#NIKASEI NO PAZURU FULL#

Most ancient depictions of brewers clearly show them as women in both Mesopotamia and Egypt although, once brewing became a commercial enterprise, males are shown supervising the female brewers. The priestesses of Ninkasi were the first brewers and this is hardly surprising since women, generally, had brewed beer in the home until commercial production of the beverage began and men started taking over. Each of the supernatural beings born this way goes on to produce some great benefit for humanity, such as Nanshe - goddess of social justice and divination - and, in keeping with Mesopotamian tradition in which the clergy who served the deity were of the same sex, the clergy of goddesses like Nisaba, Nanshe, and Ninkasi were women. As Ninhursag draws out Enki's afflictions, a new deity is born and, among these, is Ninkasi.

Ninkasi, and therefore beer, was associated with healing because she was born through the ministrations of the Mother Goddess Ninhursag when she was healing Enki, who was sick and close to death. Her spirit and essence infused the beer produced under her guidance. Nisaba was not just the goddess of grain but the actual grain and, once she became goddess of writing, she was not just an impartial overseer of the craft but the craft itself the same is true of Ninkasi. Beer was created to make the heart feel light and the goddess responsible for such elevation was Ninkasi.Īs in the case of goddesses like Nisaba (patroness of grains, accounts, writing, and scholarship) Ninkasi was both the brewer of beer and the beer itself. The inability to 'hold one's drink' is regularly depicted as a weakness but beer itself is never criticized it is the fault of the drinker if he or she is unable to maintain self-control while drinking. In this poem, Enki loses face through drunkenness and, in the poem Enki and Ninmah, the goddess Ninhursag loses prestige when she is beaten in a drinking game by Enki. The commercialization of beer is evidenced by The Alulu Tablet from the city of Ur, an ancient receipt for the delivery of beer by the brewer Alulu, dated to 2050 BCE. From the evidence of art works found throughout Mesopotamia, it is clear that beer was consumed daily in great quantities by the people, sediment or no, and developed from a cottage industry into a lucrative commercial enterprise. The straw, developed by the Babylonians, was first invented by the Sumerians specifically for the purpose of drinking beer and, no matter how carefully filtered that beer was, it does seem that the straw was used to keep a drinker from the unpleasant experience of consuming sediment in the beer. The Sumerian beer was carefully filtered.

#NIKASEI NO PAZURU FULL#

The fact that it was often drunk through straws from large containers suggests to many academics - who may, as a class, have special expertise in beer - that it was full of particles and grit that were excluded by the straw.This is surely unfair. It has generally received a rather bad press in the academic literature. There seem to have been many varieties of Mesopotamian beer, brewed to different strengths and, in the absence of hops, flavoured with different ingredients. Laborers were provided with beer as part of their daily rations (a practice also observed in Egypt) and, based on art works as well as writings, it was a drink enjoyed by the lowest laborer to the highest noble and was consumed through a straw. (297)īeer also contained nutrients other beverages did not and, as Black notes, was a staple in the daily diet of the people throughout Mesopotamia. Beer was consumed by people at all levels of society and offered to gods and to the dead in libation rituals. Its manufacture was recorded and controlled by scribes even in the earliest written records, from the late fourth millenium BCE. Beer was a staple in Mesopotamia and its surroundings from prehistoric times, as the fermentation process was an effective method of killing bacteria and waterborne disease.

Nikasei no pazuru