Jesus turning the water into wine at the marriage in Cana, Eastern Orthodox Iconography, date unknown.
In 870 BCE, one of the greatest celebrations ever held in the ancient world was thrown by King Ashurnasirpal II of the Assyrian Empire. If you had been invited and didn’t attend, look out. You’d soon be getting a visit from Ashurnasirpall’s army, one of the greatest military forces ever assembled. At this party, there was something served to the thousands who attended that had never been served in Mesopotamia on such a large scale before. It was what the Assyrians and Babylonians called “The Excellent Beer of the Mountains,” and the “Drink of the Gods.”
It was wine.
Ashurnasirpal II was one of them most powerful men to ever live. During his 25 year reign (884 – 859 BCE) over the Neo Assyrian Empire he commanded all of the lands of Babylonia from the Persian Gulf, north to the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, east into the Tarsus Mountains of Turkey, across modern Syria, down the eastern shore of the Mediterranean including the modern countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and even the Lower Egyptian Empire of the Nile Valley as far south as Thebes.
Ashurnasirpal did not conquer all of these lands himself; most were conquered by his father, but when Ashurnasirpal came to power in 884 BCE, rebellions erupted in some of his holdings. He marched with his army upon the rebelling cities of Sura and Tela, which both he destroyed, and according to his chronicles, he flayed all of the rebel chieftains, skinning them alive and hanging their hides on a pillar at the city gate. Others he impaled on stakes. He cut the hands and feet off of the rebel officers, leaving them alive to bleed to death. Of the soldiers who rebelled, he cut off their noses, lips, ears, and put out their eyes. He allowed his soldiers to have their way with all of the maidens and young boys before he burned the alive. He made a pyramid of the heads of those he executed. He exiled some of the citizens to the desert, naked without water or food. And the luckiest citizens of the rebel cities were sold into slavery.
After the destruction of these two cities and the extermination of their populations, it is not surprising that every other city and province within the empire readily fell into line and pledged their loyalty to Ashurnasirpal; there was never another rebellion attempted during his reign. Taxes of gold and other wealth poured in from all over the empire. Rulers from neighboring kingdoms sent tribute, and acknowledged him as the King of Kings, in hopes that if Ashurnasirpal saw them as friendly, and subservient, he wouldn’t attack them. He visited all of the neighboring lands, and at the threat of violence, he commanded their subjection to his rule. Everyone complied.
Having secured his kingdom, he set about building a new city for himself with a palace to out shine anything ever built. He moved from the traditional capitol of Ashur on the Tigris River to his new city, the new capitol of Kalhu, also historically called Calah and/or Nimrud, just a few miles north on the same river, near the modern city of Mosul in Iraq. It was the greatest metropolis the ancient world had seen to that date. The palace at the center sat on a raised platform, higher than the rest of the city, surrounded by canals and waterfalls, and irrigated gardens with delicious vegetables and fruits being raised for the King and his court. The magnificent halls were adorned with polished wood and bronze doors, and roofed with cedar, cypress, and juniper wood. On the walls of the palace he had artisans carve great sculpted relief tableaus depicting all of his conquests and triumphs, including the cities he destroyed and the thousands of people that he had put to death. Then he announced of the celebration to inaugurate the new capitol and invited all of the leaders from all of the cities and provinces within his empire, as well as dignitaries and leaders from neighboring kingdoms to come to and bend a knee before the King of Kings. No one returned the RSVP with regrets. And he made them all go look at the artwork depicting his glory.
The celebration was magnificent, lasting an entirety of ten days. The official record claims that exactly 69,574 people attended; over 47,000 of those attending were citizens from all across the empire; 16,000 were newly relocated inhabitants of the new capitol city; another 5,000 or so were foreign dignitaries, and 1,500 member of Ashurnasirpal’s royal court. According to the rolls and records, over the 10 days the attendees dined endlessly, and were served 1,000 fattened cows, 1,000 calves, 10,000 sheep, 15,000 lambs, 500 gazelles, 1,000 ducks, 1,000 geese, 20,000 doves, 12,000 other small birds, 10,000 fish, 10,000 jerboa (a small domesticated rodent, similar to a gerbil), and 10,000 eggs. There were very few vegetables, only 1,000 crates. It was a feast of historic proportion. The king boasted in his chronicles that he did them due honor and sent them back, healthy, and happy, to their homes.
