transcaucasia; it is noteworthy that they extend into eastern Anatolia to Korucutepe, a site we have associated with early evidence for the spread of the domesticated grapevine in the last half of the fourth millennium. Likewise, horse bones are found from around the same time at Tepecik, another such site; this

515

See Mallory (1989) 29-30. These kurgans appear south of the Caucasus “before 3000 BC”, although the dating is not particularly precise. We would be even more pleased if we could date them securely to the middle of the millennium, although as we have seen it is prudent to consider our knowledge of dates in the prehistoric period as tentative. In any case, it should be noted that these kurgans simply represent a terminus ante quem for the penetration of tribes from north to south into the Near East; the presence of burial mounds suggests an earlier intrusion and perhaps even subsequent semi- sedentarization. 516 While there is a great amount of controversy about the location and dating of the early Indo- Europeans, only a small minority would disagree that these tribes in this place and at this date were speakers of an Indo-European dialect. Proponents of both major Indo-European homeland theories accept this: see Mallory (1989) 222 ff. and Renfrew (1987) 205-210. In fact, many would say that these tribes spoke Proto-Indo-European itself, although as we will see that is not strictly true.

271 suggests that the intrusive tribes rode their way into the Near East, something entirely typical of early Indo-European wanderers.517 In any case, this archaeological evidence allows us to posit a movement of Indo-European speakers from north to south from the steppes, through Transcaucasia, and on into other parts of the Near East during the fourth millennium (and, in fact, continuing on into the third).

Yet for all this, the connection between the southward spread of wine and the southward spread of a group of Indo-Europeans might be considered nothing more than circumstantial if not for one piece of evidence we noted in the chapter on linguistics. In that chapter, we noted that contact must have occurred between an Indo-European- speaking group and an early group of Semitic speakers sometime between 3750 BCE and

2500 BCE (if we are to give rough dates based on the linguistic evidence). The proof of this contact was the transmission of the word for wine (*woin- or *wain-) from Indo-

European to Semitic at a date sufficiently early that it could pass genetically into every branch of Semitic except East Semitic. This contact implies two things relevant to the issue under discussion. First, speakers of Indo-European and Semitic (to be tautological) must have come into contact at this very early date. But where? There is no evidence to suggest that Semitic speakers ever came into contact with early Indo-Europeans beyond the steppes, and so we must posit that this contact took place someplace to the south of the Caucasus in the Near East. This requires us to posit the presence of a group of Indo-

Europeans south of the Caucasus in the fourth or third millennium, and that is indeed exactly what we have shown to be the case. Yet the very fact of the borrowing of such a 517 See Mallory (1989) 30.

272 term from Indo-European into Semitic suggests something else of importance, namely that the Indo-Europeans in question were in some way involved in the spread of wine as a commodity to the south. After all, we should remember that Proto-Semitic had its own terminology for the grapevine and its fruit, suggesting that Semitic speakers were not entirely unfamiliar with the semantic sphere in question. The borrowing of another culture's term for the beverage (and the plant!) implies that the lending culture had contributed in some significant way to Semitic speakers' appreciation for its use. We might certainly expect as much if the Indo-Europeans had brought a new kind of grapevine from the north as well as advanced techniques on winemaking. Thus, the borrowing of the word for wine into Semitic represents the clinching piece of evidence for the connection of the intrusive Indo-European tribes with the spread of wine.

We can now tell a more complete tale of the origins of wine in the Near East. The grapevine was domesticated (and wine production begun) in Transcaucasia, but for over two thousand years it showed little sign of spreading to other regions. Around the beginning of the fourth millennium, it was transplanted to neighboring regions for the first time, but its spread remained slow. The eruption of a group of Indo-Europeans from the north across the Caucasus and into the area changed things suddenly and dramatically. This movement of peoples stirred the pot in the ancient Near East, bringing peoples and technologies into newfound contact with each other. As these Indo-

Europeans swept on south, they took the domesticated grapevine and knowledge on winemaking with them, bringing it at least as far as eastern Anatolia and the far

273 northern reaches of Mesopotamia and the Levant. Here, we may surmise that they came into contact with very early Semitic speakers, to whom they gave the knowledge and technology they brought from the north. Beyond this point, it is impossible to say how far the Indo-Europeans penetrated into the Levant; whether they likewise brought the vine and wine to the southern Levant or whether this was done in turn by Semitic speakers is entirely a matter of conjecture. This accounts only for the spread of the domesticated grapevine toward the southwest; as for its southeastern spread along the spine of the Zagros, we must here plead almost complete ignorance as to how much of this process was carried out by Indo-Europeans. Both linguistic and archaeological evidence is lacking to tie any Indo-European group to this area in the fourth millennium, but lack of evidence means only that we may never know for sure. Indeed, there is no evidence to cause us to believe that Indo-Europeans did not also move south and east from Transcaucasia; the fact that they were in the area and highly mobile makes their involvement hard to rule out. Yet lest we lose ourselves in conjecture, let us once again highlight just what the evidence confirms for us: sometime likely in the latter half of the fourth millennium BCE, Indo-Europeans entered Transcaucasia from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, received wine culture from those in the area, and took it south with them into southeastern Anatolia where they transmitted elements of language, culture, and botany to early Semitic speakers.

In the end, this particular group of Indo-Europeans disappeared from history and left no further traces of itself. Only by following the scant clues of a six-thousand-plus-

274 year-old trail can we at last shine a spotlight on their notable contribution to world history. At minimum, we can say that they provided some of the impetus and much of the means for the spread of the domesticated grapevine (and hence winemaking) throughout the Near East during the fourth millennium. At the dawn of the earliest literate civilizations at the end of the fourth millennium, winemaking was already indelibly linked to the regions ringing Mesopotamia to the east, north, and northwest; yet while those civilizations seem to take winemaking in these areas for granted, the truth is that the Indo-Europeans had only recently helped to make it a reality. Likewise, the introduction of wine and the vine into Egypt—presumably from the southern Levant via Semitic speakers—was ultimately set into motion by Indo-European speakers bringing the domesticated vine south in the preceding centuries.

Just who were these Indo-Europeans, exactly? Did they speak some form of

Proto-Indo-European, or were they speakers already of one distinct branch? To answer this question, we will have to retrace the steps of this intrusive group north across the

Caucasus and onto the Pontic-Caspian steppe. It is here that one theory (the dominant one) locates the home territory of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their successors, although disagreement remains as to the time depth of the mother tongue. In fact, the mid-fourth millennium BCE is both early enough to lend credence to the continued existence of a linguistic unity and late enough to inspire belief that Indo-European had already begun to fragment into dialects or even daughter languages. Our data will prove critical in deciding between these two possibilities.

275 As discussed in the chapter on linguistic evidence, Proto-Indo-European indeed had a word for “grapevine”. This suggests that the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in a region which exhibited wild vines, and it is sufficient to note that the range of the wild grapevine extends across the northern shore of the Black Sea (including the Crimean

Peninsula) as well as throughout the Balkans and the north side of the Caucasus.

Wherever Proto-Indo-European was spoken—and we need not spill more ink on that question here—we may certainly believe that the grapevine was present. However, we have noted that Proto-Indo-European did not have a unitary word for “wine” which it passed down to its descendants. This can be explained in two ways. The first option is that Proto-Indo-European was spoken in wine-producing areas but was spoken before wine production became a fact of life; the second option is that Proto-Indo-European was spoken inside the territory of the grapevine but outside the territory of wine production at the time. As wine production was limited to Transcaucasia until the start of the fourth millennium and did not spread outside of the ancient Near East until the third millennium, we are fairly safe in focusing on the second option. Thus, we can state that, as Proto-Indo-European began to disintegrate, its speakers were aware of the grapevine but were not aware of any systematic exploitation of its fermented juice (so systematic, in any case, that it deserved its own set term).

