Developing The Perfect Democratic Society Thousands of Years Ago When Beer Was Invented

 Nadene Goldfoot

The Era of Abram                                         

Those were the days.  Welcome to the ancient city of Ur.   This Sumerian city was one of the first classed as an official city to be brought up and was an important trade city at the time sitting next to the Euphrates River with 2 connected harbors north and south west of the city.

Deep in the Middle East over 4,000 years ago of the 2nd millennium BCE lived a  man named Abram living along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in a city not unlike New York City  of their day called Ur of the Chaldees.  Abram, son of Terah, the idol maker, knew that the common belief in idol worship and belief in many gods controlling man's lives was not his understanding; ;not for him.  This religion  didn't make sense to him.  He was about to marry his love, his niece, Sarai, and he knew that this would bring him many children, and this belief of his fathers was not what he wanted his children to grow up with.                                                                             

Something was brewing in Ur.  The whole area believed in human sacrifice to satiate the gods into giving them good harvests, plenty of water, food, and human wants, and was becoming so prevalent that children were being sacrificed, a practice going on for many years now.  Many of his family were preparing to leave Ur and travel Westward into the hinterland towards Egypt's lands, and his family was one of them.  Something caused the group to leave; perhaps a warring neighbor of Ur about to strike, higher taxes, a change in climate.  Mankind always seemed to think that the grass was greener beyond their own fields, and this urge was itching this group as well.   Terah and his son, Abram were city boys and had to learn to camp out on their trek with the rest of the relatives leaving Ur.  There'd be a lot they'd miss, but it was better to leave such a sick environment and start fresh.   

 Once writing was invented, c. 3500-3000 BCE, the scribes seem almost obsessed with recording every facet of their cities lives and, because of this, archaeologists and scholars in the present day have a fairly clear understanding of how the people lived and worked.

The population of ancient Mesopotamian cities varied greatly. In c. 2300 BCE Uruk had a population of 50,000 while Mari, to the north, had 10,000 and Akkad 36,000 (Modelski, 6). The populations of these cities were divided into social classes which, like societies in every civilization throughout history, were hierarchical. These classes were: The King and Nobility, The Priests and Priestesses, The Upper Class, the Lower Class, and The Slaves.                                                                           

                                                                            

A Sumerian  votive plaque.  A votive plaque of white marble. The lower part shows two men carrying a large jar (probably filled with beer) and another man in front of them seems to steer an animal from behind, perhaps a cow or horse. At the upper part there are two seated figures (a man and a woman) sitting in front of each other holding two glasses and drinking something (very likely beer) in "a cheers action". Early dynastic period, 2900-2300 BCE. From Ur, Mesopotamia, Iraq. (The Sulaymaniyah Museum, Iraqi Kurdistan).  

• Many Sumerian clay tablets have been found with writing. Initially, pictograms were used, followed by cuneiform and then ideograms.
• Sumerians believed in anthropomorphic polytheism, or of many gods in human form that were specific to each city-state.
• Sumerians invented or perfected many forms of technology, including the wheel, mathematics, and cuneiform script.                                                                                                                                

              Beer Allocation Clay Cuneiform Tablet from Southern Iraq                                              

This specific tablet is describing the allocation of beer rations for workers. Beer was one the most popular drinks in Mesopotamia and was also used as pay for the workers  This clay tablet is currently being kept in the collection at the British Museum in London.   This clay tablet was discovered in in the rich Mesopotamian city of Uruk (modern day southern Iraq) and was created around 5,000 years ago (3100 - 3000 BC). It displays some of the earliest writing discovered in the world.  

As almost any cereal containing certain sugars can undergo spontaneous fermentation due to wild yeasts in the air, it is possible that beer-like drinks were independently developed throughout the world soon after a tribe or culture had domesticated cereal. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced as far back as about 7,000 years ago in what is today Iran. This discovery reveals one of the earliest known uses of fermentation and is the earliest evidence of brewing to date.  

The earliest known traces of wine were also from Persia (today's Iran) from 5,000 BCE.  The spread of wine culture westwards was most probably due to the Phoenicians who spread outward from a base of city-states along the Mediterranean coast of what are today Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and Palestine.    

