The likes of Wine Enthusiast, Wine Spectator, and jancisrobinson.com all stand at the vanguard of elite modern wine writing publications. The articles and tasting notes that grace their pages detail the intricacies of wine production and describe the sensory experiences of sipping various vintages. The language they use is unique to wine writing–full of industry jargon and organoleptic identifiers. We could ponder the history of this specialized section of journalism–from the rise of Robert Parker’s 100-point scale to the constant addition of new denominations of origin to the oenologist’s repertoire–but this is only scratching the surface. Wine writing is as old as writing itself. And wine is even older.
Archaic cuneiform dating back around 5,000 years marks the nebulous start of systemic writing. Wine, at least 8,000 years old, was already well established in certain parts of the so-called Fertile Crescent where writing developed. Accordingly, the most primitive writing systems record the beverages of these ancient civilizations in tax records geared towards agricultural harvest. While we can describe the body, legs, or terroir of a wine today, ancient wine writing (at least what we know of it) was far more rudimentary. We are reduced to asking how the actual technology of writing attempted to capture the meaning of wine and in what contexts wine was actually written about.
In Sumer, the cuneiform sign for the grapevine appears in the archaeological record in the earliest centuries of writing around the early third millennium BCE. (Powell 2003) Over the next 3,000 years, the cuneiform writing system would serve a variety of languages and changed markedly over time from being largely pictographic to becoming a sophisticated syllabic script. Just as the physical written symbol for wine would evolve over time and across cultures, the context of writing about wine could change too.
For the first 1,000 years of written life, wine was not a quotidian staple in Mesopotamian life. Wine was the product of the Mediterranean coast and the northern mountains of Armenia. Based on their natural endowments, Sumer, and other Babylonian civilizations devoutly produced and consumed beer. Snell estimates that raisins were five to ten times as expensive as barely around 2,000 BCE. Wine was an imported beverage for the rich (and the gods). It was in these elite contexts that wine appears in the most ancient of writing.
Grapes were likely cultivated in the Mesopotamian world since 4,000 BCE but there is no conclusive evidence of wine production for the next 2,000 years. Rather than wine, the end product of early Mesopotamian viticulture was more frequently raisins or grape syrup. This fact complicates our ability to decipher ancient wine writing, as our biases assume wine is the foremost product of the grape vine and the words for grape and wine are often identical. The texts we have give us information about the quantity and quality of grapes and wine, but specific production information is lacking or untranslatable. Thus, it can be difficult to tell if a text is actually discussing wine.
Records dating from 2,400 BCE show that viticulture was practiced in modern day Iraq. By 1,800 BCE there is more definitive evidence of wine-making between the Tigris and Euphrates. We can read about wine in the bookkeeping of toll men who regulated the downstream wine trade on the Euphrates or in the tax records of Mesopotamian governments. The way we write about wine today is foreign compared to the ancient cuneiform remnants of the past. So what did wine writing look like in cuneiform script and its older pictographic precursors.
The grape vine, wine, bunch of grapes.
This term and its pictogram frequently appeared in Sumerian texts describing abundance and wealth. It is often written alongside lal which means grape syrup. Without a doubt, geštin refers to the grape vine and its fruits, but we cannot always assume that it means wine in most texts.
For example, the term tabatu in Akkadian and geština in Sumerian likely means “water of the grape.” Wine may seem to be a sensible translation, but this could also signify a beverage made by soaking raisins in water. Powell also notes that many texts have translated the ideogram “Grape + Sun,” spoken geštin hea, as white wine, when in reality it should be raisin or sun-dried grape. He suggests instead that white wine is written as “second quality wine” which is juxtaposed against normal red wine.
Later, in the 1,600s BCE, the ancient Hittites labeled a military position GAL GEŠTIN meaning “The Great Wine.” In the hieroglyphs of their time, the Hittites wrote the word for wine in the shape of a modern martini glass, with little grapes attached. While we cannot always pinpoint the meaning of geštin, it has a positive connotation associated with wealth and abundance over the course of several thousand years.
Palm tree.
Herodotus noted that Mesopotamians, who were not avid viticulturists or apiculturists like Mediterranean peoples, made both wine and honey from the date palm.
An intoxicating drink, wine. Also, life, to live, to be healthy, to cure.
Generally, Tin means an intoxicating drink. Szarzyńska notes that Tin was also sometimes used to indicate a title of a profession.
A container for beer or wine, sweet red wine, grape cluster.
Estimating measurements is tricky business, but these container were likely around 10 liters in volume.
First fruits offering, spring time, wine cellar, perhaps governor.
The nisag was an official government tax on the harvest. It was also the name of the harvest month and likely is the linguistic forefather of the Hebrew month Nisan, during which Passover is celebrated.
Beer.
Beer was the drink of choice in Mesopotamia. The climate was better suited to grain cultivation than viticulture. Beer was important in religion, with beer deities like the goddess Ninkasi, and also the economy as the government, which employed hundreds of thousands of individuals at times, sometimes compensated workers with special payments of beer. University of Pennsylvania’s Sumerian Dictionary shows over 12,000 known attestations of the word Kas between 2,500 and 2,000 BCE. The same database lists only 278 for wine or geštin during the same time frame.
She who pines poetic over a glass of pinot and opts to record her sensory delight in words has the Mesopotamians to thank. They were not true wine-drinkers, yet still appreciated the goodness inherent in wine. The pictograms and logograms for the vine and wine were associated with status, sweetness, and abundance. Both titles and names used wine words as prefixes of suffixes; Hittite women’s names often ended in –wiya, that is wine.
The invention of wine predates systemic writing. Perhaps, the foundation of agriculture made writing both possible and necessary. Wine, as a unique agricultural product, would naturally fall into the earliest uses of writing–counting agricultural output for taxation. Although it is difficult to peer so deeply back into history and know which geštin meant wine for certain, it is still remarkable to consider just how ancient wine writing is.
D. C. Snell. Ledgers and Prices: Early Mesopotamian Merchant Accounts (New Haven 1982)
EPSD. (n.d.). Retrieved May 9, 2022, from http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/nepsd-frame.html
Halloran, J. A. (2006). Sumerian lexicon: A dictionary guide to the ancient Sumerian language. Logogram.
Green, M. W, et al. Zeichenliste Der Archaischen Texte Aus Uruk. Berlin: Mann, 1987.
Neumann, Hans. “Beer as a means of compensation for work in Mesopotamia during the Ur III period.” (1994): 321-331.
Powell, Marvin A. “Wine and the vine in ancient Mesopotamia: the cuneiform evidence.” The origins and ancient history of wine. Routledge, 2003. 119-147.
Sumerian compound-sign words – initials G through K. (n.d.). Retrieved May 9, 2022, from http://www.sumerian.org/sumg-k.htm
Szarzyńska, Krystyna. “Archaic Sumerian Tags.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vol. 46, 1994, pp. 1–10, https://doi.org/10.2307/1359935. Accessed 7 May 2022.
Weeden, Mark. “The Good God, the Wine-god and the Storm-god of the Vineyard.” Die Welt des Orients 48.2 (2018): 330-356.
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