World’s oldest BEER tab is discovered on a 4,000-year-old clay tablet

There’s nothing quite like having a drink to celebrate payday – and it turns out this tradition dates back thousands of years.

Scientists have discovered one of the earliest known beer tabs in the National Museum of Denmark.

For over a century, the museum has housed a large collection of inscribed tablets from the earliest civilisations of the Middle East, written in languages that are now extinct.

Now, for the first time, experts have deciphered them and discovered texts about magic, kings and alcohol transactions.

One, which dates back 4,000 years, represents a record of beer being used as a form of payment in the ancient city of Umma, in what is now southern Iraq. It shows beer in various quality and quantities supplied by someone named ‘Ayalli’.

It includes a payment of 16 litres of ‘high quality beer’ and 55 litres of ‘ordinary beer’, which would have been distributed among a group of workers

‘There are several texts at the National Museum of Denmark included in our volume that mentions beer being used as payment to workers,’ Dr Troels Arbøll, from the University of Copenhagen, told the Daily Mail. ‘They are therefore administrative documents or receipts.

‘Beer was presumably high in nutrition and considered an integral part of how these earliest urbanised populations lived.’

It was about 5,200 years ago that people from ancient cultures in Iraq and Syria began carving characters onto clay tablets.

This new system of communication gradually made it possible to develop advanced societies with complex administrative systems.

‘A great many of the cuneiform tablets we have today bear witness to a highly developed bureaucracy,’ Dr Arbøll said.

‘There was a need to keep track of the advanced societies that were being built, and we have found a large number of cuneiform tablets containing practical information, such as accounts and lists of goods and personnel.

‘It is therefore not surprising that one of the tablets in the National Museum’s collection contains something as commonplace as a very old receipt for beer.’

At the time, beer would likely have tasted sour, tangy, flat and fruity, with a thick, milky texture and notes of sediment or clay.

Instead of modern hops, it was often brewed using fermented bread and sometimes sweetened with honey or dates.

The beer would have had a low alcohol content, usually estimated to be between 3.5 to 6.5 per cent, and would likely have been sipped through a long straw.

Tate Paulette, an assistant professor of history at North Carolina State University, has written about drinking in Mesopotamia – the historical region that encompasses modern-day Iraq and Syria.

‘If you could travel back in time to one of the bustling cities of ancient Mesopotamia (c. 4000–330 B.C.), for example, you would have no trouble finding yourself a bar or a beer,’ he wrote on The Conversation.

‘Beer was the beverage of choice in Mesopotamia. In fact, to be a Mesopotamian was to drink beer.’

He explained that Mesopotamian literature reveals drinking this beer could lead to confusion, loss of control and poor judgement.

Beer was also known to produce unwanted physical effects, like feeling horrible the next morning and an inability to perform sexually.

As part of their new research, the University of Copenhagen scientists analysed, identified and digitised as many ancient tablets as they could find.

They discovered the museum housed a wide variety of texts ranging from accounts and letters to medical treatments and magical incantations.

One text which particularly caught their attention originated from the Syrian city of Hama and had likely resided in a large temple library.

‘One of the clay tablets turned out to contain a so-called anti-witchcraft ritual,’ Dr Arbøll said.

‘This was of enormous importance to the royal authority in Assyria because it had the remarkable ability to ward off misfortunes—such as political instability—that might befall a king.’

The ritual, which took a whole night, involved the burning of various small figures made of wax and clay, while an exorcist recited a series of fixed incantations.

Among the collection, researchers also discovered a copy of a very famous regnal list which describes both mythical and historical kings.

Mesopotamia is known as the ‘cradle of civilization’, but what made it so great?

A historical area of the Middle-East that spans most of what is now known as Iraq but also stretched to include parts of Syria and Turkey.

The term ‘Mesopotamia’ comes from Greek, meaning ‘between two rivers’.

The two rivers that the name refers to are the Tigris river and the Euphrates.

Unlike many other empires (such as the Greeks and the Romans) Mesopotamia consisted of several different cultures and groups. 

Mesopotamia should be more properly understood as a region that produced multiple empires and civilizations rather than any single civilization. 

Mesopotamia is known as the ‘cradle of civilization’ primarily because of two developments: the invention of the ‘city’ as we know it today and the invention of writing.

Thought to be responsible for many early developments, it is also credited with the invention of the wheel. 

They also gave the world the first mass domestication of animals, cultivated great swathes of land and invented tools and weaponry. 

As well as these practical developments, the region saw the birth of wine, beer and demarcation of time into hours, minutes, and seconds.

It is thought that the fertile land between the two rivers allowed hunter-gathers a a comfortable existence which led to the agricultural revolution. 

A common thread throughout the area was the equal treatment of women. 

Women enjoyed nearly equal rights and could own land, file for divorce, own their own businesses, and make contracts in trade.