Yet this state of affairs was soon to change. Proto-Indo-European did not suddenly shatter like glass into ten subgroups; rather, people-groups began to split off and gradually lose contact with others, their dialects becoming more and more distinct

276 as the years went on. These people-groups in turn eventually began to lose unity, leading to more dialects and eventually the irreducible subgroups we envision today. Yet linguists are able to note similarities among groups of dialects which allow us to posit periods of unity (or at any rate, more intense contact) which postdate the overarching

Proto-Indo-European unity. As discussed in the chapter on linguistic evidence, it was during this intermediate period of loosely connected dialects that the commodity that is wine erupted onto the Indo-European consciousness. Suddenly, there was a need for a term to describe the fermented juice of the grape, and each speech-community settled on their own derivation of the shared (and inherited) term for the grapevine. So it is that the word for wine in the Indo-European languages looks so similar and yet is irreducible to one proto-form.

Yet as we have seen, the Indo-Europeans did not come up with ten entirely distinct words for wine. Rather, the morphology of the words themselves allow them to be demarcated into three groups. The appearance of the word in Greek, Armenian, and

Albanian reveals an o-vowel in the root; the appearance of the word in Italic, Celtic,

Germanic, and Balto-Slavic shows no vowel in its place; and Anatolian stands alone in its treatment of the term. These shared characteristics lead us to believe that at the time of the beverage's debut among the Indo-European tribes, there were three loosely affiliated groups of dialects which each inhabited adjacent but clearly separate geographic spaces. Fortunately, these three macro-subgroups we have defined coincide perfectly with those currently accepted by many Indo-Europeanists (linguists and

277 archaeologists alike), and so we have good reason to believe in the veracity of our reconstruction of historical events.518

Where might each of these three macro-subgroups have been located around the time of the mid-fourth millennium BCE? Perhaps the easiest to place is the Anatolian languages. It is widely held that these languages split off from Proto-Indo-European early on and underwent a period of separate development, and it seems likely that they were ensconced in western Anatolia by the mid-fourth millennium. As for the group comprising Italic, Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic we can be less certain; however, given that all four of these subgroups would surface a few millennia later to the north and west of the steppe region, we might expect that their position during their time of loosely affiliated unity could be found somewhere in that direction. Finally, the group comprising the forebears of Greek, Armenian, and Albanian could likely be found on the steppes themselves, stretching in a blossoming dialect continuum from the Balkans in the west to the Caspian in the east. As the Indo-Iranian subgroup shares a number of convincing traits with this group, we should locate it as well on the steppes, likely as the easternmost member of this continuum.

This positioning of dialects receives some support from the linguistic evidence we have already seen concerning the borrowing of the word for wine from Indo-European into Semitic. This word certainly had an *o in the root, and so we must expect it to have come from a dialect pertaining to the appropriate Indo-European grouping. If an Indo-

European dialect penetrated from the steppe into Transcaucasia roughly in the mid- 518 See Mallory (1989) 154-55, who also contributes to the discussion in the next paragraph.

278 fourth millennium BCE, we would expect it to be an offshoot of the dialect continuum of the steppe. This continuum, as we have seen, shared a word for wine in o-grade, and this is precisely what we find borrowed into Semitic. Thus, we are able to identify with some certainty the Indo-European group responsible for the accelerated spread of wine throughout the Near East.

This information allows us to make two important claims. First, to revisit our question from above, the linguistic evidence makes it clear that the Indo-European group which passed through Transcaucasia and brought both wine and its term south in the mid-fourth millennium BCE did not speak Proto-Indo-European but rather a daughter dialect related to the group which would eventually beget Greek, Armenian,

Albanian, and Indo-Iranian.519 This, in turn, allows us to state that by this time—again, roughly in the middle of the fourth millennium—the era of Proto-Indo-European unity was past, but not too far past. We might retroject that era back to the last half of the fifth millennium BCE, an estimation which fits well with the current scholarly consensus on the topic. Again, we find that our data is supported by the consensus and supports it in turn.

Our second claim is related to another important question: how (and from what direction) did the Indo-Europeans come to be familiar with wine? Surely, the smoking gun lies in the clear contact of the o-grade group with winemaking (and winemakers) in

519 As discussed in the chapter on linguistic evidence, there is at least some reason to think that the Indo- European intruders spoke a very early Indo-Iranian dialect. At the very least, they must have come from the eastern side of the Pontic-Caspian dialect continuum, an area from which the Indo-Iranian dialects would emerge within the next millennium.

279 the area of the Caucasus in the mid-fourth millennium BCE. Although it is clear that a group of Indo-European speakers broke off from the dialect continuum and drove south into Transcaucasia and beyond, we need not suppose that they lost contact with their relatives to the north. Yet even if they did, we must remember that winemaking was also likely taking place north of the Caucasus (including along the shores of the Black Sea) as well as south of the range. It would be erroneous to envision a scenario in which Indo-

Europeans had to cross the Caucasus to come into contact with the domesticated grapevine and winemaking; they likely did so even without penetrating that imposing mountain barrier. In this way, it is likely that the beverage was introduced to speakers of the dialect continuum of the steppe, and when it was there arose the need for a definitive word to refer to it.

We can envision the beverage spreading west across the northern shore of the

Black Sea at this time. Regrettably, we have no evidence to show that the domesticated grapevine spread with it, although it is possible that it did, only to be left to go wild when the inhabitants of the area moved on. Yet whatever we believe about vine-tending in this area in the fourth millennium, we can readily believe that wine was traded from the region of the Caucasus to the tribes of the steppe. As wine became an item of importance in the lives of these steppe-dwellers, each community had the option to use different morphology to derive a term for it from their shared term for “grapevine”.

Eventually, different groups within the dialect continuum settled on slightly different terms for “wine”, even while the derivation of the term in o-grade went apparently

280 unquestioned by the entire linguistic community. In the years to come, many of these tribes would leave the steppe, moving apart from each other both geographically and linguistically. Yet as they eventually evolved into different languages, the Greeks,

Armenians, and Albanians preserved their words for wine, a testament to this period of semi-unity.

The linguistic evidence is thus clear that this term is no Wanderwort, but rather a bona fide inheritance from a well-attested stage of Indo-European. Yet we should address one common argument against the scenario we have set forth: how could these tribes have preserved a word for wine for so many centuries if they did not have access to the beverage? Indeed, the word seems to have fallen by the wayside entirely in Indo-

Iranian, perhaps because speakers dwelt for centuries in a region with few vines and little to no wine.520 Yet this was not the case with the other dialects. In fact, there is no good reason to think that speakers of ancestral Greek, Armenian, or Albanian ever completely lost contact with regions which could provide them with wine in trade, if only intermittently or in small measure. In any case, the vine grows wild throughout the

Balkans, the Aegean, and Anatolia, and thus there existed from generation to generation the capacity to make small amounts of wine—enough, at any rate, to keep the word alive in these languages. This reasoning for the survival of the word stands even if we

520 The period of Indo-Iranian unity is often connected with the Andronovo culture, located north and east of the Caspian Sea and dated to around 2000 BCE (see Mallory (1989) 227). If the Indo-Iranians indeed spent centuries if not millennia in such an area both bereft of grapevines and lacking significant contact with wine-producing cultures, we can forgive them for forgetting all about it. Perhaps significantly, the only other Indo-European subgroup lacking the term is Tocharian, itself hailing from a high oasis of western China far from the wine-drinking world.

