Ninkasi

Beer in Mesopotamia was not what beer is now. It was a staple food, thick and nutritious, drunk daily by everyone and issued as a standard ration to workers and officials in fixed quantities; administrative tablets record its distribution in the same breath as barley and oil. It was safer than river water, it was central to temple offering, and brewing it was largely a household craft in the hands of women, the tavern-keeper of the Old Babylonian laws is a woman, and so is the goddess. A deity of beer in this setting is a deity of ordinary sustenance and hospitality, and reading Ninkasi as a goddess of drunkenness imports a much later moral frame that the sources do not carry.

Her name is usually rendered "the lady who fills the mouth". Her parentage is given in more than one way and the atlas does not choose between them. The Hymn to Ninkasi opens by calling her born of flowing water and tenderly cared for by Ninhursag. The myth of Enki and Ninhursag tells a different story, in which eight deities are born to heal the eight afflicted parts of the wounded god Enki, and Ninkasi is the one born to heal his mouth, a pun on her name, and a piece of theology in a joke: what fills the mouth heals it.

She is a minor figure by the measure of Mesopotamian religion. No great temple is known for her in the way one is for Inanna at Uruk or Enlil at Nippur, and she has no securely identified iconography. What she has instead is one very well-known text.

The Hymn to Ninkasi is preserved on Old Babylonian tablets copied around 1800 BCE, in a Sumerian that was by then a learned language, and its composition is probably older than its manuscripts. It is a praise poem in the standard form, addressing the goddess in the second person stanza by stanza, and each stanza happens to describe one step of brewing. She is the one who handles the dough with a big shovel, who bakes the bappir twice, who soaks the malt in a jar and spreads it on the ground to sprout, who pours the filtered beer out like the Tigris and the Euphrates in flood.

It is often called the oldest surviving beer recipe, and that is half right. The sequence of operations is genuinely there and is genuinely informative, it is a principal source for how Sumerian beer was made, but it gives no quantities, no times and no temperatures, because it was never meant to instruct anyone. It works as a recipe for the same reason it works as a hymn: everyone hearing it already knew how beer was made, and the pleasure of the poem is in seeing familiar work described as the act of a god. Modern attempts to brew from it, including a well-publicised one by an American brewery with Assyriological advice in 1989, have had to supply from elsewhere everything the text leaves out.

The hymn survives alongside a companion drinking song, and the pair are among the more approachable pieces of Sumerian literature. Their appeal now is partly that they are unpretentious: no cosmogony, no kingship, no flood, just a goddess and a very good drink.