Mesopotamia and wine: beer for the people, wine from the mountains

The short answer: Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, drank mostly beer. Grapevines grow poorly on its hot, flat southern plain, so wine came from the hills to the north and east, and it was a luxury for temples, palaces and the rich. Some of the oldest evidence of wine anywhere comes from those hills.

Where is Mesopotamia?

Mesopotamia means “between the rivers”. It covers most of modern Iraq, with parts of Syria, Türkiye and Iran. Sumer, Akkad, Babylon and Assyria all rose here, and so did some of the world's earliest writing.

The oldest wine was made nearby

• Georgia, about 6000–5800 BC: the oldest known wine residues so far, in clay jars south of Tbilisi. See why wine started in clay pots.
• Hajji Firuz, Iran, about 5400–5000 BC: a jar in the Zagros Mountains holding traces of wine and tree resin, found with five similar jars.
• Godin Tepe, Iran, late 4th millennium BC: jars in the Zagros that held resinated wine. The same site gave some of the earliest chemical evidence of barley beer.

These are mountain sites, at the edge of Mesopotamia. That's the pattern: the vine grew in the hills; the great cities grew on the plain.

Why beer ruled the south

Southern Mesopotamia is hot and dry, and its farming depended on irrigation. Barley thrived; vines struggled. Patrick McGovern of the Penn Museum, who led much of the chemistry behind these finds, notes that grapevines grow only with difficulty in southern Iraq, and that barley beer is usually seen as the drink of choice in ancient Sumer.

Wine still reached the lowland cities. By the late 4th millennium BC it was probably being carried down from the northern Zagros, and enjoyed, at least, by the upper classes.

Wine in the oldest stories and records

• The Epic of Gilgamesh: in the flood story, Utnapishtim rewards the men building his boat with beer, ale, oil and wine, poured out like river water, so they can feast as if at the New Year festival.
• Boats of wine on the Euphrates: the Greek historian Herodotus, in the 5th century BC, describes round boats made of hides that floated down the river from Armenia to Babylon, carrying mostly palm-wood casks of wine. At Babylon the boats were taken apart, and the hides went home on donkeys.
• A king's feast: at Nimrud, in the 9th century BC, the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II celebrated his new palace with a ten-day banquet. His Banquet Stele, found in 1951, lists 69,574 guests, 10,000 jars of beer and 10,000 skins of wine.
• A drink under the vines: a famous relief from Ashurbanipal's palace at Nineveh, about 645 BC, now in the British Museum, shows the king reclining under a grapevine, cup raised, beside his queen. Look closely and you'll see the head of a defeated enemy king hanging in a tree. Assyrian garden parties were not gentle.

What the old stories get wrong

• “Wine was Mesopotamia's traditional drink.” Beer was. Wine was for the few.
• “Wine was used as money.” Barley and silver were the usual measures of value. Wine was a luxury good.
• “They bottled their wine.” There were no glass bottles. Wine was kept in clay jars and carried in skins.
• “Wine was invented in Mesopotamia.” The oldest traces so far come from Georgia and the Zagros Mountains, in the hills around it.

Wine in the old lands today

Upper Mesopotamia reaches into south-eastern Türkiye. In Mardin and Midyat, the Syriac Christian community still makes wine, a living tradition in very old wine country. Further west, on the Aegean, Urla is another Turkish wine story worth knowing.

Next time you open a bottle, remember the kings of Assyria. For them, wine was the rare thing on the table. For us it's an everyday pleasure, and it took about eight thousand years to get here. More ancient wine: the Etruscans and wine and Pliny the Elder on wine.

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