ARAM Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies: Twentieth International Conference on Alcohol, 7-9 July 2003.
David G. K.
Taylor
Department of Theology,
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2003
Vol. 6, No. 2
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv6n2crtaylor
David G.K. TAYLOR
ARAM Society for Syro-Mesopotamian Studies: Twentieth International Conference on Alcohol, 7-9 July 2003.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol6/HV6N2CRTaylor.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2003
vol 6
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
ARAM
Alcohol
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[1] The very
first Aram Society International Conference (on the Nabataeans)
was held as recently as 1989, but such has been the driving
energy and enthusiasm of the Society's founder, Shafiq
AbouZayd, that it has now hosted the twentieth in the series.
To mark this major milestone in the history of the society,
scholars came from around the world - South America, the Middle
East, the United States, and Europe - to present papers on the
appropriately celebratory theme of 'Alcohol'. As usual in Aram
conferences, papers by art historians and archaeologists were
mixed with those of specialists in literature, history, and
theology, and on this occasion the periods discussed ranged
across many millennia.
[2] Maria
Teresa Viviani presented a paper on the iconographic
representation of alcoholic beverages and their consumption in
third millennium BCE Sumer and Akkad. Beer was consumed by all
classes of society, and the images of separate groups of both
men and women sitting sociably around large communal jars of
beer, sucking on huge straws, will not soon be forgotten by
those who saw them. (It may well start a whole new craze in
faculty parties!) Moving to the mid-second millennium, Natascha
Bagherpour Kashani reappraised the ancient Hittite 'cultic
vase' from Inandik. She convincingly argued that its cultic
function should be interpreted in the light of the images
painted upon it, which portray the brewing, conveying, and
consumption of beer in vessels similar in form to the vase, as
part of a religious ritual. The professionalism of the paper
was all the more outstanding given that the speaker is only
just completing her first degree. The third and final paper
concerned with beer was that of Max Nelson who, drawing upon
his forthcoming book on the subject, 'The Barbarian Beverage',
described its production in the Graeco-Roman world, including
northern Europe, and the attitudes towards it of contemporary
writers.
[3] Skipping
on to the second half of the first millennium, and moving from
beer to wine, Steven Derfler gave an illustrated account of the
excavation of wine presses at Tel Michal and the Sharon in
Israel, great centres of regional wine production over an
extraordinary period of time. The technology needed for wine
pressing was also explored by Amos Kloner who described the
structures and installations at Hulda, and some of the
corresponding data from Lebanon was presented by Moheb
Chanesaz.
[4] Several
papers explored the economic and social impact of the
production and trading of wine in different periods and
regions; Michael Decker's paper focussed on the wine trade of
Cilicia in Late Antiquity; Lukas Schachner investigated the
evidence for wine production in the early monasteries of Egypt
and the Levant; and Souad Slim took the conference forward to
eighteenth and nineteenth-century viticulture on waqf
land in Lebanon.
[5] A
cluster of four papers related to wine and its use in the
Aramaic city states of Late Antiquity. Lucinda Dirven started
with images of banquet scenes from Hatra, and went on to argue
that many were associated with local veneration of the
ancestors which gave rise to an influential and widespread
funerary cult, as part of which memorial banquets were held on
key anniversaries not at the burial sites, as has previously
been argued, but in the city's numerous temples. She also
traced Heracles' supplanting of Nergal as god of the
underworld. Danila Piacentini examined comparable evidence for
the role of alcohol in the funeral ceremony and subsequent
anniversary commemorations at Palmyra. The final two papers in
this group neatly illustrated the difficulties involved in
interpreting archaeological evidence for ancient religious
practice and taboos. Joseph Patrich re-examined the evidence
for Nabataean veneration of Dionysus, who was identified with
the native Nabataean deity Dushara. Dushara is explicitly
stated in one inscription to forbid the consumption of wine,
and the absence of vine or grape motifs in the carved
decoration of the monuments in Petra is quite remarkable. The
obvious implication is that the Nabataean religion forbad the
drinking of wine, and that Dionysus was worshipped not in that
aspect associated with vegetation and wine, the aspect most
familiar to many of us, but in his role as god of death and the
afterlife. Zeyad al-Salameen, however, then presented an
account of excavations at a site (Beyda) a short distance away
from Petra where several contemporary wine presses had been
found in association with caves where wine might well have been
stored, and in one of which there was an inscription with an
imprecation addressed to Dushara. This strongly suggests that
Nabataeans were in fact both drinking and producing wine. How
are we to reconcile the two sets of evidence? Was the community
at Beyda prepared to overlook orthodox religious duty in favour
of economic gain? Or had Hellenism weakened this particular
demand of their religion? Or does some of the evidence need to
be re-examined or redated? Perhaps we shall learn the
resolution of this issue at a future Aram conference.
[6] Three
papers related to alcohol in Syriac sources. Shafiq AbouZayd
explored the evidence for the strict prohibition of the
drinking of alcohol in Syriac ascetic sources, and discussed
some of the possible explanations for its origins. Sebastian
Brock focussed on the spiritual theme of 'sober drunkenness'
which can be traced back to Philo and is also to be found in
the Macarian Homilies, and which frequently occurs in Syriac
writings in the form 'spiritual drunkenness'. This concept was
then followed with abundant examples as it evolved and
developed in Syriac spiritual and liturgical texts, and its
relationship to later Arabic Sufi texts was also suggested. An
example of Arabic literary influence upon Syriac, in the form
of the khamriyyat or wine songs of Khamis bar Qardahe
was discussed by David Taylor, who attempted to show how the
conventional motifs of the desire of the poet for the virgin
wine and the homoerotic longing for the cup-bearer were
redirected towards Christ, both wine and cup-bearer. It was
suggested that a probable context for these poems was the court
of the Mongol Il-Khanate at the end of the thirteenth
century.
[7] The
khamriyya genre in its Islamic context formed the
subject matter of Kathryn Kueny's paper, which focussed on a
poem of the early-thirteenth-century Cairene poet Umar ibn
al-Farid. This was a scintillating exploration of the literary
and religious tensions involved in a Muslim poet who has never
drunk wine, or who cannot admit to having done so, describing
the intoxication induced by the divine fragrance which brings
clarity of mind and an appreciation of what is real, a
drunkenness which restores the soul to the state of its
pre-existence. Another medieval Arabic text—an amusing
account of a man who falls unconscious through drink, is joined
by his friends who do likewise, and on his awaking he decides
to rejoin them, and so on, so that over several days of sharing
the same room they never actually meet each other
awake—was chosen by Bo Holmberg as the focus for a
fascinating examination of the longing for unconsciousness in
the light of modern psychological theory. The final paper on
alcohol in Arabic sources was Stephan Dähne's discussion
of an early-eighteenth-century Christian-Arabic sermon against
the sin of drunkenness produced by a European missionary in the
Lebanon. Amongst several memorable features was its claim that
humans began to drink wine after the flood because the water
had been contaminated by the corpses of those drowned!
[8] In this
report I have inevitably passed over much of great interest,
and have no doubt garbled the arguments of some of the papers I
have discussed, but the full texts should be available in due
course within the pages of the Aram Periodical. To finish I
would like again to raise my glass to Shafiq AbouZayd who has
organised, with the invaluable aid of Hannah Hunt, another
highly memorable conference in which scholars from all of the
countries of the Middle East and beyond were able to meet and
discuss issues of mutual interest and concern in a friendly and
highly sociable context, regardless of world events. Your very
good health Shafiq, and best wishes for the next twenty
conferences!