But, even with the aforementioned extravagance in foods, the one most impressive thing served at the celebration were the 10,000 skins of wine that had been imported from the mountains of Persia to the northwest. There were also 10,000 jars of beer, the everyday drink of the Assyrians and Babylonians, but wine was a delicacy, only available to Mesopotamians in small quantities. It had to be imported; the nearest wine growing region was in what is today the mountains of Iran, more than 500 miles away. Cost alone of transporting wine from Persia made it cost at least 10 times what beer would cost. It was so rare that wine was typically only used in religious ceremonies; even the elites could not afford to drink it on a regular basis. It was, for all intent and purposes, out of reach of only the wealthiest and most powerful of men; exactly the message that Ashurnasirpal II wanted to convey to each and everyone who attended his celebration. If I can afford this much wine, if I can afford to give it to you, I can do whatever I want.
On many of the reliefs Ashurnasirpal is depicted drinking wine from a shallow bowl, probably made of gold, held high in one hand as a salute to the gods. In Mesopotamia at the time beer was drank from jars and jugs, using a straws to suck up the beer so the drinker would not swallow the chaff that floated on the top or the yeast gunk that settled on the bottom. These images of Ashurnasirpal II and his court drinking wine are the first depictions of such in the Babylonian and Assyrian world, although beer had been drank by the Mesopotamians for many millennia, and had been depicted in art in the region 4,000 years earlier. Under the Assyrians in the 1st Millennia BCE, wine was the drink of only the greatest rulers, conquerors, and human gods who walked the earth. The introduction of wine to Mesopotamia by Ashurnasirpal II and the subsequent promotion of wine drinking by his son, Shalmaneser, proved to be a turning point for wine consumption in the Near East.
Sculpted Alabaster Relief of Ashurnasirpal II, with wine bowl, ca. 870BCE, formerly of the palace at Kalhu (aka Calah and Nimrud), now at the British Museum
The Assyrians were not the first to drink the wine of grapes; that distinction belongs to the Neolithic inhabitants of the Zagros Mountains, a region that is found in Armenia and northern Iran, beginning sometime after 9,000 years BCE, but it was probably around 6,000 BCE when wine making blossomed in the region with the invention of pottery, a necessary tool for the making, storing and serving of wine.
Wine is the fermented juice of crushed grapes. On the skins of the grapes there are naturally occurring wild yeast strains that convert the sugars in the juice into alcohol. Trying to store grape juice for any length of time would eventually, and naturally, result in the making of wine. The earliest evidence ever found of wine was a reddish residue inside a pottery jar from an archaeological dig dating to 5400 BCE, found in the area where biblical story of Noah claims he planted the first vineyard on the slopes of nearby Mount Ararat after the flood.
The cultivation of grapes (viticulture) spread from this area westward into Anatolia, then the Hellenistic World of Greece and western Turkey, and then south along the Mediterranean coast into the land known as Levant; what is today Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Egypt’s kings, dating from 3,500 years BCE, developed a taste for wine, importing it with great expense from the vineyards of Levant. The pharaohs eventually started vineyards of their own in the Nile Delta region with limited success. Just as it would be in 2,600 years later in Mesopotamia, wine was very expensive, very rare, and only available to the wealthiest and most powerful; as I said before, for consumption by human gods who walked the earth.
By 2,500 BCE wine was being cultivated on the island of Cypress and the Greek mainland, and at that early time it was also the drink of only the wealthy in both the Mycenaen and Minoan cultures, as wine was not listed on the ration tablets of slaves, workers, and lower level religious officials. According to Greek mythology wine was introduced by the gods as a gift to the humans; the Gods did not consume wine in Greek myths, they drank nectar, which is mead (fermented honey water.)
