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This records a purchase of “best” beer from a brewer, c. 2050 BC from the Sumerian city of Umma in ancient Iraq. Beer is one of the oldest drinks humans have produced. The first chemically confirmed barley beer dates back to the 5th millennium BC in modern-day Iran, and was recorded in the written history of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and spread throughout the world. As almost any cereal containing certain sugars can undergo spontaneous fermentation due to wild yeasts in the air, it is possible that beer-like drinks were independently developed throughout the world soon after a tribe or culture had domesticated cereal. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced as far back as about 7,000 years ago in what is today Iran.

Author Thomas Sinclair says in his book, “Beer, Bread, and the Seeds of Change: Agriculture’s Imprint on World History” that the discovery of beer may have been an accidental find. The precursor to beer was soaking grains in water and making a porridge or gruel, as grain were chewy and hard to digest alone. Ancient peoples would heat the gruel and leave it throughout the days until it was gone. In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people consuming a drink through reed straws from a communal bowl. In China, residue on pottery dating from around 5,000 years ago shows beer was brewed using barley and other grains.

The invention of bread and beer has been argued to be responsible for humanity’s ability to develop technology and build civilization. Beer may have been known in Neolithic Europe as far back as 5,000 years ago, and was mainly brewed on a domestic scale. Beer produced before the Industrial Revolution continued to be made and sold on a domestic scale, although by the 7th century AD beer was also being produced and sold by European monasteries. Today, the brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries.

Rock mortars in Raqefet Cave, used to make beer during the Stone Age. Sumerian language from approximately 4,000 BC. Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat It is the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates. Approximately 5,000 years ago, workers in the city of Uruk were paid by their employers in beer. Beer is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the ‘wild man’ Enkidu is given beer to drink. In February 2019, archaeologists from Mola Headland Infrastructure and experts from Highways England found evidence of first Iron Age beer dated back over 2,000 years during road works in Cambridgeshire.

It’s a well-known fact that ancient populations used the beer-making process to purify water and create a safe source of hydration, but this is potentially the earliest physical evidence of that process taking place in the UK”, said archaeologist Steve Sherlock. Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of Eurasian and North African antiquity, including Egypt—so much so that in 1868 James Death put forward a theory in The Beer of the Bible that the manna from heaven that God gave the Israelites was a bread-based, porridge-like beer called wusa. These beers were often thick, more of a gruel than a drink, and drinking straws were used by the Sumerians to avoid the bitter solids left over from fermentation. Though beer was drunk in Ancient Rome, it was replaced in popularity by wine. Ancient Nubians had used beer as an antibiotic medicine. The Ebla tablets, discovered in 1974 in Ebla, Syria, show that beer was produced in the city in 2500 BC. Early traces of beer and the brewing process have been found in ancient Babylonia as well.