A School Exercise That Became a Modern Beer

The many surviving copies of this hymn come almost entirely from Old Babylonian scribal schools, where students learned cuneiform and literary Sumerian by copying out standard literary works, including this hymn, centuries after Sumerian had ceased to be anyone's native spoken language and had become a learned, scholarly language much as Latin later did in medieval Europe. This means the roughly one hundred surviving copies attest to the hymn's popularity as a curriculum text for training scribes rather than necessarily reflecting continuous ritual use in an actual brewery or temple at the time each copy was made, a distinction that matters for how confidently the text can be read as a live working document versus a preserved classic already somewhat removed from active practice.

In 1991, the biochemist Solomon Katz and the brewer Fritz Maytag of Anchor Brewing collaborated on an attempt to actually brew beer following the hymn's description of the process as closely as the ancient text and available archaeological and botanical evidence allowed, a project that received considerable attention as an experiment in experimental archaeology applied to a religious text rather than to material remains alone. The resulting beer was necessarily an interpretation rather than a certain reconstruction, since several of the hymn's technical brewing terms remain uncertain in precise meaning among Assyriologists, but the project is now a standard reference point in popular accounts of ancient beer and demonstrates how a text composed as devotional praise of a goddess has been read by modern researchers as a working technical document.