One of the most unexpected details of ancient life among the Hittites and Sumerians that I learned early on was that people drank through beer straws. The long tubes had filters to keep out the unwanted bits of barley, etc. I had sought out the curator at Harvard’s Sackler Museum to check the accuracy of the Hittite “world” I’d reconstructed for Briseis, the main character of my first novel set in the context of the Trojan War. The curator had graciously welcomed me into her office. We were intently conversing about a range of topics. I confess, at that point, I couldn’t quite visualize the beer drinking scene from the quick reference she made. How people drank beer wasn’t the important information to me at that moment. So I left it for later.
Sitting around a pot of beer
The photo above shows such a communal drinking scene through beer straws. It’s a seal impression from the Sumerian cylinder seal shown here. A group of people, as many as eight or so (two on the seal), could sit around a large pot of beer. Into the beer, the drinkers placed tubes, a little over a meter long, that they could easily reach with their mouths from their seats. Thus everyone could drink from the shared pot.
This Sumerian version of a pitcher and pint glass feels very friendly, but it may actually have been part of somber or formal rituals such as funeral and religious feasts. Most commonly, the Sumerians made the beer straws from reeds. The distinctive nodes along the reeds show up in the artwork and artifacts. Archaeologists have found copper filter tips with slits cut into them that would fit over the end of the reed put into the beer.
When a Scepter is Actually a Beer Straw
Only recently did I come to have a vivid and clear picture of this intriguing ancient beer drinking style. Archaeologists from the Russian Academy of Sciences have written an article in Cambridge University Press’s Antiquity, “Party like a Sumerian: reinterpreting the ‘sceptres’ from the Maikop kurgan.” They studied 8 silver and gold hollow tubes found in a Bronze Age burial mound in Maikop, Russia. They date to about 3000 BCE. Small silver or gold bulls decorate the tubes.
In 1897 Professor Nikolai Veselovsky of St Petersburg University excavated the mound. He interpreted the tubes as scepters. A later scholar decided on poles for a canopy. Another declared them a ritual element involving arrows.
The article in Antiquity compares them to the somewhat later Sumerian beer straws. The similarities are pretty persuasive. I suspect this solution would only occur to you if you knew about the Sumerian practice. From there, it verges on obvious, although the scholars build a very rigorous argument. For example, they conducted micro-botanical analysis and found barley starch residue inside the tubes.
Drinking Beer Sumerian Style
I was less interested in a new interpretation of the Russian artifacts than in the accompanying detailed discussion of the Sumerian straws and their use. Fortunately, ancient Near Eastern people formed metal versions imitating the more common reed straws. Reeds decay and leave no trace. However, the high status gold and silver straws survive in places like Queen Puabi’s tomb in the Royal Cemetery at Ur.
I enjoyed the precise descriptions of the construction of various straws from around the Near East. The researchers performed experimental archaeology with reeds, constructing the straws with the filters. They showed how the metal and reed straws shared distinctive design details. Drawings of participants drinking from them gave me a vivid image of the scene. Tiny cylinder seal drawings and other ancient depictions show a fuzzier view.
So now you can imagine the drinking rites at Queen Puabi’s funeral, or, most probably, many grand feasts in the ancient Middle East and in the Hittite Empire. I’m going to have to write this into a scene with my Hittite-inspired characters, Tesha and Hattu. I’ve been giving them cups to drink from, silly me! (I suspect this wasn’t the every day way to drink, in any case.)
The article is a model of academic rigor combined with approachable clarity.
Here for a post about an Egyptian beer brewery. Here for Neolithic beer at Göbekli Tepe.