281 dismiss the possibility that the domesticated grapevine arrived in the Balkans and the

Aegean via Indo-European migration, which we will discuss below.

Yet before we do, we must discuss the transmission of the term to another linguistic community of Indo-Europeans. These are the linguistic ancestors of Italic,

Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic, likely living to the north and west of the steppe tribes we have been discussing. By the mid-fourth millennium BCE, we might imagine that the language spoken by these tribes had truly split from the language of the steppes, having passed beyond the bounds of mutual intelligibility. When this latter group therefore first encountered wine in significant measure, perhaps in trade from the Indo-Europeans of the steppe, they made their own morphological judgments as they named the drink.

Although they likewise derived the term from their native word for “grapevine”, they did so in a slightly different way, choosing to create a derivative in the zero-grade (that is, without the o-vowel characteristic of steppe dialects). Yet unlike the varying derivational morphology found in the latter group, the northwestern group preserved only a homogenous neuter derivative. This merits discussion.

We can explain this homogeneity of the northwestern dialects, so different from those of the steppe, in a number of different ways. First, the answer could be as simple as the fact that the group remained a relatively tightly-knit linguistic community into the mid-fourth millennium BCE, thus ensuring only one outcome in all daughter languages which emerged from that group. But what if the community was in fact too widespread to allow for this to happen? We ought to consider that this community was spread out

282 toward the northwest, away from regions where the grapevine was prevalent. If one dialect of this group coined the attested term for wine, we might entertain the possibility that this term was simply borrowed by rote among other dialects as a trade term, something that did not happen among the communities of the steppe each of which had a hands-on appreciation for the vine and for its fruit. Yet if this is the case, we must also admit to the possibility of much later borrowings between these same languages. Indeed, it is true that we cannot prove that Germanic (to make an example of the family likely to have spent the longest time outside of the range of the wild grapevine) did not lose the inherited word at some point only to re-borrow it at a later date from some Italic, Celtic, or Balto-Slavic language which had preserved it. All we can say for sure is this: the word survived in at least one descendant of this fourth- millennium group, a descendant from which it could be re-borrowed when the wine trade into central Europe began in earnest in the first millennium BCE. If Germanic is the family most likely to have lost the inherited word for wine, Italic must be considered the most likely to have preserved it: besides the clear indication of the term's antiquity in the Italic languages, we can note that the most direct path of migration from eastern

Europe through the lower Danube valley and into Italy is strewn with grapevines, preparatory to the prevalence of the plant in Italy itself. Imported wine subsequently began to arrive in Italy in the mid-second millennium, leaving no major gap in which the word would pass out of use. Thus, we can say with reasonable confidence that the Italic term for wine reflects no borrowing but rather a genuine inheritance from the fourth

283 millennium. Whether the presence of the term in Celtic, Balto-Slavic, and Germanic is due to inheritance, borrowing from Italic or each other, or some mixture is nearly impossible to decide. Yet one thing is for sure: as we noted, the linguistic evidence from the latter three groups implies that the term had been present for some time by the mid-first millennium CE, suggesting that if a borrowing happened it must have taken place well into prehistory, perhaps at the time of the Etruscan wine trade of the seventh- sixth century BCE.

Of the three major Indo-European groups of the fourth millennium BCE, it is perhaps most difficult to state with any kind of authority how wine came to be introduced to the speakers of the Anatolian languages. Yet this is tied up with a larger question: having suffused the ancient Near East and subsequently (in some measure) the steppes to the north during the fourth millennium, how did wine and the domesticated grapevine make the leap westward all the way to the Aegean and western

Anatolia? Since it is necessary to answer this question as we answer the first, we will endeavor to answer them both together.

The material evidence, so important to us thus far, largely fails us as we attempt to trace the path of wine culture from the Near East to the Aegean. Palaeobotanical evidence is lacking throughout much of western and central Anatolia during the crucial two millennia from 3800 to 1800 BCE, and it is only with the rise of the Hittites at the end of that period that we can definitively place a wine-drinking culture in the region.

Meanwhile, the seed evidence for Greece is little better; despite (or perhaps because of)

284 the large number of studies done in the area, there is little agreement as to when the domesticated grapevine arrived in the region. As we have seen, estimates range from the first half of the fourth millennium to the last half of the third millennium. The culture centered at Myrtos on Crete, dating from 2500-2200 BCE, is our first strong evidence for systematic winemaking and the presence of the domesticated grapevine. The most we can say for certain about the material evidence from the fourth and third millennium in the Aegean and western Anatolia is that the wild grapevine grew in abundance.

Such evidence, therefore, is unable to provide a clear answer to the question of when the elements of wine culture, beginning with the domesticated grapevine and eventuating in the introduction of class-specific customs such as the symposium, arrived in the region. Just as importantly, it is unable to answer the question of how and from where these elements arrived. To attempt to answer these questions, therefore, we must turn to the other evidence we have examined in this dissertation, namely the literary and the linguistic testimony. Ultimately, these sources yield three different hypotheses, all of which may be correct in some measure. We will discuss them in turn.

Both today and in prehistory, the Aegean region lies at a crossroads of cultural influence. To the south lies the sea, within which stand the macro-islands of Crete and

Cyprus and ultimately the potential for contact with Egypt. To the east lies Anatolia, the gateway to the cultures of the Near East. To the north lies Thrace and the Balkans, ever the source of pulses of cultural change from the regions beyond the Danube. Our three hypotheses for the origins of wine culture each focus on one of these cardinal directions.

285 Did wine and its attendant societal markers arrive in the Aegean from the east, the south, or the north?

We begin by examining the likelihood of the third hypothesis, that of a northern source for elements of wine culture. This hypothesis immediately has the linguistic evidence on its side in some measure. As we have seen, the linguistic ancestors of the

Greeks likely learned about wine on the steppes to the north of the Black Sea around the mid-fourth millennium BCE. Whether they simply received wine in trade from

Transcaucasian cultures or received the domesticated grapevine as well is entirely a matter of speculation. Yet one thing is for certain: these Indo-Europeans who came into early contact with wine culture eventually made their way south and west to settle in the Aegean, bringing their wine-related vocabulary with them.521 While they may have brought only their vocabulary and nothing else, we must consider the possibility that they also brought the domesticated grapevine with them. This is particularly true given the fact that palaeobotanists have been unable to establish a clear chain of transmission for the domesticated grapevine through Anatolia and into the Aegean region. Perhaps they have simply been looking in the wrong place: palaeobotanical studies on the northern and western coasts of the Black Sea are scarce.522 On the other hand, it must

521 The ancestors of the Greeks are not thought to have invaded Greece proper until approximately 2000 BCE, too late for the introduction of the domesticated grapevine. Yet there is some evidence to suggest that the peoples they displaced (traditionally called Pelasgians) were also speakers of an Indo- European language, likely stemming from the same fourth-millennium dialect continuum of the steppe (see the tentative but tantalizing reconstructions in Georgiev (1981)). If true, we might in fact credit the Pelasgians for bringing the domesticated grapevine to the Aegean, if indeed it was brought from the north. 522 It is unclear what such studies would find in any case. If the domesticated grapevine was tended briefly in the mid-fourth millennium BCE by tribes which later moved on and left it to intermingle with the local wild variety, the palaeobotanical evidence would be scant. As noted in the chapter on material

286 be admitted that the domesticated grapevine would surely be more easily transmitted from sedentary culture to sedentary culture rather than by semi-nomadic groups known to have migrated over a thousand miles from the area where they might have acquired the domesticated grapevine. In any case, if we are to credit invading Indo-Europeans with introducing this basic element of wine culture to Greece, we can hardly credit them with introducing further elements: it is virtually unthinkable that such tribes brought with them customs such as the symposium as they settled in the Aegean. The connection of Dionysos with Thrace in the literature does give one pause, for Thrace is the likely entrepot to points north along the Black Sea; yet it might equally point east across the Hellespont and into Anatolia.

