One of the oldest known written 'recipes' in the world is a nearly 4,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablet describing how to brew beer — and it makes a case that fermentation, more than roasting or baking, may have been humanity's first laboratory science

Around 1800 BCE, the Hymn to Ninkasi was written down in cuneiform. It was addressed to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer. The tablet that survives is about 3,800 years old.

Read one way, it is a hymn of praise. Read another, it is a set of instructions for making beer: bake the barley bread, soak and sprout the grain, ferment the sweet liquid in vats.

The hymn that doubles as a recipe

The text is best known through the work of the Sumerologist Miguel Civil, of the University of Chicago, who made its most influential English translation in 1964. In 1989 the Anchor Brewing Company used it to recreate a Sumerian-style beer, which is how the hymn earned its popular billing as one of the oldest surviving beer recipes in the world.

The traditional reading treats the poem as a working set of steps. As the World History Encyclopedia’s Joshua J. Mark puts it, the hymn is “at once a song of praise to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, and an ancient recipe for brewing (though this claim has been challenged).”

Is a devotional song, set to a repeating tune and easy to memorize, really a recipe in any working sense? Or is it a memory aid wrapped in worship? Modern scholars are not sure.

Different translations disagree on key terms. The late historian of science Peter Damerow offered a more sceptical reading, warning that “given our limited knowledge about the Sumerian brewing processes, we cannot say for sure whether their end product even contained alcohol.” His warning names the honest gap: we are reading brewing steps into a hymn whose technical words we only partly understand.

Older than the tablet

Whatever the tablet is, the knowledge in it likely predates the tablet. A song shaped for reciting is a way of storing a process before anyone writes it down. The brewing it describes almost certainly passed from person to person for centuries. The clay version is a late snapshot of a much older craft.

Archaeology pushes fermentation far deeper than any writing system. At Raqefet Cave in Israel, traces left in stone bowls suggest people were making a porridge-like beer roughly 13,000 years ago.

Further east, the evidence is firmer. Chemical analysis of ancient pottery from Jiahu in China, by an international team including the archaeochemist Patrick McGovern, identified traces of a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit dating back about 9,000 years. It seems that long before the Sumerian scribe picked up his stylus, people were turning sugar into alcohol.

Fermentation as early science

The larger claim here is offered as an argument, not a settled fact. Roasting and baking are quick and legible. Heat does visible work in minutes, and a cook corrects by eye. Fermentation is slower and stranger. The change happens invisibly, over days, driven by organisms no one could see, and it fails quietly when conditions are wrong.

To make it reliable, you have to control things you cannot watch: temperature, timing, cleanliness, the order of steps, even reusing a vessel that carries the right invisible cultures. You repeat the process, observe which small change works, and pass on the method that succeeds so the next batch matches the last. That is, in miniature, what a laboratory does — controlled conditions and careful observation, repeated until the method holds. Seen this way, the Ninkasi hymn is less a poem about a drink than a technique made memorable, a way to preserve a repeatable process in a world where most technical knowledge still moved orally, person to person.

What the Yale tablets complicate

The beer hymn has a rival for the title of oldest recipe. The Yale culinary tablets  are often called the world’s oldest cooking recipes. One holds twenty-five recipes for stews, most with meat. A team from Yale and Harvard deciphered and cooked them, which is part of why they read so clearly as recipes.

They read that way for a specific reason. The recipes “list the ingredients and the order in which they should be added, but does not give measures or cooking time,” as if written for experienced cooks. On dating, the beer hymn still comes first if it is counted as a recipe but the Yale tablets look more like recipes in form, and that is exactly the ground on which the beer hymn’s claim is doubted.

The two texts pull in opposite directions. The older text may not quite be a recipe. The clearer recipes are slightly younger. 

Perhaps what this argument really exposes is how we split ritual knowledge from technical knowledge, as if a hymn and a recipe must be different kinds of thing. The Sumerians may not have felt the need to choose. A song to a goddess that also told you how to brew was not a confusion to them. It was one object doing two jobs.

Whether the Hymn to Ninkasi is the oldest ‘recipe’ may matter less than what the hard question reveals: for most of human history, the instructions for doing something and the story told about it were perhaps the same thing.