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THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: TRACING THE ORIGINS OF WINE - Dissertation Luke A. Gorton
THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: TRACING THE ORIGINS OF WINE - Dissertation Luke A. Gorton
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy
By
2014
Dissertation Committee:
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
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
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
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract........................................................................................................................ii
Dedication....................................................................................................................iii
Acknowledgments........................................................................................................iv
Vita...............................................................................................................................v
Table of Contents.........................................................................................................vi
List of Figures..............................................................................................................vii
Chapter 1: Introduction.................................................................................................1
Bibliography................................................................................................................297
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
original contributions herein to the question at hand will be found largely in the chapters
has not yet been said, although new insight into the literary evidence is needed as well.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
“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
“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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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.
“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
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.
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
Yet while this discussion about archaeology and even palaeobotany is interesting to
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
19
CHAPTER 2: GREEK AND ROMAN LITERATURE
The classical world was also the classical locus of wine culture. The Greeks and
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
about food, drink and many other topics collected by a man named Athenaeus in the 3 rd
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
Greek Literature
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
ὧσα ἐπιδεδέατοι
Παραϝέϝου ϝοῖνος...
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
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.
The normalization is in some doubt for this tablet, but appears to be something like
what follows:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
36
χερσὶ δ᾽ ἀνίπτοισιν Διὶ λείβειν αἴθοπα οἶνον
ἅζομαι: οὐδέ πῃ ἔστι κελαινεφέϊ Κρονίωνι
αἵματι καὶ λύθρῳ πεπαλαγμένον εὐχετάασθαι.
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
the liquid most appropriate to such a libation.48 The drink is thus strongly connected to
At the end of the Iliad, we again find wine used in connection with religious rites,
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.
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
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.
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
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
by the gods’, in Odyssey 11.61)51, and it was to be respected even in secular use.
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
the action not of a good Greek but of a barbarian, and as such of one not worthy to lead
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:
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
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.
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
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:
43
Τρῆχόν τ᾽ αἰχμητὴν Αἰτώλιον Οἰνόμαόν τε,
Οἰνοπίδην θ᾽ Ἕλενον καὶ Ὀρέσβιον αἰολομίτρην...
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
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,
commodity in modern Western culture as important and omnipresent as wine was for
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
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
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.
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
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
of wine with Saturn.61 Nonetheless, there was undoubtedly one dominant wine-god in
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
Meanwhile, the other two occurrences are in Book 6, where an early story about
Dionysos is related:
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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:
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)
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
well as archaeological finds which pertain to the custom, we will discuss this topic
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
“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,
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
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 8 th
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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-
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.
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
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
Cicero remarks on the same phenomenon of the lack of viticulture in the north,
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
Italian economy. In any case, we should probably attribute the lack of serious
Conclusion
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 3 rd Dynasty, we find the
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.
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
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
From the time of the Old Kingdom, therefore, Osiris was envisioned as the god who
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
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
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
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 12 th Dynasty
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 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
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
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
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
“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'
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 t in 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
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
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- t in 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 (ka š- ge št in ) 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
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
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
Despite its rarity, wine thus plays an undeniable role in Sumerian culture, especially with
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,
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,
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
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
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
particular fruit of the grapevine.150 More definite terms in Akkadian for such things seem
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
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
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”
Despite this evidence for a wine trade down the rivers of Mesopotamia, wine
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.
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
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 8 th
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
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:
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
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
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,
[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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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,
[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:
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
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
posited from other evidence: wine (and the vine) were rare in southern Mesopotamia
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:
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
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
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
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
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)
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
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
il . yṯb . b mrzḥh
yšt . [y]n . 'd šb' . trṯ 'd škr
And at the end of the story of the fight between Ba'al and Mot in the Ba'al Cycle,
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
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
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
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
Hebrew Literature
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
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
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”.
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
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
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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
תו משם זמורה ואשכול ענבים אחד וישאהו במוט% ויבאו עד־נ)חל אש (כל ויכר
+
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
A vine did you bring up out of Egypt; you drove out the nations, and you planted
it.
(Psalms 80:8)
עשועיו
1 ואיש יהודה נטע ש
) אל
/ בית ישר/) כרם יהוה צבאות+ )כי
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
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
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:
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:
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:
ליקם
9 / מאחרי בנשף יין יד
/) דפו1 )כר יר/כימי בבקר ש
/ הוי משM
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
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:
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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
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
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
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
For all of the mention of wine and the vine in the Hebrew Bible, these items are
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:
[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
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:
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
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
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.
Some might take it for granted that the word for “wine” is so similar in so many
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
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
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-
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
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
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
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
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
units, and borrowed terms often mean nothing in the languages into which they are
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
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,
(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
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 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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
respected Western linguist, and the hypothesis that the word for wine was of Indo-
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
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
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
plausibly connected with *wei(H)- 'twist, wind' (cf. Latin vītis 'vine').”238 Martirosyan's
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
European.240 Curiously, even Beekes's own 2010 etymological dictionary of Greek shows
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
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
Egyptian?
