Cheers: Celebration drinking is an ancient tradition

WASHINGTON, DC. KAZINFORM No one knows exactly when alcohol first entered the human diet-chances are it was a serendipitous prehistoric stumble on fermented fruit-but clearly we took to it like ducks to water.

Excavations of the Neolithic settlement Skara Brae in the Orkney Islandsturned up 30-gallon pottery jars, the dregs of which-analyzed-turned out to contain an alcoholic brew made from barley and oats, flavored with meadowsweet and topped off with a hallucinogenic handful of deadly nightshade, henbane, and hemlock. The ancient Egyptians made beer and wine. Financial records show that the thirsty builders of the Giza pyramids had a beer ration of over a gallon a day; and Tutankhamun's tomb held 26 wine jars with vintages (both red and white) from fifteen different vintners, the National Geographic reports. The ancient Chinese made wine from rice and grapes; the Mayans madepulque from fermented corn; the Celts got tipsy on mead; and the Mongols drank kumis from fermented mare's milk. Wine, for the ancient Greeks, was a pillar of civilization, to the point where Greek teetotalers were viewed with suspicion. Water-drinking, the Greeks believed, made people surly, curmudgeonly, and over-earnest. Wine-drinkers, in contrast, were convivial, creative, passionate, and fond of intellectual discourse. The original Greeksymposium-nowadays a staid, scholarly affair-was once a drinking party. Ancient Drinking Parties The drinking party, in one form or another, has been around for thousands of years-and from its inception, has had the potential to spiral wildly out of control. Wine, at Greek symposia, was served in a krater-a large central urn, the equivalent of a modern punch bowl, from which guests filled their cups. The Greek poet and statesman Eubulus, writing in the 4th century BCE, states that after three kraters of wine, the wise guests go home. Subsequent kraters lead to nothing but trouble: the fifth, he writes, leads to yelling, the sixth "to prancing about, and the seventh to black eyes. The eighth brings the police, the ninth vomiting, the tenth insanity and hurling the furniture." Excess alcohol consumption was often, rather than an inadvertent drinking-party by-product, a deliberate aim. Early medieval Anglo-Saxon bashes featured round-bottomed drinking glasses, designed to be emptied, since they could not be set down. Guests drained their cups and then turned them upside-down on the table. (Such cups were called tumblers; now, in a quirky historical turn-around, tumbler is a synonym for a drinking glass with a flat un-tippable bottom.) In the 18th century, the rowdy Prince Regent (later King George IV) instituted the practice of snapping the stems off wine glasses at parties, to ensure that his guests always drank the whole thing. Being able to hold one's liquor has traditionally been a sign of macho prowess-though attempting to do so has led a lot of people disastrously astray. Among them just may have been James Bond, whose steady consumption of martinis (shaken, not stirred)-according to a 2013 study by Graham Johnson and colleagues in the British Medical Journal-should by all rights have put him in serious trouble. For full version go to The now-respectable custom of the toast was once an exercise in aggressively competitive drinking. Historians guess that the toast most likely originated with the Greek libation, the custom of pouring out a portion of one's drink in honor of the gods. From there, it was an easy step to offering a drink in honor of one's companions.