Sweetness Before Sugar
Long before sugar came on the scene, the main sweetener used was honey. Honey has certainly been collected from the wild since Neolithic times, and probably much earlier. Rock art from Spain dated 8000–2000 BCE depicted wild honey gathering, and beeswax found in pottery vessels from Anatolia dates to the seventh millennium BCE and has also been found at numerous other European Neolithic sites.4 The oldest evidence of beeswax use is from a sample from the Border Cave of South Africa, which might have been used in an adhesive and is around 40,000 years old.5 The ancient Egyptians may have been the first to practise beekeeping, with historical evidence dating to c.
2400 BCE.6 Honey was used as food, in medicine and in rituals. Herodotus said that the Babylonians ‘bury their dead in honey’, possibly meaning embalming.7 The Greeks and Romans used honey extensively both as medicine and food. Aristotle wrote about honeybees in the fourth century BCE and Pliny made detailed (and sometimes mythical) observations about the natural history of bees and types of honey. He was clearly fond of it, saying that ‘it affords us by its flavour a most exquisite pleasure’.8 He also praises its quality of preventing putrefaction, treating disorders of the throat and tonsils, ailments of the mouth, quinsy and fever; honied wine was used to treat paralysis and honey with rose oil ‘as an injection for the ears; it has the effect also of exterminating nits and foul vermin of the head’.9Honey was mixed with water to make hydromel, or with vinegar to make oxymel. They were used in cookery and in medicine. Other mixtures were made combining it with wine, roses, apple juice and sour grapes. Columella, a Roman agriculturist of the first century CE, wrote extensively on beekeeping and honey gathering.10 References to honey also abound in classical literature.
Petronius observed somewhat philosophically: ‘Then there’s the bee: in my opinion, they’re divine insects because they puke honey, though there are folks that claim that they bring it from Jupiter, and that’s the reason they sting, too, for wherever you find a sweet, you’ll find a bitter too.’11Other sweeteners were dates and mead. Dates, the fruit of the palm Phoenix dactylifera, have been cultivated in the Middle East and Indus Valley for thousands of years. Their high natural sugar content (over 60 per cent) gives a lot of sweetness (and energy) in a small package. The oldest evidence of date cultivation is from the Indus Neolithic at Mehrgahr (in modern Pakistan) where dates were used in the period 7000–5500 BCE.12 Cultivation in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys probably dates to the fourth millennium BCE.13 Evidence of wild progenitors goes back much further – they would have been part of the Neanderthal diet in the Middle East. Mead is the fermented product of honey mixed with water, and is also ancient, perhaps dating back a few thousand years.