Thus we move on to the second hypothesis, namely that wine culture came to the Aegean from the east across Anatolia. This route is the most direct one, and as such it is the path we might expect. Indeed, it is the path that seems to be taken for granted in much of the literature, and we must admit that it is in some ways the most likely one.

Yet as we have already noted, the palaeobotanical evidence is hardly conclusive on this count: we cannot convincingly trace the spread of the domesticated grapevine across

Anatolia in the fourth millennium BCE as we can trace its spread across the ancient Near

East during the same period. Yet what if it did indeed come by this route? As we have noted, the Indo-European tribes who intruded south of the Caucasus in the mid-fourth millennium were highly mobile, and we can imagine a scenario whereby they were

evidence, seed evidence from the Crimea from the first millennium BCE (after the date of Greek colonization) shows a somewhat unusual mixture between wild- and domesticated-like seeds.

287 instrumental in bringing the domesticated grapevine into central (if not western)

Anatolia. Yet this is entirely speculation. We are on perhaps firmer ground as we trace other elements of wine culture into and through Anatolia: the Hittites had received the custom of the symposium from Mesopotamia in the first half of the second millennium

BCE, and given their certain contact with the Aegean we can easily imagine that they in turn influenced the development of the symposium in Mycenaean Greece (and subsequently into classical times). The literary commentary on Dionysos generally supports this view, for he is frequently portrayed as entering Greece from the east, even if this is through Thrace.

Yet we cannot reach a conclusion before examining the final hypothesis, namely one that posits southern influence on the introduction of wine culture to Greece. This hypothesis is also not without merit: after all, the first indisputable evidence of a mature wine culture in the Aegean comes from Crete by around 2500 BCE. Crete, in turn, was in contact even at this early date with both the Levant to the east and Egypt to the south, two areas which already boasted flourishing wine cultures in the last half of the third millennium. Could the domesticated grapevine have first been brought to the Aegean by ship from Phoenicia or even Egypt? The answer is yes, although for reasons we will examine below the likelihood that it came from Egypt is in fact quite small. The connections are more convincing with regard to other elements of wine culture; for instance, the symbol for “wine” in the early writing system of Crete looks much like the early Egyptian hieroglyph for “wine”, suggesting that this particular wine-related

288 innovation may have flowed from south to north. We must also mention Dionysos' perennial connection with Crete, as well as with Phoenicia and Egypt.

As we noted in the chapter on Greco-Roman literature, the testimony about the origins of Dionysos is fragmented at best. Sadly, it becomes clear from our discussion of these three hypotheses about the introduction of wine into the Aegean that other testimony is no more conclusive. Yet in that chapter, we concluded that the fragmentary nature of the testimony about Dionysos may well be due to the fact that the origins of wine and wine culture in the Aegean are themselves fragmentary. Having examined all of the evidence, it certainly appears clear that this could be the case. The Aegean lay at the center of a number of regions which in some way preceded it in the art of wine. It is not only possible but likely that each of these regions transmitted one or two elements of what would in time become the flowering wine culture of the Aegean. The domesticated grapevine likely came first, probably from the east but possibly from the north; later came elements of wine culture such as cups and other material evidence, perhaps from the sea; then came drinking customs such as the symposium, likely from the east. If Greeks of the first millennium BCE infused a societal memory of this process into their wine god, then we can hardly blame them if they were themselves entirely unsure of just how “wine” came into Greece. Yet matters were in fact more complicated still: if we remember the trichotomy of origins invoked at the beginning of our conclusion (those of nature, language, and culture), all of this together accounts only for the element we have called “culture”. With regards to “language”, the Greek word for

289 wine was inherited from a tribe of steppe-dwellers far to the north, while with regards to “nature” the wild grapevine grew abundantly in the land and had always done so.

When dealing with this triad, there was at least one different answer for each aspect.

Where was Dionysos from? In responding to this question, one could hardly be wrong.523

So it is that the wine culture of Greece was fertilized from a number of different sources. Yet before moving on, we must also discuss the wine culture of the Hittites and other speakers of languages belonging to the Anatolian branch of Indo-European which dominated western Anatolia. As we have seen, the material evidence is ambiguous as to when and how this region received the domesticated grapevine. Yet the linguistic evidence is at least somewhat clearer. As discussed, speakers of the Anatolian languages coined their own terms for wine, just as did other groups of Indo-European speakers.

However, there is one significant difference: our two best-attested Anatolian languages,

Hittite and Luvian, seem to take different morphological tracks to coining a word for wine from their shared term for grapevine. This implies that they had not only separated from other Indo-European speakers but also from each other when they first became aware of the commodity in question. This, in turn, suggests that these languages first met wine in Anatolia and not elsewhere, as we might expect that Proto-Anatolian was indeed spoken in Anatolia before splitting apart within the region. Thus, it seems likely that the domesticated grapevine and wine culture came to them; they did not bring it to

Anatolia. This in turn confirms what linguists have already suspected: by the mid-fourth

523 One could be wrong if one answered “west”. It is perhaps not by chance that this is the one cardinal direction left out of the discussion entirely by the ancient Greeks.

290 millennium BCE, as other groups of Indo-Europeans remained in loosely confederated tribes, Anatolian speakers had already branched off and begun the process of disintegration into their respective languages.

As with the Greeks, we must ask the question: did the inhabitants of western

Anatolia receive the various elements of wine culture from the east, north, or south?

Although we still cannot answer this question with certainty, we do have at least one slender thread of evidence to introduce to the discussion. In the chapter on linguistics, we noted that a term wnš is attested in Egyptian dating from the time of the Old

Kingdom (roughly the middle of the third millennium BCE) onward. This term means

“grape(vine)”, but is not the usual term in Egyptian for this referent. For both this and purely linguistic reasons, we must believe that this term was not introduced into Egypt from the Levant along with wine and the vine in the late fourth millennium. Instead, as we have seen, it is likely to be a borrowing from an Anatolian Indo-European language, likely via commerce across the Mediterranean Sea. What are the implications of an

Egyptian borrowing of an Anatolian term for “grapevine” by the mid-third millennium?

First, we can expect that the grapevine (and hence likely wine) was already an important part of Anatolian culture and commerce by that date. Second, we might also expect that the domesticated grapevine did not originally arrive in western Anatolia and the Aegean from the south; it becomes difficult to motivate the borrowing of the term from north to south if the referent for the term had recently made its way from south to north. And what about the possible borrowing of the hieroglyph for “wine” from Egypt to Crete? If

291 this indeed occurred, it happened at least several centuries later and was not associated with the movement of the vine itself but rather with the expansion of writing, a different matter altogether. Thus, this piece of linguistic evidence enables us to conclude that, while Egypt may have been responsible for transmitting certain elements of wine culture northward to the Aegean and western Anatolia, the domesticated grapevine was not one of them. As discussed above, this must have arrived from the east or from the north.

