Ancient World Review

The Hallucinogenic Honey That Poisoned A Greek Army

"When bees feed on the pollen of rhododendron flowers, the resulting honey can pack a hallucinogenic punch." Source: Atlas Obscura.

"It’s called mad honey, and it has a slightly bitter taste and a reddish color. More notably, a few types of rhododendrons ... contain grayanotoxin, which can cause dramatic physiological reactions in humans and animals. Depending on how much a person consumes, reactions can range from hallucinations and a slower heartbeat to temporary paralysis and unconsciousness."

"The intoxicating effects of mad honey have been known for thousands of years. Not surprisingly, there have been many famous episodes of human inebriation caused by its consumption. Xenophon, Aristotle, Strabo, Pliny the Elder and Columella all document the results of eating this 'maddening' honey, believed to be from the pollen and nectar of Rhododendron luteum and Rhododendron ponticum. According to Xenophon, an invading Greek army was accidentally poisoned by harvesting and eating the local Asia Minor honey, but they all made a quick recovery with no fatalities. Having heard of this incident, and realizing that foreign invaders would be ignorant of the dangers of the local honey, King Mithridates later used the honey as a deliberate poison when Pompey's army attacked the Heptakometes [1] in Asia Minor in 69 BCE. The Roman soldiers became delirious and nauseated after being tricked into eating the toxic honey, at which point Mithridates's army attacked." Source: Wikipedia.

[1] "In about 65 BCE, Pompey's army was approaching Colchis.  Mithridates' allies there, the Heptakometes, were described by Strabo as 'utterly savage' mountain barbarians, dwelling in tree forts and living on 'the flesh of wild animals and nuts.'  The tribe was feared for attacking wayfarers - suddenly leaping down on them like leopards from their tree houses.  The Heptakometes may have received specific orders from Mithridates on how to ambush the Roman army.  What we do know for a fact is that they gathered up great numbers of wild honeycombs dripping with toxic honey and placed them all along Pompey's route.  The Roman soldiers stopped to enjoy the sweets and immediately lost their senses.  Reeling and babbling, the men collapsed with vomiting and diarrhea and lay on the ground unable to move.  The Heptakometes easily wiped out about one thousand of Pompey's men." - Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor. (Source: Roman Times)

Taking mad honey sounds like a dangerous way to get loaded. According to the Drug Classroom, "[t]he core symptoms of mad honey poisoning include nausea, vomiting, salivation, headache, blurred vision, sweating, weakness, circumoral paresthesia, tongue numbing, fainting, drowsiness, drunkenness, tingling, and seizures." The toxins in the honey can also cause "1st to 3rd degree heart block, asystole, and myocardial infarction."

Ancient Beekeeping & Bee Divination

People have been collecting honey from bees since the Stone Age. According to Wikipedia, "[c]ollecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In Africa, honeyguide birds have evolved a mutualist relationship with humans, leading them to hives and participating in the feast. This suggests honey harvesting by humans may be of great antiquity. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock paintings, dating to around Upper Paleolithic (13,000 BCE). Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest."

Honey was an important commodity in the ancient world. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised), "bee-keeping had the same importance for antiquity that sugar production has now. Honey-gathering preceded the culture of bees which began perhaps in the mesolithic period. The evidence for bee-keeping in classical antiquity is mainly literary, ranging in time from Hesiod onwards and in content from incidental allusions to codifications of the practical experience of Greek, Roman, and Carthaginian bee-masters."

Then, as now, honey was used both as a food and a medicine. Note: Honey is currently used as an antibiotic and a treatment for coughs, wounds and burns. (Wikipedia) The Egyptians and other people in the Middle East also used honey to embalm the dead in some cases.