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
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
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
Ugaritic: yn
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 vernacular 250 (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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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?
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 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
being missing only in Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.261 There follows the oldest attested
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-
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
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 <i>,
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 <i> 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
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
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 <ei> 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 <ei> 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
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
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
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
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
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 <i> may create confusion, the
sound laws once again provide welcome clarity: an <i> 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 <i> 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
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 <e> 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-
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
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
the word, unencumbered by Sumerian relics, essentially agree with this root shape and
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
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
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
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
different from the rest, will be the cipher through which we come to understand all of
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
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
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
morphology which adds nuance to the basic meaning of the root, we are well on our
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
Thus, positing a root shape *w(V)iH seems to satisfy all of the phonological data
(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
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
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
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
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
feminine noun *huiē, but if so why the double attestation? Yet this term is clearly odd
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
176
(and in other subgroups), it referred simply to a nondescript twisty item of botanical
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
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
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.
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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—
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
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
thereafter. Being unaware of the morpheme boundary between root and stem present
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
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
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
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
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,
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,
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
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
Egyptian Revisited
with a derivative wnš.t. Due to the lack of recorded vowels, we have a much more
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
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.
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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
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
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
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
other family. Besides blaming the shape of the form of the form *γwin(o)- on 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 <o>, 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
“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.
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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
'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
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.
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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
Etruscan is a four-vowel language, with no distinction made between <o> and <u>; 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.
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such, the Etruscan term would naturally occur as <vinum> if it was a borrowing from an
Italic or Celtic term ending in -om.345 Such an adjustment of <o> to <u> 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
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
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
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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
borrowings. When such principles are followed, we find that the data can be explained
in a compelling manner.
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
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.
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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
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
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
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
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last have the complete story of the origins of wine, or at least as complete a story as we
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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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
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
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
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
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
antiquity has long since disappeared. Wood and leaves rot away in time, as do grapes
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
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
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
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
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
they provide must be accompanied and buttressed by other types of evidence. Grape
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
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
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
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
millennium BCE, and in Anatolia and points west in the 2nd millennium BCE and
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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
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.
examine evidence relating to the early wine culture of Transcaucasia. Although the
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
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.
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
return to regions which certainly exhibited evidence of the wild grape in ancient times.
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
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
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
may be no coincidence that the advent of this type of pottery dovetails with the
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
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
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
quite likely that many of them did. Thus, there is no doubt that the Levant of the second
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
domesticated grapevine until after 4000 BCE. Yet the material evidence, such as it is,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
than in Greece, and it makes more sense as a cultural import than as a native
truly Greek fashion, but during the Greek Bronze Age it appears to have exhibited all the
markings of aristocracy.474
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
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
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
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
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
Italy
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
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
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
(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
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
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
northern Italy, so also were contacts with a mature wine-drinking culture, namely the
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
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
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
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
the early Carthaginians were the first to produce wine in North Africa—but it does not
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
514
See Guerrero Ayuso (2009) 102-107.
264
CHAPTER 6: THE ORIGINS OF WINE: A SYNTHESIS
which touches upon the question of the origins of wine. We have looked at the literary
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
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
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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
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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
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
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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-
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.
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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
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
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
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
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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
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.
which brought the domesticated grapevine to new regions and new peoples. This can be
driven occurrence. Why, then, was winemaking spread far and wide in a short time out
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of the land of people who had done a good job of keeping it to themselves for so long?
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
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.
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suggests that the intrusive tribes rode their way into the Near East, something entirely
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
Yet for all this, the connection between the southward spread of wine and the
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.
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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
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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
steppe, received wine culture from those in the area, and took it south with them into
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-
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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
Just who were these Indo-Europeans, exactly? Did they speak some form of
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
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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
grapevine but were not aware of any systematic exploitation of its fermented juice (so
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
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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
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
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archaeologists alike), and so we have good reason to believe in the veracity of our
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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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
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
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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
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.
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dismiss the possibility that the domesticated grapevine arrived in the Balkans and the
Yet before we do, we must discuss the transmission of the term to another
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
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
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
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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
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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-
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
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)
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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.
when the elements of wine culture, beginning with the domesticated grapevine and
in the region. Just as importantly, it is unable to answer the question of how and from
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.
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Did wine and its attendant societal markers arrive in the Aegean from the east, the
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
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
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
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
supports this view, for he is frequently portrayed as entering Greece from the east, even
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'
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
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
when and how this region received the domesticated grapevine. Yet the linguistic
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
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
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
likely via commerce across the Mediterranean Sea. What are the implications of an
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
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
anthropology.
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
296
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