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Israel Museum
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ERIC SILVER
Israel Correspondent

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T

he Greeks and Romans
popularized wine and beer,
but the peoples of the
ancient Middle East were
tippling off the grape and the grain
long before Plato's sym-
posium or Caligula's
imperial orgies.
"Drink and Be
Merry," a celebration of
booze in ancient times,
which opened in June at
the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem, traces the
first known wine culti-
vation to the sixth mil-
lennium B.C.E. in
northern Iran and the earliest beer to
the fourth millennium in Egypt and
Mesopotamia (today's Iraq). Both
were consumed in the Holy Land by
the third millennium.
Wine was always more expensive
to produce. It was reserved initially
for cultic purposes, but soon found
its way into the banqueting cham-
ber. The cheaper beer was dismissed
as the beverage of barbarians. An
erotic, 4,000-year-old terra - cotta

plaque from Mesopotamia shows a
naked woman sipping beer through
a straw while a man is slyly
approaching her from behind.
The ancients began by adding
wine to water (to decontaminate it)
and finished by adding water to wine
(so that they didn't get drunk too
quicldy). A letter, written in brownish
ink on a pottery shard
dating from the seventh
century B.C.E.,
instructs Eliashiv, the
Judaean commander of
the Arad fortress in
southern Israel, to sup-
ply his Greek mercenar-
ies with flour, oil and
wine.
The Israel Museum
exhibition's curator,
Michal Dayagi-Mendels, explains that
the oil and flour were for making
bread; the wine was for purifying
brackish water. To prove her point,
she displays a collection of 10th cen-
tury B.C.E. hip flasks, with built-in
spoons for measuring the dosage.
King Herod, the first century B.C.E.
tyrant who built the Temple in
Jerusalem for his Jewish subjects and a
winter palace at Masada overlooking

King H erod
was a
wine s nob.

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