Bees, along with other insects, were also used for divination, a form of augury known as entomomancy. Pliny the Elder describes the practice in a section on bees and beekeeping in Book XI of his monumental Natural History:

"Bees provide signs of future events both private and public, when a cluster of them hangs down in houses and temples -- portents that have often been presaged by momentous events. They settled on the mouth of Plato when he was a young child and foretold the charm of his very pleasing eloquence. They settled in Drusus' camp at the time of our great victory at Arbalo; indeed augurs, who always think the presence of bees is a bad omen, are not invariably correct." -- from Book XI, Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, Penguin Classics.

Note: "The oldest known honey remains were found in the country of Georgia. Archaeologists found honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels unearthed in an ancient tomb, dating back some 4,700–5,500 years. In ancient Georgia, several types of honey were buried with a person for their journey into the afterlife, including linden, berry, and meadow-flower varieties." (Wikipedia)

Report from 2012.

Giant Prehistoric Bird Ate Neanderthal Child's Bones

"One Neanderthal child had a very bad day about 115,000 years ago. The child died — that much is certain — and the bones were gulped down and digested by a giant, prehistoric bird, according to archaeologists in Poland." Source: Live Science.

"However, it's unclear whether the giant bird killed the child before the gruesome feast or whether the child died from another cause before the bird scavenged the remains, the archaeologists said."

Note: The bones, discovered in Ciemna Cave, one of several caves in Ojcow National Park in Poland, are "the oldest known human remains ever to be found in Poland." The bird that ate the child's bones isn't identified, which is too bad. I've got this picture of a Neanderthal kid wandering off from its cave and getting gobbled up by a huge terror bird, but the terror birds, unfortunately, lived in South America during a different time period.

Related: 10 Dangerous Prehistoric Birds.

Medieval Germans Riddled With Tapeworms

Video from 2014. Do not view while eating.

"Sifting through preserved poop from a medieval port city in Germany, scientists discovered that the town's inhabitants were riddled with tapeworms." Source: Live Science.

"The discovery also revealed a fascinating hidden record of dietary changes during that period, according to a new study."

Note: "Intestinal parasites such as tapeworms and roundworms were common in Europe before the advent of modern sanitation," according to Nature. "Adrian Smith at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues extracted DNA from parasite eggs in soil samples from graveyards and former latrines. The samples, collected from archaeological sites in what are now the United Kingdom, Germany, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, ranged from 350 to 5,600 years old."

Cannibalism At Gough's Cave In England

Video from 2014.

"Engravings on a human bone from a prehistoric archaeological site in a cave in southern England shows that human cannibals ate their prey and then performed ritualistic burials with the remains, scientists said on Wednesday (Aug. 9, 2017)." Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation (2017).

"The forearm bone appears to have been disarticulated, filleted, chewed, and then engraved with a zig-zag design before being broken to extract bone marrow, said scientists from Britain's Natural History Museum who conducted the analysis."

Note: The bones were found in "Gough's Cave [Somerset, England], thought to be from Britain's Palaeolithic period ..." The fact that some kind of cannibalism, possibly ritualistic, was practiced in the cave has been known for some time.

Video from 2009.

Wine And The Barbarian's Beverage

Notes: "The alcoholic beverage of choice for both the ancient Greeks and Romans was wine, customarily distilled with water, except perhaps in the case of the Macedonians who were reputed to drink their wine akratos, or unmixed. Distilled spirits, such as brandy and whisky, had not yet been invented, and beer was looked upon as a swinish potation better left to barbarians." Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary (OCD, 3rd ed. revised).

Both the Greeks and Romans were aware of the destructive effects of excessive drinking and chronic intoxication, according to the OCD. "In the Odyssey, Homer makes a speaker note that wine is a bane to those who drink it excessively and identifies overindulgence as the cause of the Centaur Eurytion's vile behavior. In Hades, Homer's Elpenor admits that heavy drinking was a key factor in his fatal plunge from Circe's roof."