In those days, writing was practiced to record business transactions, mostly.  It was done on damp clay pieces that was easily scratched with a stick that recorded information and was fired in a kiln, hardened and easily kept.  Ur became a deposit of many of these clay pieces, found today by archaeologists and read.

Like today, man had to be warned of the dangers of wine and beer.  Our writings are full of warnings, such as :Proverbs 20:1 ESV / 69 helpful votes :  Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise. However, wine is used ceremonially in Shabbat where grape wine is used to make kiddush.  The conditioning and use of wine in this way seems to have worked in its association with connection to observance in tradition of respect of G-d  and not as a change in emotions.  Alcoholism has not been a problem with Jews, at least in our past.  

Before entering Canaan, today's Syria or Palestine, Abram saw that it was a land of city-states, not unified into one organized area protected by a powerful army.  Judges were set up who were tribal leaders, mainly Levites,  using both male and females as these guidance counselors and advisors of arguments.   Later, soldier-leaders, priests or prophets assumed in addition to his or her chief functions,  that of the judge.  Joshua was the first, and then people like Deborah and Othniel, Gideon, Jephthah and Samson were best known as the judges.                                                                                         

                   Abram, Sarai and son Isaac in their new tent-life of Canaan

Abram's idea of the world was that of a force was responsible for the creation of the world that he understood to be from one G-d.  He felt that this power, G-d, had communicated with him, hearing the ideas in his mind, for he didn't think he could have thought of all this strange idea all by himself.  That's how he explained it to his children and wife when he shared his ideas in Canaan as they camped out in tents, like today's modern hippies, for they had come from stable strong homes of Ur.  Living in tents was new to them.  As they learned to get along with the few native Canaanites there, they developed more understandings, and this is shown in their story-telling at night-time camp-fires by changing their names to Abraham and Sarah, which was told as G-d's way of enlightening their minds to  a higher level.    Abram, now called Abraham, give his people new ideas of valuing human life and the treatment of each other by introducing  kindness.                                                                        

We remember our Patriarchs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and our Matriarchs of Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel.  Here we see Leah and her 6 sons and 1 daughter, Jacob and Rachel and son Joseph, and the wives' two handmaids with their sons. Rachel would later have one more son, Benjamin.  

As time went by, Abraham's descendants were taught the concept of a single G-d who created the earth until it got to Moses, now belonging to the tribe of Judah, one of the 12 tribes of Jacob who had continued to live in Canaan.  A time of famine had hit the land and Jacob's family of 70 members traveled to Egypt, living there as nomads tending their sheep until they grew in size, scaring the Egyptians who did not know of their unusual religious concept of the world and their peaceful tendencies.  They were taken as slaves,  and this continued from the time of their entrance, for 400 years until a descendant of Abram was born, Moses.  Moses was unable to learn his birth mother's history, but may have been with her if she became the wet-nurse, as the royal step-mother could not have fed him.  

Moses lived through a period of the pharaoh having all new born sons of the Judeans being killed of of fear of their growing possible power along with their growing numbers and retaliation for their terrible treatment of the past 400 years.  He had been a foundling, raised by one of the pharaoh's daughters as a son of the royal house, and educated along with them in all areas and found to have been the smartest of all.                                                                     

                 Beer was generally known as “Hqt” (“heqet” or “heket”) to ancient Egyptians, but was also called “tnmw” (“tenemu”) and there was a type of beer known as haAmt (“kha-ahmet”). ... There is some evidence that as a staple foodstuff, ancient Egyptian beer was not particularly intoxicating.                                                              

    600,000 leaving Egypt with no time to waste before the Pharaoh changed his mind, taking what they could with them.  They mixed flour and water to make a type of hardtack to eat on the road, now called matzos, baked quickly in the hot sun.  