By whatever route and whatever means, this much is certain: the domesticated grapevine had crossed land and sea to the Aegean by the last half of the third millennium BCE, and other elements of wine culture were not far behind. Now, it remains only to discuss the spread of wine west into Italy, Iberia, and coasts in between.

As with the Aegean, the origins of wine are fragmented in these areas, too, but our evidence is more secure as we attempt to pick up the pieces and write a unified history.

To invoke once again our trichotomy of origins, the Roman must have been as conflicted as the Greek when attempting to ascertain the origins of wine in his country.

When considering the categories of nature, culture, and language, all three had separate origins in Italy. With regard to nature, the grapevine grew wild throughout the peninsula, and was already present in abundance when the distant ancestors of the Romans came to the region. With regard to language, the invading Indo-European tribes brought their ancient word for wine with them, a term first coined while living far to the east. Of course, the ancient Roman was perhaps not aware of the former, and was almost

292 certainly unaware of the latter; his knowledge was based chiefly on myths and stories, themselves at best based off of distantly remembered historical events (if not simply fabricated in the service of aetiology). Those events, in turn, were chiefly related to the third category of origins, culture. The educated ancient Roman would likely have been aware of two historic centers of wine culture in Italy, one to the north and one to the south. Each of these represents a point of contact with mature wine cultures to the east: to the south, the Mycenaeans had brought basic elements of wine culture, including the domesticated grapevine, to Sicily and southern Italy as early as the mid-second millennium BCE, while in the north the Phoenicians were likely instrumental in introducing the Etruscans to all elements of wine culture in the ninth-eighth century

BCE. From these two areas, wine culture radiated throughout the Italian peninsula, coming to maturity throughout the region by the time of Rome's Golden Age. Where did wine come from for a Roman? The answer was both south, north, and east (to include the well-known and well-established wine traditions of Greece and the Orient) all at once, and in this the classical Roman would have echoed the classical Greek. Yet in doing so he would have been no less wrong, and he would have provided us no less valuable confirmation of the tale told to us by the modern sciences of linguistics and anthropology.

As we continue west throughout the Mediterranean, our literary and linguistic evidence begins to fail us. The modern-day areas of France, Spain, and North Africa have no native literatures of their own from ancient times; likewise, they do not furnish us

293 with archaic linguistic data which may help us to understand better the origins of wine in the region. Our evidence for these areas is thus primarily of the material variety, with occasional support from scant references in classical literature. All evidence points to wine culture being a latecomer to most of these areas; in southern France and on the coast of North Africa, we can date it to the onset of contact with advanced wine cultures, whether from trade or colonization. In the latter region, the domesticated grapevine and wine culture was almost certainly brought by the Phoenicians who founded Carthage around the eighth century; in the former region, it was the Etruscans, themselves inspired by the Phoenicians, who first brought wine to southern France. On the heels of the Etruscans followed Greeks and then Romans, and these three groups together introduced first wine and then wine culture to the peoples of central Europe.

Even so, it was not until the dying years of the Roman Empire that wine culture came to be truly established beyond the Alps, thus giving birth to a wine-producing region celebrated even today.

Finally, we come to the Iberian Peninsula, a region where the origins of wine are hazy. Much like was the case with southern Italy, Mycenaean traders reached these shores in the second half of the second millennium, and Phoenician traders followed early in the next millennium. We can be sure that these merchants—merchants who, in the case of the Phoenicians, eventually became colonizers—brought the domesticated grapevine and other elements of wine culture from the east. Yet controversy remains: did Iberia, perhaps alone of all areas outside the Near East, achieve an independent

294 domestication of the grapevine as early as the beginning of the third millennium?

Studies are ongoing, and we may have a clearer answer in time. For now, we may say this: there may indeed have arisen a culture of grape-growing and wine-drinking in prehistoric Iberia, complete with the cups and other material evidence to go with it. Yet other elements of what we have come to call mature wine-drinking societies—the symposium, for example—likely only appeared with the arrival of an upper class at the time of the Phoenicians or even the Romans. As we have found to be the case in many regions, the origins of wine in Iberia may be far from unitary.

And so it is that we can at last say that we have told the entire story of the origins of wine, from its birth in the hills of Transcaucasia over eight thousand years ago to its spread into much of Europe at the start of the common era. While its paths have not always been obvious, they are discernible to those who look through the lens of variegated evidence. This evidence has come from diverse fields, including literature, linguistics, and archaeology, and by creating a dialogue between these disciplines we have found that we can shed light not only on the question of the origins of wine but also on contested issues within each discipline. Along the way, we have found that wine did not travel by just one road: wine and the culture it engenders moves in mysterious ways, merely touching some peoples while transforming others. Yet out of diversity comes unity: in the end, the entire western world would stand transformed by this beverage, the fermented juice of the grape. This dissertation represents a small step in giving credit to all those who worked, however inadvertently, to bring a worldwide wine

295 culture to fruition.

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López-Ruiz, Carolina. “The King and the Cupbearer: Feasting and Power in Ancient Mediterranean Myth.” In In Patrimonio Cultural de la Vid y el Vino, eds. Sebastián Celestino Pérez and Juan Blanquez Pérez. Madrid: UAM 2013.

Lissarrague, F. Un flot de images: Une esthétique de banquet grec. Paris: Adam Biro, 1987.

Manzi, Luigi. La viticoltura e l'enologia presso i Romani. Rome: 1883.

Marazzi, Massimiliano. “Appunti per un dossier sulla circolazione del vino attraverso le testimonianze in Linear B.” In Drinking in Ancient Societies: History and Culture of Drinks in the Ancient Near East, ed. Lucio Milano (Padua: Sargon, 1994): 139-150.

McKinlay, A. “Ancient Experience with Intoxicating Drinks: Non-Attic Greek States.” Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 10 (1949), 289-315.

Murray, O. and Tecusan, M. In Vino Veritas. London: British School at Rome, 1995.

Murray, O. Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposium. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Murray, O. “The Symposion as Social Organization.” In R. Hagg (ed.), The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century B.C.: Tradition and Innovation, 195-99. Stockholm: 1983.

Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

Otto, W.F. Dionysos, Myth, and Cult. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.

303 Palmer, Ruth. Wine in the Mycenaean Palace Economy. Liège: Université de Liège, 1994.

Palmer, Ruth. “Wine and Viticulture in the Linear A and B Texts of the Bronze Age Aegean.” In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, eds. Patrick McGovern, S.J. Fleming and S.H. Katz (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995): 269-286.

Pallottino, Massimo. Gli Etruschi. Rome: Colombo, 1939.

Pantel, Pauline Schmitt. “Rite cultuel et rituel social.” In In Vino Veritas, eds. Murray, O. and Tecusan, M. (London: British School at Rome, 1995): 93-105.

Privitera, G.A. Dioniso in Omero e nella poesia greca arcaica. Rome: Ateneo, 1970.

Purcell, N. “Wine and Wealth in Ancient Italy”, Journal of Roman Studies (1986).

Puvis, A. De la culture de la vigne et de la fabrication du vin chez les anciens. Paris: 1847.

Reichter, W. Der Weinbau im römischen Altertum. Schaffhausen: 1932.

Remark, P. Der Weinbau im Römerreich. Munchen: 1927.

Ridgway, David. The First Western Greeks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Ruck, C.A.P. “The Wild and the Cultivated: Wine in Euripides' Bacchae”, Journal of Ethno- Pharmacology, 1985.

