‘A History of the World in Six Glasses’ by Tom Standage is a book that discusses the relationship that the six drinks beer, wine, coffee, tea, spirits and Coke, had in shaping the history of the world. In this essay, I will describe how Tom Standage discusses the relationship between beer and wine consumption and how they were used in the Mesopotamian, ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek societies for religious, social and economic purposes. Beer and wine were used for many religious purposes. There are no written records of the discovery of either one. There are many myths from different cultures which “explain how the Gods invented beer and then showed humankind how to make it,” (Standage 19). The first evidence of the use of wine dates back to 5400 BCE (Standage 47). It was considered a gift from the Gods because the process of fermentation occurred on its own and was not understood. One of the religious uses of beer was an offering to the Gods; this can be seen across various beer-drinking cultures. “The Egyptians also believed that their well-being in the afterlife depended on having an adequate supply of bread and beer,” (Standage 38). As a result, they buried the dead with jars of beer and drawings related to beer have been found in Egyptian tombs.
Wine has been mentioned in religious stories such as in the Bible. The Egyptian God of wine Dionysus and his Roman counterpart Bacchus are also associated with wine converting miracles and resurrection (Standage 85). There are also similarities between the traditions of Dionysus, Bacchus and Christ because, “like Christians [these cultures] regarded wine drinking as a form of sacred communion” (Standage 85).
“Sumerian depictions of beer, from the third millennium BCE, generally show two people drinking through straws from the same vessel,” (Standage 18). These pictures emphasize the social importance as by this time period people had developed ways to filter debris ...