ON THE CUTTING EDGE: A Jug Of Wine, A Loaf Of Lavash …
Archeologists have traced the history of beer back at least 6,000 years to Sumeria, but where does wine come from? If you guess France, you’d be wrong. It’s Armenia, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Archaeological Science by Gregory Areshian, assistant director of the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
According to the Book of Genesis after Noah's Ark landed on Mount Ararat - the heart of ancestral Armenia - he founded Nakhichevan, the oldest city in Armenia (thus Armenians consider themselves direct descendants of Noah) and planted a vineyard. Areshian’s discovery corroborates some of this biblical lore, reports The Washington Post:
[A]ctual proof of early vintners comes from a cave near a remote Armenian village, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is within 60 miles of Mount Ararat. Scientists have unearthed a surprisingly advanced winemaking operation, surrounded by storage jars, and say it dates back 6,000 years, making it the earliest known site in the world for wine-making with grapes, by far.
Its presence, along with the recent discovery of the world's oldest leather moccasin in the same cave outside the small town of Areni, is requiring professionals in the field to broaden and, to some extent reexamine, exactly what constituted early civilization and where it occurred.
"This is the oldest confirmed example of winemaking by a thousand years," said Gregory Areshian, an archaeologist and co-director of the dig. "People were making wine here well before there were pharaohs in Egypt."
The winemaking in the cave appears to be associated with burial rituals because numerous graves are close by, he said. "This was almost surely not wine used at the end of the day to unwind." …
Although researchers traditionally look to Egypt and Mesopotamia to understand ancient civilization, Areshian said that "there were many, many specialized and unique centers of civilization in the ancient world, and we can only understand it as a mosaic of these peoples."
Comments