At the time of Ashurnasirpal II reign in Mesopotamia, wine was still a luxury item throughout most of civilization, primarily because of trade and transportation restrictions. It was hard to get wine from grape growing areas to places that didn’t have grapes. Within 200 years though, wine had become such a commonly traded commodity that it was even given to servants in the royal households. Herodotus, the Greek historian, also known as the father of history, visited Mesopotamia in 430 BCE and described the shipping of wine from regions of Anatolia and Syria, by boat on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These boats, made of wood and reeds, would be filled with wine jugs bound for Babylon. Once the wine was sold in Babylonia, the boats would be virtually worthless and sold for next to nothing and the wine merchants would return to their homes by land.
Even with the opening up of this trade network, wine still very expensive. In Babylonia in the 5th Century BCE, an imported jar of wine containing about 18 liters cost a shekel of silver, which at the time was considered the minimum wage for a month’s work by a common laborer. While wine was no longer exclusively the drink of the ultra rich and powerful- the merchant and craftsman classes were now able to afford wine- it still was out of reach for the lower classes, who continued to drink Mesopotamian beer, and another local beverage, date palm wine, made from water and the fermented syrup of locally grown dates.
During the Classical Greece period, wine became the drink of not only the wealthy, but also of the thinking class- the poets, the philosophers, the scientist and scholars. At gatherings known as symposia, which were nothing more than formal drinking parties, wine would be drunk and the attendees would try to outdo each other in matters of the arts, elocution, and rhetoric. The Greeks saw themselves as superior to the “barbarians” of Persia and Mesopotamia, who drank beer, or if they drank wine, they did it in a most barbarous manner, not within the polite parameters of wine consumption done by the Greeks. One Greek historian even wrote in the 5th Century BCE that only because of wine and olives- the cultivation of grapes and olive trees- was the Eastern Mediterranean world able to emerge from barbarism and supersede their eastern neighbors.
Depiction of a Greek Symposium Ca. 10th-5th Centuries BCE. Note that the only females attending were servants and entertainers.
One Greek myth clearly illustrates the Hellenistic mindset. According to the legend, Dionysus, the Greek God of Wine, fled to Greece to get away from the beer loving barbarians in Mesopotamia. The myth goes on that it was in Greece that Dionysus made wine available to everyone, not just the elites. Euripides penned in his play The Bacchae: “to rich and poor alike hath he granted the delight of wine, that makes all pain to cease.”
Dionysus and the Satyr, Athenian Wine Drinking Vessel, ca. 7th Century BCE
In Greece, beginning in the 7th Century BCE, viticulture thrived; it was the ideal environment for grape production, and within just a couple of centuries grapes became such a widely grown commodity that wine was easily affordable by people in all walks of life. The Greeks perfected grape cultivation, being the first to develop vineyards that resembled those today, with grapes being grown in rows on trellises rather than growing them on the trunks of trees, as the Persians did. They perfected the pressing of the grapes to get the most juice. Grape cultivation took over. A farmer could make 20 times more money producing grapes than grain, and the acres of vineyards you owned equated to societal status.
Wine was classical Greece’s main export, being shipped all over the Mediterranean world, and overland to Mesopotamia. By the 5th Century BCE, Greek wine was being drunk in southern France to the west, Egypt to the south, the Crimean Peninsula to the East, and along the banks of the Danube River to the north. The Greeks introduced viticulture to Sicily at their colony of Syracuse, as well as the Italian peninsula, and Southern France. The Phoenicians, a rival to the Greeks in wine exportation, introduced viticulture to Spain and Portugal on the Iberian Peninsula. And a Celtic grave mound found in central France, dating form the 6th Century BCE, held the body of a young noblewoman, and among the valuables in her tomb were found imported Greek wine drinking vessels.
