Details

"A richly illustrated account of the story of ancient viniculture. In a new afterword, the author discusses exciting recent developments in the understanding of ancient wine, including a new theory of how viniculture came to central and northern Europe"--.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• FOREWARD
• PREFACE
• 1. Stone Age Wine
  • Sifting Fact from Legend
  • Man Meets Grape: The Paleolithic Hypothesis
  • Whence the Domesticated Eurasian Grapevine?
  • When and Where Was Wine First Made?
• 2. The Noah Hypothesis
  • Genetics and Gilgamesh
  • Transcaucasia: The Homeland of Viniculture?
  • Exploring Georgia and Armenia
  • Ancient DNA
  • Casting a Wider Net in Anatolia
  • The Indo-European Homeland
  • “Noah’s Flood”
  • Farther Afield
• 3. The Archaeological and Chemical Hunt for the Earliest Wine
  • Godin Tepe
  • Molecular Archaeology Comes of Age
  • Identifying the Godin Tepe Jar Residues by Infrared Spectrometry
  • Archaeological Inference
  • From Grape Juice to Wine to Vinegar
  • Winemaking at the Dawn of Civilization
  • The First Wine Rack?
  • A Symposium in the True Sense of the Word
• 4. Neolithic Wine!
  • A Momentous Innovation
  • Liquid Chromatography: Another Tool of Molecular Archaeology
  • Ancient Retsina: A Beverage and a Medicine
  • A Media Barrage
  • Wild or Domesticated Grapes?
  • More Neolithic Wine Jars from Transcaucasia
  • Creating a Ferment in Neolithic Turkey: A Hypothesis to Be Tested
• 5. Wine of the Earliest Pharaohs
  • A Royal Industry Par Excellence
  • An Amazing Discovery from a Dynasty O Royal Tomb
  • Ancient Yeast DNA Discovered
• 6. Wine of Egypt’s Golden Age
  • The Hyksos: A Continuing Taste for Levantine Wines
  • Festival Wine at the Height of the New Kingdom
  • Wine as the Ultimate Religious Expression
  • Wines of the Heretic King, Akhenaten, and of Tutankhamun
  • The Vineyard of Egypt under the Ramessides
• 7. Wine of the World’s First Cities
  • A Beer-Drinking Culture Only?
  • Banqueting the Mesopotamian Way
  • Wine, Too, Was Drunk in the Lowland Cities
  • Transplanting the Grapevine to Shiraz
• 8. Wine and the Great Empires of the Ancient Near East
  • Wine Down the Tigris and Euphrates
  • Wines of Anatolia and the Lost Hittite Empire
  • Assyrian Expansionism: Cupbearers, Cauldrons, and Drinking Horns
  • The Fine Wines of Aram and Phoenicia
  • Eastward to Persia and China
• 9. The Holy Land’s Bounty
  • Winepresses in the Hills, and Towers and Vineyards in the Wadi Floors
  • The Success of the Experiment
  • Serving the Needs of a Cosmopolitan Society
  • Wine for the Kings and the Masses
  • Dark Reds and Powerful Browns
  • Wine: A Heritage of the Judeo-Christian Tradition
• 10. Lands of Dionysos: Greece and Western Anatolia
  • Drinking the God
  • A Minoan Connection? The Earliest Greek Retsina
  • Wine Mellowed with Oak
  • “Greek Grog”: A Revolution in Beverage Making
  • Wine and “Greek Grog” during the Heroic Age
• 11. A Beverage for King Midas and at the Limits of the Civilized World
  • King Midas and “Phrygian Grog”
  • Re-creating an Ancient Anatolian Beverage and Feast
  • To the Hyperborean Regions of the North: “European Grog”
• 12. Molecular Archaeology, Wine, and a View to the Future
  • Where It All Began
  • Consumed by Wine
  • Why Alcohol and Why Wine?
  • The Lowly Yeast to the Forefront
  • Mixing Things Up
  • Wine, the Perfect Metaphor
• AFTERWORD
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ILLUSTRATION CREDITS AND OBJECT DIMENSIONS
• INDEX