It’s hardly news that the ancients drank wine
— the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians all imbibed, as did pretty much any
other civilization in which alcohol wasn’t prohibited for religious
reasons. “We have written records,” says Brandeis University
archaeologist Andrew Koh. “We’ve found jars marked ‘wine.’ We’ve found wine residues. It’s pictured everywhere.”
That
being the case, you might think a cache of 40 wine jars unearthed from a
room in the Bronze Age Canaanite palace at Tel Kabri, which stood more
than 3,600 years ago in what’s now modern Israel, would be no big deal.
But you’d be wrong. “In the past,” says Koh, lead author of a paper describing the discovery in the latest issue of the journal PLOS One, “we wouldn’t have been able to say much more than ‘this is a bunch of containers that held wine.’”
Thanks to an unprecedentedly sophisticated analysis of the deposits
inside those containers, however, Koh, who has a joint appointment in
Brandeis’ Classical Studies and Chemistry Departments, along with two
colleagues, can conclude much more, specifically that the wine was
flavored with — deep breath, now — honey, storax resin, terebinth resin,
cedar oil, cyperus, juniper and possibly mint, myrtle and cinnamon as
well.
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