There were actually two centaurs named Eurytion and they were both lushes who came to bad ends after making violent threats and lusting after human females. As for Elpenor, he was one of Odysseus's companions on the island of Circe. He got plastered and decided to spend the night on Circe's roof, only to fall off in a drunken stupor and break his neck.

The Romans were familiar with alcoholism as well. "In On the Nature of Things, Lucretius writes that wine's fury disturbs the soul, debilitates the body and provokes quarrels. The younger Seneca warns that habitual drunkenness so weakens the mind that its consequences are felt long after the drinking has stopped. He notes that some men become so tolerant of wine that even though they are inebriated they appear to be sober." (OCD)

According to the OCD, several famous Romans were accused of being drunks. They include Sulla, Cato, Mark Antony (no surprise there), Cicero's son, Augustus' daughter, Julia, "and the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Vitellius and Commodus."

As noted above, beer was known as the "Barbarian's Beverage" in the ancient world, but the stuff the barbarians swilled didn't have much in common with the distilled beers we have today:

"We know of ancient European beverages combining various fruits, or fruits and honey, fruits and cereals, honey and cereals, or even fruits, honey, and cereals. Furthermore, numerous types of plants, spices and other substances (such as narcotic drugs) could be added to the beverage before or after fermentation." Source: The Barbarian's Beverage: A History of Beer in Ancient Europe, by Max Nelson (PDF). This book is also available on Amazon.

The history of guzzling and overindulging in various fermented drinks probably goes all the way back to the Stone Age. It appears to be a natural human impulse. Even Conan the Barbarian couldn't resist the urge to get hammered after a long day fighting wizards and smashing heads.

The Roman Grain Trade

Note: This entire lecture series should play automatically, but if it doesn't, the rest of the series can be found here.

"For all of the glory and grandeur of Ancient Rome, the Roman economy never developed into anything terribly complex compared to modern economies. Ancient Rome was an agrarian and slave based economy whose main concern was feeding the vast number of citizens and legionaries who populated the Mediterranean region. Agriculture and trade dominated Roman economic fortunes, only supplemented by small scale industrial production." Source: "Ancient Roman Economy," United Nations of Roma Victrix.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed. revised), "The growth of Rome to a city of perhaps 250,000 in the time of the Gracchi and of up to one million under Augustus, far outstripping the productive capacity of her hinterlands, created an unprecedented demand for imported foodstuffs." The regular distribution of "a set monthly ration of grain at a set price for adult male citizen residents" was established by the populari Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, later assassinated for his reforms, and the ration was made free by P. Clodius Pulcher in 58 BC.

The Gracchi brothers were representatives of the lower class who attempted to make reforms benefiting the common people. Both were murdered by the ruling aristocracy for (among other things) their land reforms which would have had a big impact on the patrician's power and incomes. This conflict between the commoners and the rapacious nobility still continues to this day.

The emperor Augustus stabilized the number of residents entitled to the grain dole "at or below 200,000" in 2 BC. "[The] public supply, drawing on the grain paid to the state as rent or tax in Sicily, Africa and (from 30 BC) Egypt, helped the privileged minority who held tickets of entitlement, which could be inherited or sold. But the monthly ration did not meet a family's need for grain, and the tickets did not necessarily go to the poor." (OCD)

Sounds a lot like our modern welfare system. In later years, this public dole, combined with the construction of the new Colosseum, led to the development of the "bread and circuses" system for controlling (or trying to control) the population of Rome and made the grain supply of Egypt critical to the survival of the city.

Even the state couldn't meet the huge demand for grain in a city the size of Rome, however, and this created all sorts of problems. "State grain met no more than a portion of the city's annual grain needs," according to the OCD ('Trade, Roman,' p. 1537).  "The rest had to be supplied by the free market. Furthermore, the importation of the state grain depended upon private traders, who in times of crisis had to be offered considerable incentives to involve themselves in the trade."

World's "Oldest Brewery" Found In Israel

"Archaeologists have found what they believe is the world's oldest site for alcohol production, a study said Thursday, adding the beer-like beverage may have been served in ceremonies some 13,000 years ago." Source: AFP.

