6 Glasses and a History of Writing
I was watching one of those Sunday news shows this morning and caught a short segment on Tom Standage’s book A History of the World in 6 Glasses. Though I’m generally skeptical of such wannabe hipster histories–seeing them less as cultural/quotidian archival projects and more as the publishing industry’s watered-down (re)packaging of the same old exclusionary grand-narratives–I found Standage’s focus interesting, particularly in the ways it attempts to link the history of writing to the development and distribution of alcohol in ancient and early modern cultures.
As the title suggests, 6 Glasses hypothesizes that western (and even global) history was as much shaped by each period’s drinking obsessions as by its political, ideological, and cultural conditions. In early Mesopotamia, for example, beer constituted an important source of consumption and trade, becoming in fact one of the area’s most lucrative exports. At the same time, as Standage (and others) believe, Mesopotamians perfected one of the first writing technologies for keeping track of debts and exported goods, among the most common of course was beer. Using tokens etched with pictographic symbols before eventually turning to more symbolic inscriptions on large clay tablets, early Mesopotamians employed “writing” as a form of economic record keeping and accounting. Though perhaps too neat and a bit overstated in its assumption that writing and literacy enabled the rise of modern “civilized” societies, I must confess I like the implication that writing, as an inscription/accounting technology, is historically indebted to an emerging regional obsession for beer. If nothing else, it makes for a great story and a fun hypothesis to share with students. Though I wonder: assuming Standage’s story is true (or even partly true) then does having a couple of beers and watching the Stanley Cup Finals qualify as archival research applicable to my upcoming prelim essays?