Hi, Wednesday, November 26, 2003, 11:01:49 PM, you wrote:
> I can confirm the fact that the Egyptians were the first to brew a type of > beer. I don't know that it would have tasted like what we now call beer, > and I don't know that it was made from the 4 traditional ingrediants that we > brew beer with today (hops, malt, water, yeast), but it was a fermented > grain beverage, and that's good enough for me. > My sister was an Egyptologist, and told me all about it. > I gotta say, that Asahi beer, styled after the Egyptian recipe sounds > interesting. Too bad I missed it. This website: http://www.alabev.com/history.htm claims that the Sumerians got there first. This shouldn't be too surprising. We'd expect beer (or something like it) to have been produced by the earliest agriculturalists - which is why I looked it up. Egypt seemed surprisingly late to me. The website says the Sumerians had a Goddess of Brewing. She's alive and well, and serving pints at my local. Richard Rudgeley tells us that the Sumerians and the pre-dynastic Egyptians had beer, and that beer and wine have their origins in the Neolithic. Before they started to put alcohol to good use the Stone Age people had a wide range of other narcotics, such as opium, cannabis, mandrake and others. One of my other books somewhere tells me that the early ancestors of Europeans were very fond of ephedra, which is thought to be the semi-mythical 'soma'. We still use it in the form of ephedrine. The people who painted the caves at Chauvet, Altamira etc. also show evidence of being completely out of their heads for a lot of the time, though presumably not while painting. Some scholars have tentatively translated two of the symbols in Lascaux, next to a pot-bellied guy painted yellow, as "It's Duff Time!" and "Mmm! Beer!". -- Cheers, Bob mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "There is no such thing nowadays as Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen - only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same customs, and for good reason: [...] Their fatherland is any country where there is money for them to steal and women for them to seduce." --- J J Rousseau