Greek and Phoenician Expansion in Mediterranean World, 6th Century BCE
The Romans emerged as the expanding power in the Mediterranean world by the middle of the 2nd Century BCE, and within a century and a half displaced the Greeks, the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Carthaginians as the rulers of their own lands. Romans, wanting to show their sophistication, adopted many of the traits and beliefs and customs of the Greeks; from architecture, to government, to religion, and of course, wine. The Romans planted vast vineyards across their holdings, and one mark of prestige of a Roman politician or statesman was the quality of the wine produced by his vineyard. I could do an entire podcast about the Romans and wine, and I will at sometime in the future, just as I will probably go back and look further into depth about wine and the Greeks. But, for today, let’s just say that the Romans took what they had learned about wine from the Greeks and ran with it.
Vineyard in Tuscany, Italy, dating from the Roman Empire period, ca. 1st Century BCE
As the Roman Republic and then the Empire expanded, they took grape cultivation with them; to France, Spain, Portugal, even the Rhine Valley of Germany. In Rome, everyone drank wine, from the Emperor to the lowliest of plebs. It was the Roman drink. And regardless of whether they could grow it in the territories they claimed, they took wine with them across the empire.
Roman Empire at its greatest extent.
When the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th Century CE to the various invasions of beer drinking barbarians, according to long held Roman and Greek prejudices, that should have been the end of wine drinking in the world. But, despite many aspects of the Roman world being swept away by the invaders, including lifestyle and norms, trade and transportation, two things did not diminish: wine and religion. The barbarian tribes did not hate wine, on the contrary, they grew to love it. Viticulture was simply foreign to them, but they readily adopted the practice where it already flourished and grew into wine growers and drinkers. The Visigoths even had a law code making it a crime, punishable by execution, if a vineyard was destroyed. You could burn the house and the outbuildings, sure, just make certain you get the wine out first, but don’t you dare damage those vines.
And of course, the connection between wine consumption and Christianity cannot be overlooked; wine is pretty central to one of the religion’s key rituals, Communion. As Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, before its fall, and then subsequently among the pagan invaders, wine went with it. Jesus drank wine. Everybody in the pre modern world drank alcohol of some kind, as water was generally pretty dodgy to be consume.
So yes, if you believe that Jesus was a historical figure, then Jesus drank wine, real wine, not grape juice. He turned the wine into water at the marriage at Cana, and during the last supper he passed a cup of real wine among his followers, saying, “Take this cup, for it is my blood. Drink this in remembrance of me.”
Now, beer was available in Palestine at the turn of the Last Millennia BCE and the 1st Millennia CE, and was actually probably a more common drink than wine among most of the population. Beer had been in the region for much longer than wine, probably 6,000 years before viticulture reached the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. You know why there is no mention of beer in the Bible? Because the Romans and the Greek citizens of the Rome wrote the New Testament and translated the Old Testament, and the Romans and the Greeks looked down upon beer as being a vulgar drink. Historically we know, beer was probably more commonly drunk in the biblical world by the lower classes than the more expensive wine.
So, what if viticulture hadn’t reached Palestine? What if Jesus hadn’t had wine at the last supper and had only beer to give to his disciples? Well, for one thing, Catholic Mass would sure be a hell of a lot different. I’ll let you ponder on that one yourself.
Hishtory: The Story of Alcohol
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Works Cited:
“All About Greek Wine: History.” Thalassi Companies, Inc. 2003-2010. http://www.allaboutgreekwine.com/history.htm
Mark, Joshua. “Ashurnasirpal II.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. July 9, 2014. http://www.ancient.eu/Ashurnasirpal_II/
Norris, Shawn T. “Wine- The Water of Rome.” Rome Across Europe. June 28, 2015. http://www.romeacrosseurope.com/?p=1986#sthash.5bssn2hP.dpbs
Parry, Wynne. “In Vino Veritas: Wine Cups Tell History of Athenian Life.” Live Science, Jan. 12, 2011 http://www.livescience.com/9264-vino-veritas-wine-cups-history-athenian-life.html
Standage, Tom. A History of Civilization in Six Glasses. New York, Walker & Company, 2005