In 1897, archaeologists led by Nikolai Veselovsky from the University of Saint Petersburg excavated a huge Early Bronze Age burial mound, a so-called kurgan, near the small town of Maikop in southern Russia. The monument, originally eleven meters high and with its pristine, richly furnished burial chambers, was so prominent that it gave the associated culture its name: The Maikop culture – sometimes also transliterated “Maykop” – flourished in the north-western Caucasus between around 3700 and 3000 BC and its northern foreland. Among the treasures and implements that had been given to the grave lord of the kurgan of Maikop, perhaps a priest-king, between 3700 and 3100 BC, there were also eight thin tubes, regarding 1.12 meters long, made of silver and partly also of gold , four of which were provided with attachable figurines in the shape of bulls, also made of precious metals. All eight end in silver tips on one side with an openwork design. What is it?
Veselovsky, who immediately brought the treasures from Maikop to the St. Petersburg Hermitage and presented them to the royal family, interpreted the tubes as a “scepter” because they lay directly to the right of the skeleton of the presumed priest-king. Other researchers believed them to be the remains of an ornate tent or canopy that was held during the funeral procession to the kurgan for the deceased ruler. Still others suspected that the tubes might have formed a ritual instrument, perhaps in a bundle, and felt that the pierced bull figurines reminded them of the Sumerian myth of the heavenly bull.
Drawings of the “scepters” from the Maikop Kurgan.
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Photo: Viktor Trifonov
Now Viktor Trifonov from the Institute of History and Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, together with two colleagues in one Article for the British trade magazine “Antiquity” presented a whole new interpretation. It points even more clearly to the Sumerians, who lived 1,700 kilometers further south in lower Mesopotamia, in the area of present-day southern Iraq. They were an early high culture organized in city-states, whose first heyday coincided with the era of the Maikop culture and whose members were very fond of beverages made from fermented barley.
“A common Sumerian utensil for consuming beer was a tube made of long plant cane,” write Trifonov and colleagues in their paper. “It allowed the user to drink from a large tankard placed on a low pedestal while seated or even standing.” And as pictorial representations show, this happened sometimes – or maybe even usually – together, which one then has to imagine similar to bucket drinking at Ballermann, albeit perhaps a bit more civilized, especially on occasions when drinking straws wrapped in gold foil were used to They were used as found in the tomb of the Sumerian queen Puabi in the royal necropolis at Ur.
However, the drinking tubes apparently did not only have the purpose of enabling beer consumption from large and therefore difficult-to-handle vessels. Their ends might also be cut into a V-shape and tied together. The liquid only penetrated the pipe through slits and the solids in the beer, which were difficult to avoid due to the brewing processes of the time, were held back. However, attachable nozzles made of perforated copper were also common, which also served as sieves. Such was found, for example, in the remains of the Sumerian city of Eschnunna, today’s Tell Asmar in central Iraq,
