Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1998 - 32

stoppers give the name of the pharaoh, and sometimes the
hieroglyph for grapevine or vineyard and the presumed
location of the vineyard in the delta.
In time, the Egyptian elite came to draw on a large and
refined stock of locally produced wines for both daily consumption and ritual purposes. New Kingdom tomb reliefs
and paintings depict elaborate storehouses and wine cellars in the palaces and temples at Amarna and Thebes,
with row upon row of amphorae awaiting royal celebrations. One such celebration was the heb-sed (renewal festival), in which' feasts and religious rites were carred out
for months to ensure a monarch's long life, the country's
welfare, and the fertility of the Nile Valley. Large quantities of wine were served at the three heb-seds of Amenhotep III, ca. 1350 b.c., as attested by hundreds of
inscribed amphora sherds found in the vicinity of the

Wine

pharaohs palace at Malkata in western Thebes. In the
Great Papyrus Harris, one of the longest and best-preserved manuscripts from ancient Egypt, Rameses III
(1 184-1 153 b.c.) boasts of presenting 59,588 jars of wine
to the chief Egyptian deity, Amun, at his temple in
Thebes, a favor that was expected to be returned in the
hereafter. The custom had been foreshadowed by the earliest Egyptian kings, who may have been the first to envision the preservation of wine for all eternity. Sadly for
them, the treasured elixir would evaporate in musty tombs
as their royal bodies turned to dust.
Patrick E. McGovern is a senior research scientist in the
Museum Applied Center for Archaeology of the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and
an adjunct associate professor of anthropology.

s
Prehistory

Credit our Neolithic forebears with a discerning taste for the wild grape.
by Patrick
fascination of Egyptian kings with wine
must have been preceded by a long series of
serendipitous discoveries reaching back into
prehistory. Our Palaeolithic forebears might
The
well have had a tasting or two when the wild
grape came to fruition in the fall. Accidental squeezings of
grape juice might have produced some wine, owing to fermentation by the natural yeast on the grape skins. Lacking adequate storage containers, such wine would have to
have been drunk quickly, much like Beaujolais Nouveau,
before it turned to vinegar.
The Neolithic period, from about 8500 to 4000 b.c.,
was the first time the preconditions for intentional winemaking came together. Communities in the ancient Near
East and Egypt were permanent, year-round settlements
made possible by the domestication of plants and animals.
A Neolithic cuisine emerged, in which barley bread and
beer, and undoubtedly an array of meat and grain entrées,
were produced for the first time. Of special importance for
food preparation and storage, pottery vessels were introduced around 6000 b.c. Viticulture and the craft of winemaking stood to benefit from these developments,
probably contributing to ever more complex societies. To
have any assurance of a dependable grape crop, the vines
had to be carefully tended throughout the year, and to
make the investment in land, labor, and pottery containers
worthwhile, a market for the wine, provided by upper
classes and royalty in permanent settlements, was needed.
32

E. McGovern
Winemaking on any kind of scale required the cultivation or even the domestication of the wild Eurasian
grapevine (Vitis vinifera sylvestris), which grows today
throughout the temperate Mediterranean basin and into
south, west, and central Asia. During the Neolithic, when
wetter conditions prevailed, it might even have grown
somewhat farther south in the Zagros Mountains of Iran
and the hill country of the southern Levant. Somewhere
in this vast region the wild grapevine began to be cultivated. The domesticated vines advantages over the wild
variety derive from its hermaphroditism: bisexual flowers
occur, enabling self-pollination by the wind and fruit production by nearly every flower. By rooting branches or
grafting one vine onto another, people then cloned hermaphroditic plants that yielded larger, juicier, and tastier
fruit with fewer seeds. The Eurasian vine was ultimately
transplanted throughout the temperate regions of the
earth, now accounting for almost all the worlds wine,
whether red Merlot or white Chardonnay.
Based on current archaeological information and historical considerations, a single origin for the domesticated
grapevine in some northern mountainous region of the
Near East makes the most sense. Around 4000 b.c., the
domesticated grapevine was transplanted from somewhere in the north to the Jordan Valley, where the wild
grapevine never grew, and then around 3000 b.c., at the
beginning of the Early Dynastic period, to the Nile Delta,
where it formed the basis of the newly established royal
Archaeology

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1998

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1998