Seaford, Richard. Dionysos. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Seltman, C. Wine in the Ancient World. London: Routledge, 1957.

Stanislawski, D. “Dionysus Westward: Early Religion and the Economic Geography of Wine”, The Geographical Review, October 1975.

Versnell, H.S. Ter Unus: Isis, Dionysos, Hermes, Three Studies in Henotheism. Leiden: Brill, 1990.

Vetta, M. (ed.) Poesia e simposio nella Grecia antica: guida storica e critica. Rome: Laterza, 1983.

Vickers, M. Greek Symposia. London: Joint Association of Classical Teachers, 1978.

Watkins, Calvert. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Boston:

304 Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

West, Martin. Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer (Loeb Classical Library #496). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Wilson, Henneke. Wine and Words in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. London: Duckworth, 2003.

Wright, J.C. The Mycenaean Feast. Princeton: 2004.

3. Near Eastern Literature

Bakos, M.M. “The Significance of Wine Drinking in Love and in Daily Life in Ancient Egypt.” In Sesto Congresso Internazionale di Egittologia (Turin: 1993), 319-323.

Bibby, Geoffrey. Looking for Dilmun. New York: Knopf, 1969.

Bottero, Jean. Textes culinaires mesopotamiennes. 1995.

Bottero, Jean. “Le vin dans une civilisation de la biere.” In In Vino Veritas, eds. Murray, O. and Tecusan, M. (London: British School at Rome, 1995): 21-34.

Breasted, James Henry. Ancient Records of Egypt. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1906.

Broshi, M. “Wine in Ancient Palestine- Introductory Notes.” Israel Museum Journal 3 (1984): 21-40.

Brown, Francis, S.R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. Hebrew and English Lexicon. Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 1906.

Busse, E. Der Wein im Kult des Alten Testamentes: Religiongeschichtliche Untersuchung Zum Alten Testament. Freiburg: Freiburger Theologische Studien, 1922.

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Volume 5: G, ed. Oppenheim, A.L., et al. Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1956.

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Volume 7: I-J, ed. Oppenheim, A.L., et al. Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1960.

305 Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, Volume 8: K, ed. Oppenheim, A.L., et al. Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1971.

Darnell, J. C., F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Marilyn J. Lundberg, P. Kyle McCarter, and Bruce Zuckermanet. Two early alphabetic inscriptions from the Wadi el-Hol: new evidence for the origin of the alphabet from the western desert of Egypt. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2005.

Darshan, Guy. “The Biblical Account of the Post-Diluvian Generation (Gen. 9:20-10:32) in the Light of Greek Genealogical Literature.” Vetus Testamentum 63 (2013): 515- 35.

Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, ed. David J. A. Clines. Sheffield Phoenix, 2011.

Dils, P. “Wine for Pouring and Purification in Ancient Egypt.” In Ritual and Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East, ed. J. Quaegebeur (Leuven: 1993), 107-123.

Durand, Jean-Marie. Archive Royales de Mari XXI: Textes administratifs des salles 134 et 160 du palais de Mari. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1983.

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/. Oxford, 2003.

Finet, A. “Le vin a Mari.” Archiv fur Orientforschung 25 (1977): 22-131.

Finkelstein, Israel and Amihai Mazar. The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel. Society for Biblical Literature, 2005.

Frankel, R. Wine and Oil Production in Antiquity in Israel and Other Mediterranean Countries. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 10. Sheffield: Sheffield University, 1999.

Foster, Benjamin R. Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. Bethesda, Maryland: CDL Press, 1993.

Fronzaroli, Pelio. “Osservazioni sul lessico delle bevande dei testi di Ebla.” In Drinking in Ancient Societies: History and Culture of Drinks in the Ancient Near East, ed. Lucio Milano (Padua: Sargon, 1994): 122-27.

Genouillac, H. Tablettes sumeriennes archaiques. Paris: Librairie Paul Geuthner, 1909.

George, A. R. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

306 Goor, A. “The history of the grape vine in the Holy Land.” Economic Botany 20 (1966), 46-64.

Green, M.W. “Early Cuneiform.” In The Origins of Writing, ed. W.M. Senner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989.

Green, M.W. and H.J. Nissen. Zeichenliste der Archaischen Texte aus Uruk. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1987.

Guasch-Jané, Maria Rosa. Wine in Ancient Egypt: A cultural and analytical study. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008.

Haas, V. Magie und Mythen im Reich der Hethiter: 1. Vegetationskulte und Pflanzenmagie. Hamburg: Merlin Verlag, 1977.

Hamilton, Gordon. The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts. Washington DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2006.

Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, eds. Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner. Leiden: Brill, 1995-2000.

Helck, Wolfgang and Eberhard Otto, eds. Lexikon der Ägyptologie. Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 1992.

Hoffner, Harry. Alimenta Hethorum: Food Production in Hittite Asia Minor. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1974.

Hoffner, Harry. The Laws of the Hittites: A Critical Edition. Brill: Leiden, 1997.

Jacobsen, Thorkild. The Harps That Once....: Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven: Yale, 1987.

Kennedy, Philip F. The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Kinnier Wilson, J.V. The Nimrud Wine Lists: A Study of Men and Administration at the Assyrian Capital in the Eighth Century BC. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, 1972.

Kuhrt, Amelie. The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC. London: Routledge, 1995.

307 Lambert, W. G. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

Langdon, S. Die neubabylonischen Koniginschriften. Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1912.

Luckenbill, D.D. Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. Volume I: Historical Records of Assyria from Earliest Times to Sargon. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1926.

Lutz, H.F. Viticulture and Brewing in the Ancient Orient. Leipzig: 1922.

Macqueen, J.G. The Hittites and their Contemporaries in Asia Minor. Thames and Hudson, 1996.

Matthiae, Gabriella Scandone. “Il Vino nell'Antico Egitto.” In In Vino Veritas, eds. Murray, O. and Tecusan, M. (London: British School at Rome, 1995): 57-61.

Mayrhofer, Manfred. Kurzgefasstes Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen. Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1954.

Mercer, Samuel A. B. The Pyramid Texts, 3 vol. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1952.

Michalowski, P. “The Drinking Gods: Alcohol in Mesopotamian Ritual and Mythology.” In Drinking in Ancient Societies: History and Culture of Drinks in the Ancient Near East, ed. Lucio Milano (Padua: Sargon, 1994): 27-44.

Milano, L., ed. Drinking in Ancient Societies: History and Culture of Drinks in the Ancient Near East. Padua: Sargon, 1994.

McKinlay, A. “Ancient Experience with Intoxicating Drinks: Non-Classical Peoples.” Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 9 (1948), 388-414.

Modi, J. Wine Among the Ancient Persians. Bombay: Bombay Gazette Steam Press, 1888.

Ollivier-Beauregard. “La vigne et le vin dans l'antiquite egyptienne”. Actes de l'Academie nationale des Sciences, Belles-Lettres at Arts de Bordeaux 56 (1894), 273-297.

Parker, Simon B. Ugaritic Narrative Poetry. Society of Biblical Literature, 1997.

Petrie, William F. Flinders. The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty, Part I. London: 1900.

Poo, Mu-chou. Wine and Wine-Offering in the Religion of Ancient Egypt. London: Kegan Paul International, 1995.

308 Powell, Marvin A. “Wine and the Vine in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Cuneiform Evidence.” In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, eds. Patrick McGovern, S.J. Fleming and S.H. Katz (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995), 97-122.