"The site is located in the Raqefet cave south of Haifa in today's northern Israel that also served as a burial site for the Natufian people."

Note: Flowers and plants were used to decorate the cave burials. According to Science Daily (2013), "[t]he earliest evidence of using flower beds for burial, dating back to 13,700 years ago, was discovered in Raqefet Cave in Mt. Carmel in northern Israel. In four different graves from the Natufian period, dating back to 13,700-11,700 years ago, dozens of impressions of Salvia plants and other species of sedges and mints (the Lamiaceae family), were found under human skeletons. 

Video from 2013.

Ancient Beer Led To Civilization?

"Current theory has it that grain was first domesticated for food. But since the 1950s, many scholars have found circumstantial evidence that supports the idea that some early humans grew and stored grain for beer, even before they cultivated it for bread." Source: NY Times (2013).

Note: Several stories about this appeared back in 2013. As far as I can tell, they were all based on a paper with the ponderous title "What Was Brewing in the Natufian? An Archaeological Assessment of Brewing Technology in the Epipaleolithic" which appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. (The Natufian was a late Stone Age culture in the eastern Mediterranean.)

The full paper is, unfortunately, hidden behind a paywall, but according to the abstract, the research provides "compelling circumstantial evidence that makes it increasingly likely that brewing of beer was an important aspect of feasting and society in the Late Epipaleolithic [Late Stone Age]."

Comment: I'm not sure what that last quote actually means. Somebody should invent a drinking game where you have to guzzle a mug of beer every time an archaeologist uses a dodge word in a scientific paper. You could get drunk just reading this particular abstract. "Compelling circumstantial evidence that makes it increasingly likely ..." The handwaving is strong with this one. Still, the idea that beer played an important role in the rise of civilization isn't outlandish at all. It would be hilarious if it turns out that civilization itself was nothing but an invention to facilitate getting plastered.

Ancient African Herders Had Lasting Impact On Grazed Lands

Modern Dinka cattle herders. Video from 2010. Full lecture here.

"Ancient animal herders added to the ecological richness and diversity of the African savanna thousands of years ago -- an effect that persists to the present day, a new study finds. The herders' practice of penning their cattle, goats and sheep at night created nutrient-rich grassy glades [1] that still attract wildlife and have increased habitat diversity in the region, researchers report. " Source: Science Daily.

[1] In other words, the penned animals fertilized the ground with their droppings.

Notes: "In Africa, nomads herd cattle, goats, sheep, and camels. In the tundra, they usually herd domesticated reindeer [???]. Other animals managed by nomadic herders include horses, musk-oxen, and yaks. For many nomads, their herds provide meat, milk, and hides for their own use, as well as for trade." Source: National Geographic.

The Dinka cattle herders practice "traditional agriculture and pastoralism." (Wikipedia). According to the New World Encyclopedia, the "[a]ncient Dinka are dated back to around 3000 B.C.E. in the Sahara Desert, where hunter-gatherers settled in the largest swamp area in the world, the southern Sudan. Dinka society spread out over the Sudan region in recent centuries, from around 1500 C.E."

The prehistory of agriculture and herding in Africa is obscure. Archaeologists have tended to focus on hominin remains and stone tools, for one thing, and the climate, political instability and general lack of development in the region makes archaeological work difficult.

According to Oxford Research Encyclopedias, "...the origins of food production in Africa are less well known than those regions from which the most popular syntheses are often drawn (the Near East, China, Mesoamerica etc.), but research from the last couple of decades has now significantly clarified our understanding of early food production in the region. Nevertheless, data on the domestication of plants in eastern Africa have remained scarce, largely because archaeologists have struggled to recover plant remains due to the logistical challenges of undertaking floatation and other recovery methods in remote areas with poor access to water or electricity, and in some cases due to problems of preservation."