Ninkasi

Summary

Ninkasi is the Sumerian goddess of beer. Miguel Civil, who edited her hymn, writes that it praises her as the mysterious power that produces fermentation and changes plain grain and water into the drink that "makes the liver happy, fills the heart with joy". Beer is one of the commonest words in Sumerian tablets, most of them ration lists for workers.

Her birth is told in Enki and Ninhursanga. Enki has fallen ill after eating the plants of Ninhursag; she comes back, seats him by her and asks: "My brother, what part of you hurts you?" He says: "My mouth hurts me", and she gives birth to Ninkasi from it. Then she assigns the newborn their tasks: "Ninkasi shall be what satisfies the heart", in Sumerian "what fills the heart". In the Hymn to Ninkasi she is born of the flowing water and tenderly cared for by Ninhursag, who founded her town and completed its great walls for her; her father is Enki and her mother Ninti, queen of the Abzu. Enki and Ninhursanga 254–280, ETCSL, Hymn to Ninkasi 1–12.

Then the hymn lists her works one after another: she handles the dough with a big shovel and mixes the beer-bread with sweet aromatics in a pit; she bakes the beer-bread in the big oven and puts the piles of hulled grain in order; she waters the earth-covered malt, and the noble dogs guard it; she soaks the malt in a jar, and the waves rise and fall; she spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats to cool; she holds the great sweetwort with both hands and brews it with honey and wine; she places the fermenting vat, which makes a pleasant sound, on top of the large collector vat; she pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat, and it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Civil judges that the hymn names the steps of the craft broadly in their order, beginning with the first work and ending with the pouring, though it was not written to teach brewing.

The idea her stories turn on is that the craft itself became a goddess. Ninkasi is not handed beer as a gift; each step in making it is one of her acts. She comes out of the mouth of Enki, the god of fresh water, and is raised by Ninhursag, the mother of birth, so that her parentage joins the water in which grain is soaked and the earth that grows it, and she is given one task: to fill the heart.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. It is written nin-ka-si: nin is "lady", and the Sumerian essay reads kasi as Arabic kaʾs, "cup", so that Ninkasi is "lady of the cup". In Lane kaʾs is a drinking cup, or a cup with wine in it: it is not called kaʾs unless it contains drink, and when empty it is a qadaḥ; some say kaʾs is the wine itself, and kās without the glottal stop is allowed. Sumerian writes the name with two signs, ka, "mouth", and si, "to fill", so the full cup and the filled mouth say the same thing. The poem itself has her born from Enki's mouth and gives her the task of "filling the heart".

Linguistic Root

Ninkasi and kaʾs

The Sumerian essay ranks kaʾs first and says the Sumerian kasi matches it almost letter for letter. The correspondence is exact: k is k, the glottal stop of kaʾs is one cuneiform does not write and Lane allows kās without it, and s is s. Hebrew kôs is the cup, drunk from with wine, and Aramaic has a word with the same letters. BDB records Fraenkel's view that Arabic took the word from Aramaic, which is the limit of what can be built on the Arabic word alone. The reading does not push aside Sumerian kaš, beer, also written ka-aš: the drink, the vessel it is drunk from and the verb "to fill" all gather round the name.

Other readings in the essay

After kaʾs the essay gives qasā, to make drunk and weaken, which it ranks middling, then kasā, to cover, as an interpretation of the elation that covers the head, then kassa, which it ranks weak. Kaʾs is the closest in letters and in meaning, because the poem does not describe Ninkasi by drunkenness and weakening; it describes her by her craft and by filling the heart with joy.

Historical Context

The hymn survives on three tablets, in the Louvre, in Istanbul and in Berlin, and on all of them it comes together with a Sumerian drinking song, the only one known when Civil published it. On the Berlin tablet the scribe writes between the lines readings from other copies, trying to reconcile them. In the Sumerian dictionary the word for beer, kaš, occurs some forty thousand times, nine tenths of them on tablets of the Third Dynasty of Ur.

Family and connections

Key Mythic Narratives

The drinking song

After the hymn the tablets give a song in which the singer lists the beer vessels: the gakkul vat, which "makes the liver happy", the lamsare vat, which "rejoices the heart", and the jars and buckets ready on their stands. Then the company toasts a woman: "May Ninkasi live together with you! Let her pour for you beer and wine." She answers: "Drinking beer, in a blissful mood.. with joy in the heart and a happy liver." And the song closes: "The heart of Inanna is happy again, the heart of the queen of heaven is happy again!" Civil thinks the song may celebrate the opening of a tavern kept by a woman, perhaps one of the ale-wives the Akkadians called sābītu, since taverns at that period were normally kept by women.

Ninkasi in the two Lugalbanda poems

When Lugalbanda is left alone in the mountains, sleep overcomes him "by means of Ninkasi's wooden cask", that is, with beer, and the god of dreams comes to him. Then, resolving to honour the Anzud bird, he tells himself he will call on Ninkasi the expert, "her fermenting vat of green lapis lazuli, her beer cask of refined silver and gold; if she stands by the beer, there is joy, if she sits by the beer, there is gladness", to mix his beer, so that when Anzud has drunk and is happy he will put him on his brothers' track.

Symbolic Reading

The Sumerian essay says Ninkasi is among the oldest deities devoted to a single work, that beer in Sumer was sacred, a means of celebration and a daily food, and that the oldest beer recipe in history was written in Sumerian. The tablets bear this out: beer appears tens of thousands of times in the daily rations of workers, in offerings, and in the song that gladdens Inanna's heart.

The hymn ties beer to water and earth together: the malt is soaked in the jar "and the waves rise, the waves fall", and the filtered drink pours "like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates". Beer in the poem is a small image of the land's water and grain, as Ninkasi's parentage joins Enki, god of the water, and Ninhursag, mother of the earth.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The ale-wives Civil mentions appear in the Akkadian epic in Siduri, the keeper of the tavern on the shore of the sea at the end of the earth, whom Gilgamesh passes on his way to Utnapishtim.

The Sumerian essay sets Ninkasi beside the Greek wine god Dionysus, the Roman Bacchus, and Egyptian Hathor in her aspect of drunkenness and celebration. In Hathor's story beer is brewed at Ra's command and dyed with red ochre until it looks like blood; Hathor drinks, grows drunk and goes back without noticing mankind, so humanity is saved by beer.

India and Iran have another drink that is also a god, Soma and Haoma, whose hymns describe the pressing, crushing and filtering step by step, as the Hymn to Ninkasi describes the soaking, baking, fermenting and filtering. The difference is that soma is pressed from a plant, while beer is made from grain by soaking and fermentation.

In the North the sea giant Ægir brews ale for the gods in his hall and needs a huge cauldron, which Thor fetches from the giant Hymir; the brewer there is the gods' host, while in Sumer the brewer is a goddess.

The craft of brewing turned into a goddess, its steps kept in a hymn, puts Ninkasi among the masters of crafts on the culture heroes page.