Pritchard, James B. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Postgate, J. N. “Notes on Fruit in the Cuneiform Sources.” Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture 3 (1987): 115-44.

Reallexikon der Assyriologie und vorderasiatischen Archäologie, ed. Michael Streck. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1966-2011.

Ricci, C. La coltura della vite e la fabbricazione del vino nell’ Egitto Greco-romano. Milan: 1924.

Simpson, William Kelly (ed.). The Literature of Ancient Egypt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Sist, Loredana. “Le bevande nei testi delle piramidi.” In Drinking in Ancient Societies: History and Culture of Drinks in the Ancient Near East, ed. Lucio Milano (Padua: Sargon, 1994): 129-37.

Sollberger, Edmond and Jean-Robert Kupper. Inscriptions royales sumeriennes et akkadiennes. Paris: Les editions du Cerf, 1971.

Talon, Philippe. Textes administratifs des salles Y et Z du palais de Mari. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1985.

Teeter, Emily (ed.). Before the Pyramids. Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2011.

Thureau-Dangin, Fr. Inventaire des tablettes de Telloh, Tome I. Paris: Ernest LeRoux, 1910.

Tigay, Jeffrey H. The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1982.

Tubb, Jonathan N. (ed.) Palestine in the Bronze and Iron Ages. London: Institute of Archaeology, 1985. van de Mieroop, Marc. A History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011.

309 Walsh, Carey Ellen. The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2000.

Watson, Wilfred G. E. “Ugaritic terms for containers in the light of Comparative Semitics”. In Dialectology of the Semitic Languages, eds. Federico Corriente, Gregorio del Olmo Lete, Angeles Vicente, and Juan Pablo Vita (Barcelona: IACS, 2012): 81-111.

Wilkinson, Toby A. H. Early Dynastic Egypt. Routledge: New York, 1999.

Zamora, Jose-Angel. La vid y el vino en Ugarit. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2000.

Zapletal, V. “Der Wein in der Bibel”. Biblische Studien, Heft I. Freiburg: 1920.

4. Linguistics

Baldi, Philip. The Foundations of Latin. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999.

Barth, J. Die Nominalbildung in den semitischen Sprachen. Lepizig: Hinrichs'sche, 1891.

Benveniste, Emile. Origines de la Formation des Noms en Indo-Europeen. Paris: Adrien- Maisonneuve, 1935.

Beekes, Robert S. P. “On Indo-European 'wine'.” Munchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 47 (1987) 21-26.

Beekes, Robert S. P. Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995.

Blumel, Wolfgang. Untersuchungen zu Lautsystem und Morphologie des vorklassischen Lateins. Munich: Kitzinger, 1972.

Bonfante, Giuliano. “Das Problem des Weines und die linguistische Palaontologie.” In Antiquitates Indogermanicae, ed. Hermann Guntert. Innsbruck: 1974, 85-90.

Bonfante, Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante. The Etruscan Language. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

310 Brockelmann, Carl. Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen. Berlin: Verlag von Reuther and Reichard, 1908.

Brown, John Pairman. “The Mediterranean Vocabulary of the Vine.” Vetus Testamentum 19 (1969) 146-70.

Buck, Carl Darling. A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian. Boston: Athenaeum, 1904.

Cohen, David. Dictionnaire des Racines Sémitiques. Leuven: Peeters, 1996.

Delcor, M. “De l'origine de quelques termes relatifs au vin en hebreu biblique et dans les langues voisines.” In Actes du premier congres international de linguistique semitique et chamito-semitique, eds. A. Caquot and D. Cohen (Paris: The Hague, 1974): 223-233.

Diakonoff, I. M. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.

Erman, Adolf and Hermann Grapow. Worterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1955.

Ernout, Alfred and Alfred Meillet. Dictionaire étymologique de la langue latine. Paris: Klinksieck, 1951.

Fortson, Benjamin W. Indo-European Language and Culture, (2nd Edition 2010). Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Frisk, Hjalmar. Griechisches Etymologisches Worterbuch. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1970.

Gamkrelidze, Thomas V. and Vjaceslav V. Ivanov. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. Part I. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995.

Georgiev, Vladimir. Introduction to the History of the Indo-European Languages. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1981.

Gerner, Renate. Untersuchung uber Arzneimittelpflanzen im Alten Agypten. Hamburg: 1979.

Hawkins, John David. Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000.

Hewitt, George. Introduction to the Study of the Languages of the Caucasus. Munich: Lincom, 2004.

311 Horowitz, Wayne and Takayoshi Oshima. Cuneiform in Canaan. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2006.

Huhnergard, John. “Proto-Semitic Language and Culture.” In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2011.

Kitchen, Andrew, Christopher Ehret, Shiferaw Assefa, and Connie J. Mulligan. “Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Semitic languages identifies an Early Bronze Age origin of Semitic in the Near East.” Proceedings of the Royal Society 276 (2009): 2703- 2710.

Klimov, Georgij A. Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998.

Kloekhorst, Alwin. Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon. Leiden: Brill, 2008.

Lambdin, Thomas O. An Introduction to the Gothic Language. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2006.

Lehmann, Winfred P. A Gothic Etymological Dictionary. Leiden: Brill, 1986.

Lipinski, Edward. Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar. Sterling, Virginia: Peeters, 2001.

Mallory, J. P. and Douglas Q. Adams (eds.). Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London: Routledge, 1997.

Martirosyan, Hrach K. Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Inherited Lexicon. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

Matasovic, Ranko. Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

Neu, Erich. Althethische Ritualtextein Umschrift. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1980.

Nussbaum, Alan. Head and Horn in Indo-European. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986.

Nussbaum, Alan. “The Saussure Effect.” In Sound Law and Analogy: Papers In Honor of R.S.P Beekes, ed. Alexander Lubotsky. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.

312 Oettinger, Norbert. “Zum Ablaut von n-Stämmen im Anatolischen und der Brechung ē > ya.” In Indogermanisches Nomen: Derivation, Flexion, und Ablaut, ed. By Eva Tischy, Dagmar S. Wodtko, and Britta Irslinger. Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2003: 141-152.

Olsen, Brigit Anette. The Noun in Biblical Armenian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999.

Orel, Vladimir. Albanian Etymological Dictionary. Leiden: Brill, 1998.

Puhvel, Jaan. “Elliptic Genitives and Hypostatic Nouns in Hittite.” Aramazd 6.2 (2011), 68-72.

Pokorny, Julius. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern: Francke, 1959.

Rasmussen, Jens Elmegard. Studien zur Morphophonemik der indogermanischen Grundsprache. Innsbruck: Beitrage zur Sprachwissenschaft, 1989.

Rieken, Elisabeth. “Neues zur Ursprung der Anatolischen i-mutation.” Historische Sprachforschung 118 (2005) 48-74.

Sihler, Andrew L. New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Starke, Frank. Untersuchung zur Stammbildung des keilschrift-luwischen Nomens. Wiesbade: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990.

Takacs, Gabor. Studies in Afro-Asiatic Comparative Phonology: Consonants. Berlin: Deitrich Reimer, 2011. de Vaan, Michiel. Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. Brill: Leiden, 2008.

Van Selms, A. “The Etymology of Yayin, 'Wine'.” In Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 3 (1974), 76-84.

Vasmer, Max. Russisches Etymologisches Worterbuch. Heidelburg: 1953.

Voigt, Rainer (ed.). Akten des 7. internationalen Semitohamitistenkongresses Berlin 2004. Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2007.

Walde, Alois. Vergleichendes Worterbuch der Indogermanischen Sprachen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1930.

