Greeks made water potable by diluting it with wine

>Greeks made water potable by diluting it with wine
>Egyptians and Sumerians drank beer every day
>Bible contains ten different words in Hebrew and Aramaic to refer to varying alcoholic drinks, and five words in Koine Greek, in addition to multiple references to drunkenness
>alcohol abuse was so bad in MENA that Muhammad had to ban it from his religion entirely

Was every single human being basically drunk 24/7 for the majority of written history? Was every historical text we know of written by someone who was shitfaced?

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My grandma grew up in rural 1930s Romania drinking diluted wine, said only the very old or the village family of alcoholics (who everyone scorned) got truly drunk, definitely most everyone was buzzed though. When she migrated to the us in her early 20s she said she spent the rest of her adult life avoiding wine as she was repulsed by it, and only started drinking again in retirement

they liked getting fucked up

In my country poor workers and peasants drink all the time. In the ancient world if you werent a priest or a warrior you were a peasant or worker so I guess you had to drink all the time to make life bearable.

I always wondered about that. I know that beer was actually used as currency to pay workers in certain periods but after a hot day slaving away sweating your balls off I think alcohol would probably be the worst thing you can possibly drink. I guess they must have diluted it a whole bunch?

Slightly buzzed maybe. Modern alcoholic drinks stronger than what was drunk back in the day. The typical beer drunk every day in ancient times would have been ~1-2% alcohol by volume, several times less than typical modern beers. And the wine, as you said, was generally commonly diluted - indeed the Greeks believed drinking unmixed wine was barbaric and dangerous.

That sort of chronic poor worker/rural alcoholism only really took root in the 18th and 19th centuries as distillation really took off.

>alcohol abuse was so bad in MENA that Muhammad had to ban it from his religion entirely

that was only the second time round, Muhammad said first it was alright as long as they did come to the mosque drunk. Interestingly, Muhammad thought it was alright to drink water where a dead donkey had died in Sunan Abu Dawood.

it was the soda before soda was invented

*pop

yes and this is true even today except they also do other drugs too.

Huh, two vaguely mesopotamian threads today.

Remember, traditional 'small beer' is something like 1/2% alcoholic, if not even less. I know the greeks also drank a sort of barley beverage, a bit like tea, and I wouldn;t be at all surprised if something called 'barley-drink' or whatever gets mistranslated into beer. That isn't to say I don't think there wasn't a lot of beer drinking, but that I'd be suspicious.

I actually don't know if sumerians drank it everyday in place of water, if that's what you mean. Ditto egyptians. I know that's the generally accepted meme for the middle ages and it probably makes sense to an extent, but what I've read in sumerian myth generally explicitly relates to intoxication - as in Enkidu in gilgamesh, and I suspect it's similar for egypt (eg the Sekhmet myth). Since both drank it with straws, I wonder about the practicality of it as the only beverage of the working day.

That's extremely interesting. I've always been skeptical of this too. I mean, did every person in history have fetal alcohol syndrome? probably not.

Stop drinking water entirely and switch to domestic beer with 4-6% alcohol content as your only source of fluid. I'm betting you'd die of dehydration. Especially if you're sweating all day doing manual labor.

Yeah, as you say. I have to admit I can't think of anything explicitly saying 'we only drink beer for fun' but at the same time I couldn't really conceive of it completely supplanting water.

I know one famous hypothesis for china's massive population was that they drank nothing but tea, eliminating water born diseases as it was boiled - but that people would also drink boiled water and call it 'white tea' if they couldn't afford/find a tea plant outside regions where it was native. Someone also rather fascinatingly equated the UK's industrial revolution with the sudden growth of tea as a stimulant for the workforce, pointing out that half the income of a working class household in the late 1800s was tea, but I suspect that's reaching.

Tacitus said about the Germans they liked beer so much that all you'd have to do to conquer them is give them all the beer they want because they'd be shitfaced 24/7 and too drunk to fight.

>The typical beer drunk every day in ancient times would have been ~1-2% alcohol by volume

yeah no, you're thinking of small beer which didn't become popular until much later in history. Barley wine may have been slightly fermented (remember: no refrigeration!) 0.5% abv or so but this would've been insignificant.

actual ancient beer made of sorghum, emmer and barley and honey + whatever adjuncts they used in place of hops would've been more like like 4.5-5.5 like a typical session ale today. The Greeks drank 9% ABV mead unmixed. The Romans would use what would become the modern Amarone process to achieve ABVs of 15-20%.

Nobody drank it in place of water not even in early modern times. This is a myth. These people didn't know about microbes you morons, if the water was clear they didn't care. Most peasants used wells or rain fed cisterns if they didn't have a stream nearby.

>Nobody drank it in place of water not even in early modern times.

What did the sailors do with one gallon daily ration of beer then, pour it overboard?

*soft drank

You have to remember that for most of human history water was unsafe to drink for due to lack of effective purification methods. Part of the preparation of alcoholic and caffeinated beverages includes the boiling of the water used in the drinks, which kills the overwhelming majority of bacteria.

>>This is a myth. These people didn't know about microbes you morons, if the water was clear they didn't care.
You don't need to know about microbes to know that if somebody gets sick after drinking the well water that there is something wrong with said water.

Not to mention you usually get ill VERY quickly after drinking contaminated water.

t. boy scout who didn't know better

Got any book recommendations for Mesopotamia senpai?

Enkidu was a wild man who was raised by deer and ate grass and it wasn't until a prostitute from a city (after jumping his bones) coerced him to try beer for the first time.

This is not indicative of anything, it's just telling the story of Enkidu who got drunk for the first time in his life.

They drank it ON ADDITION to water.

I wish I could be drunk 24/7

One measure of wine, two measures of water. It's how the Greeks did it, unlike those dirty Scythians that got shitfaced by drinking undiluted wine.

I wish I could be shitfaced 24/7

me too

youtube.com/watch?v=usDuyoec6Lc
Watch this video. Basically the world has been controlled by this secret society for millennia. That's why everyone in history was slightly drunk

Tfw I'm drinking right. Nw.

>They drank it ON ADDITION to water.
So they drank significantly more than one gallon of liquids a day? That's a huge amount.

>Basically the world has been controlled by this secret society for millennia

*cold drink

frizzy fruity syrup

Nah. If you drink the recommended 2 liters per day, you've got yourself 4 beers and that's nothing if spread throughout the whole day. Also their beer was very weak, almost like American beer.

The myth that water in the past was undrinkable is just that - a myth.

It's cringeworthy to see that people still buy it. It doesn't even make any sense. It's like thinking that people believed the world was flat or that Knights needed a crane to be lifted onto their horse. It just makes my blood boil that in the age of the Internet people can still be so ignorant. This is supposed to be a history board for crying out loud

>that Knights needed a crane to be lifted onto their horse
I've never heard that one before.

Nobody's saying that all water before recent times was undrinkable, retard. They're just saying that the prevalence of non drinkable water was much more so than it is today given our technology and shit

>They're just saying that the prevalence of non drinkable water was much more so than it is today
This isn't really true either though. People in the past always had very easy access to water. If you were to gauge it by a percentage then sure there was probably more dirty water back then than today but it wasn't the water people were drinking.