Moses had the same experience as Abram had, receiving instructions as to a perfect society with the motivation that freeing his ancestors from slavery could experience.  He was able to free over 600,000 slaves including others not of his family line, and they all left on the Exodus, a wandering that took 40 years before reaching Jacob's old homeland of Canaan once again.  During all this time, Moses took it upon himself to give lectures as to how they were to live in their newly found freedom that included 613 rules to follow which were not that hard, as many of them were already being founded through Abraham's way of life.                                           

                              Receiving and writing the 10 commandments.  The first 10 were the most well known and remembered by all.  The first 5 describe man's duties to G-d;   the latter 5 his responsibilities to his fellow man.

  All this came to him word by word from a single entity, G-d, a voice that most likely mystified even him that he heard in his mind.  

A strata was set up whereas Moses's older brother, Aaron, was given the responsibility of being a leader and continuing to teach their new way of life.  When he died, his male heirs would take on this responsibility.  Moses and Aaron were members of the tribe of Levi, and they, in turn, were recognized and given other responsibilities of teaching all the other 11 tribes.  So the strata was now of priestly line of Aaron called the Cohens, the Levites, and the rest of the tribes were called the Israelites, called that for Jacob, aka, Israel, changed to show the development of his new understanding of the world through G-d's communication with him.  The people knew their place in this society;  Cohens, Levites and Israelites.  They knew the limits of what was expected of them in their society.  

                                                                           

                                        Fighting against the Amaleks on their trek towards Canaan

The only problem they had was that they were not alone on a new planet.  They still existed with other people who had the opposite of  beliefs, and found that they had to fight to continue living, but being a stubborn people, held onto their beliefs that were not so strange to them, much coming from Abram so long ago.  At least the population wasn't as crowded as it had been in Ur. 

A January 2014 report is that An archaeologist thinks he has found evidence of wine provided to the slaves who worked on Temple Mount in Bronze Age Jerusalem.  In September last year while excavating a Byzantine site, an earthenware jar was uncovered by a team from the archaeological institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Ophel area of the city, not far from Temple Mount.  It was immediately spotted as being much older and was dated back to the 10th century BCE, the days of King Solomon but at first experts thought that the letters were from an ancient near eastern language.  Solomon was born much later in 961 BCE than people of the Exodus. Solomon was of the direct line of Moses.  Today's DNA lists their DNA as J1 or the Cohen gene.   

Now professor Gershon Galil from Haifa University has claimed they are ancient Hebrew – or something closely related – and indicate that the jar contained wine for slaves and poorer members of society – possibly those who helped build Solomon’s temple, palaces and city walls.  If correct it is some of the oldest Hebrew ever uncovered.  Galil has said he thinks the word “yayin” “wine” is written as well as hints to the year and place of its production although the necessary letters are missing.According to Galil, “yayin” has a close resemblance to a word in the Ugarit language of northern Syria which indicates low quality wine.                                                               

                                         Coming to the Red Sea

That 40 year march from Egypt to Canaan, a distance closer than they realized, gave them time to develop their minds, grow some more dendrites in their brains in problem solving, and adjust to a new way of belief.  Within that time period, were 2 generations where the old died out and the new were born in freedom, ready to fight for their new way of life with Joshua leading the way.  His name was Hoshea ( הוֹשֵׁעַ‎ Hōšēaʿ) the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, but Moses called him "Joshua", the name by which he is commonly known in English. According to the Bible he was born in Egypt prior to the Exodus. He was much younger than Moses and was Moses's protege. 

                                                                       

 Homo Sapiens  appeared in Southwest Asia around 100,000 years ago and elsewhere in the Old World by 60,000-40,000 years ago.  Abram of the 2nd millennium  BCE and his ancestors had been around for a long time already when we hear of him and his beliefs.  Being born in about 1946 BCE was actually quite close to us, only about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.  He truly was someone to write about, and Moses did in his famous 5 books.  

Mankind, we homo Sapiens, have developed our technical abilities by leaps and bounds, reaching for the moon and stars already, but not so much emotionally or physically.  Will we improve in that area?  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer

https://history2701.fandom.com/wiki/Beer_Allocation_Clay_Cuneiform_Tablet_from_Southern_Iraq

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=670778102

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2014/01/3000-year-old-bin-end-wine-label-deciphered/

https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2263/sumerian-votive-plaque/

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldcivilization/chapter/the-sumerians/