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5. Physical Evidence

Algaze, Guillermo. “Fourth Millennium BC Trade in Greater Mesopotamia: Did It Include Wine?” In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, eds. Patrick McGovern, S.J. Fleming and S.H. Katz (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995): 89-96.

Amouretti, Marie-Claire and Jean-Pierre Brun, eds. La production du vin et de l'huile en Méditerranée. Athens: Ecole francaise d'Athenes, 1993.

Arnold, Claire, F. Gillet, and J.M. Gobat. “Situation de la vigne sauvage Vitis vinifera ssp. Silvestris en Europe. Vitis 3 (1998), 159-170.

Arroyo-García R, L. Ruiz-García, L. Bolling, R. Ocete R, MA López MA, C. Arnold, A. Ergul, G. Söylemezoğlu, HI Uzun HI, F. Cabello, J. Ibáñez, MK Aradhya, A. Atanassov, I. Atanassov, S. Balint, JL Cenis, L. Costantini, S. Goris-Lavets, MS Grando, BY Klein, PE McGovern, D. Merdinoglu, I. Pejic, F. Pelsy, N. Primikirios, V. Risovannaya, KA Roubelakis-Angelakis, H. Snoussi, P. Sotiri, S. Tamhankar, P. This, L. Troshin, JM Malpica, F.Lefort, and JM Martinez-Zapater. “Multiple origins of cultivated grapevine (Vitis vinifera L. ssp. sativa) based on chloroplast DNA polymorphisms.” Molecular Ecology 15 (2006): 3707-3714.

Badler, Virginia R. “The Archaeological Evidence for Winemaking, Distribution, and Consumption at Proto-Historic Godin Tepe, Iran.” In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, eds. Patrick McGovern, S.J. Fleming and S.H. Katz (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995): 45-56.

Badler, V.R., Patrick E. McGovern, and D.L. Glusker. “Chemical Evidence for a Wine Residue from Warka (Uruk) inside a Late Uruk Period Spouted Jar."Baghdader Mitteilungen 27 (1996): 39-43.

Ballard, Robert D., Lawrence Stager, Daniel Master, Dana Yoerger, David Mindell, Louis L. Whitcomb, Hanumant Singh, and Dennis Piechota. “Iron Age Shipwrecks in Deep Water off Ashkelon, Israel.” Journal of Archaeology 106.2 (2002), 151-168.

Barnard, Hans, Alek N. Dooley, Gregory Areshian, Boris Gasparyan, and Kym F. Faull. “Chemical evidence for wine production around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern Highlands.” Journal of Archaeological Science 30 (2010), 1-8.

314 Belisario, Maria Vittoria, Maria Follieri, and Laura Sadori. “Nuovi dati archeobotanici sulla coltivazione di Vitis vinifera L. ad Arslantepe.” In Drinking in Ancient Societies: History and Culture of Drinks in the Ancient Near East, ed. Lucio Milano (Padua: Sargon, 1994): 77-90.

Benoit, F. “La archaeologie sous-marine en Provence.” REL 18 (1953), 237-307.

Bertucchi, Guy. Les amphores et le vin de Marseille. Paris: Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1992.

Bohn, O. “Die altesten romischen Amphoren in Gallien”. Germania (1923), 8-16.

Brun, Jean-Pierre. “L'oleiculture et la viticulture antiques en Gaule: instruments et installations de production.” In La production du vin et de l'huile en Méditerranée, eds. Marie-Claire Amouretti and Jean-Pierre Brun (Athens: Ecole francaise d'Athenes, 1993): 307-337.

Chevallier, R. (ed.). Archéologie de la vigne et du vin. Paris: De Boccard, 1990.

Ciacci, Andrea, Paola Rendini, and Andrea Zifferero. Archaeologia della vite e del vino in Etruria. Siena: Ci.Vin, 2007.

Contenau, G. Manuel d' Archaeologie orientale depuis les origenes jusqu'a l'epoque d'Alexandre. Paris: 1927-31.

De Lattin, G. “Uber den Ursprung und die Verbreitung der Reben.” Der Züchter 11 (1939): 217-25.

Dietler, Michael. “Driven by Drink: The Role of Drinking in the Political Economy and the Case of Early Iron Age France.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9 (1990) 352-406.

Dietler, Michael. Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France. 2010.

Di Pasquale, Gaetano and Elda Russo Ermolli. “The Earliest Traces of Grapevine in the Landscape: The Great Lowland Forests.” In di Pasquale, Giovanni, ed. Vinum Nostrum: Art, Science, and Myths of Wine in Ancient Mediterranean Culture, ed. Giovanni di Pasquale (Florence: Giunti Editore, 2013): 58-61.

Di Pasquale, Gaetano and Elda Russo Ermolli. “The Habitat of the Grape in the Tyrrhenian Area and Evidence for its Cultivation in the Etruscan Period.” In di

315 Pasquale, Giovanni, ed. Vinum Nostrum: Art, Science, and Myths of Wine in Ancient Mediterranean Culture, ed. Giovanni di Pasquale (Florence: Giunti Editore, 2013): 62-65.

Evreinoff, V.A. “La limite septentrionale de la vigne sauvage”. RBAAT 21 (1951), 527-534.

Farkas, J. Technology and Biochemistry of Wine. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988.

Formenti, Francoise and J. M Duthel. “The Analysis of Wine and Other Organics Inside Amphoras of the Roman Period.” In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, eds. Patrick McGovern, S.J. Fleming and S.H. Katz (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995): 79-85.

Forni, Gaetano. “Quando e come sorse la viticoltura in Italia.” In Archaeologia della vite e del vino in Etruria, eds. Andrea Ciacci, Paola Rendini, and Andrea Zifferero (Siena: Ci.Vin, 2007): 69-81.

Franke, P.R. and Marathaki, I. Wine and Coins in Ancient Greece. Athens: Hatzimachalis, 1999.

Garlan, Yvon. Vin et amphores de Thasos. Athens: Ecole francaise du Athènes, 1988.

Germer, R. Flora des pharaonisches Agypten. Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1985.

Gorny, Ronald L. “Viticulture and Ancient Anatolia.” In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, eds. Patrick McGovern, S.J. Fleming and S.H. Katz (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995): 133-174.

Grace, V. R. Amphoras and the Ancient Wine Trade. Princeton: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1981.

Gras, Michael. Trafics Tyrrhéniens Archaiques. Rome: Ecole francaise de Rome, 1985.

Greene, Joseph A. “The Beginnings of Grape Cultivation and Wine Production in Phoenician/Punic North Africa.” In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, eds. Patrick McGovern, S.J. Fleming and S.H. Katz (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995): 311-322.

Guerrero Ayuso, Víctor M. “El vino en la Protohistoria del Mediterráneo Occidental.” In Arqueología del vino: Los orígenes del vino en occidente. Madrid: Gráficas Ormag, 1995.

316 Hansen, J. M. “Agriculture in the Prehistoric Aegean: Data Versus Speculations.” American Journal of Archaeology 92 (1988): 39-52.

Hansen, J. M. The Palaeoethnobotany of the Franchthi Cave. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1992.

Hasel, Michael G. “Recent Developments in Near Eastern Chronology and Radiocarbon Dating.” Origins 56 (2004): 6-31.

James, T. G. H. “The Earliest History of Wine and Its Importance in Ancient Egypt.” In The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, eds. Patrick McGovern, S.J. Fleming and S.H. Katz (Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach, 1995): 197-214.

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