Can You Guess Who Enjoyed Wine Back In Ancient Troy?
You might think that only the rich and elite of ancient Troy sipped wine from goblets, but it turns out that regular everyday people enjoyed the beverage as well.
For the first time, researchers have identified chemical residues related to wine in goblets from Hisarlik, a site thought to be the ancient city of Troy featured in Homer’s Iliad.
The site was first discovered in the 1870s by Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman and amateur archaeologist.
“Schliemann already conjectured that the depas goblet was passed around at celebrations—just as described in the Iliad,” said Stephan Blum, a co-author of the study and an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
But his haphazard excavations did not yield much hard evidence to support his claim. In the first book of the Iliad, the god Hephaestus passed a “double goblet” around at a banquet on Mount Olympus.
That drinking vessel is often referred to as the depas goblet, which features a slender neck and two large handles.
Now, archaeologists at Troy have unearthed more than 100 depas goblets that date back between 2500 and 2000 B.C.E. They usually measure between five and 15 inches tall and contain up to a liter of liquid.
The researchers drilled two-gram samples out of the inner walls of two vessel fragments that Schliemann had excavated. Then, they heated up the samples to over 700 degrees Fahrenheit.
They used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to isolate compounds and were able to identify succinic and pyruvic acids, which are both linked to alcohol fermentation.
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“The evidence of succinic and pyruvic acids was conclusive: They only occur when grape juice ferments,” said Maxine Rageot, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Bonn in Germany.
“So now we can state with confidence that wine was actually drunk from the depas goblets and not just grape juice.”
The collection of goblets was found among hundreds of objects made of gold, silver, copper, and electrum. It was named “Priam’s Treasure” after the mythical Trojan king Priam.
But later, the treasure was dated to about 1,000 years before the Trojan War occurred in the 12th or 13th century B.C.E.
The researchers performed additional chemical tests to determine whether wine was consumed only by the elites.
They analyzed ordinary cups found in the outer settlement of Troy, where the lower classes of people lived. The vessels contained the same chemical signatures of wine, making it clear that wine was for common people, too.
The findings upend long-held assumptions that wine was reserved for the elites during the 3rd millennium B.C.E.
In the future, more research will be conducted on wine-drinking practices at other sites across the ancient world.
The new study was published in the American Journal of Archaeology.
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