2/4/15 30 min reading, Keila Delgado

Welcome to my blog! I have spent 30 minutes reading the next several pages in "History of World in 6 Glasses". In the last chapter, we went in depth about the first beverage that made its mark through the beginning of history-beer. Tom Standage does an outstanding job of explaining this, and other concepts throughout the book.

Standage dedicates the next few paragraphs talking about the effect of "Wine in Greece and Rome"(40). He begins describing a "great feast" done by King Ashurnaspiral II of Assyria, around 870 BCE. This feast is one of the greatest, most biggest feasts in history. His palace was much like a utopia, surrounded by beautiful "canals and waterfalls", and "orchards and gardens"(43). The celebration was attended by about 69,574 people, and the feasting went of for 10 days. The "aim" of this celebration was to "demonstrate the king's power and wealth", both to his people and other foreigns (46).

This photo is of what the Great Feast might have been like.

The feast was great, but what is greater was his choice of drink. He came from Mesopotamian heritage, but did not "give pride" to their usual beverage, which was beer (48). In the carved stone shown at the palace did not show him sipping beer through a straw like the pictures in my last blog; instead, he is depicted "elegantly balancing a shallow golden bowl on the tips of the fingers of his right hand" (50). This bowl was filled with wine.

There was still beer at his feast, in fact, there was 10,000 jars served during those 10 days. But he also served an "equal quantity" of wine. That is a very impressive display of wealth, because wine was very scarce and hard to make. If you wanted wine, a "drink from the gods", then it had to be imported from the mountains (55). The cost of transporting wine down from the mountains to the land made it so much more expensive than beer, so it is called an "exotic foreign drink" in the Mesopotamian culture (55).  Mainly, wine was used for religion when available.

The King Ashurnaspiral was not only extremely wealthy, but his wealth literally grew on trees. He had his own garden, like I mentioned earlier, which contained vines "intertwined with trees" (57).

Wine was definitely a trend, but its origins are "lost in pre-history" (57). It is so ancient that many just called it a "myth or a legend" (57)
.  Here is a picture of the kings garden and his vines intertwined with trees.