Tut's Wormwood
As a life-long teetotaller I have always been puzzled as to why people drink alcohol. It is not only the stupid things people do while under the influence - and there seems no end to the folly a person will commit after imbibing a couple - but it is also the fact that drinking, by the testimony of reliable witnesses, leaves you with a headache. I know that there are some people who enjoy being tied up and whipped and far be it from me to deny any of my fellow human beings their pleasures, however perverse, but to deliberately go out and drink something that you know is going to leave you feeling as if your head has been run over by something heavy and spikey does seem eccentric, to say the least.
Then, of course, there are the other problems caused by alcohol: the stuff apparently kills off brain cells by the thousand, and my personal opinion is that one can never have too many of them, so to deliberately destroy them is unwise at best. Add in cirrhosis of the liver, cancer of the aesophagus, breast cancer (in both men and women) and all the rest of it, and drinking alcohol seems on a par with playing with poisonous snakes or going wind-surfing off Somalia.
However it appears that some people delight in living dangerously and, as if alcohol on its own was not bad enough, back in the 1800s some people in France decided to add to the risks by mixing wormwood with their wine to produce a stuff they called absinthe. Not only did it send you blind and/or raving mad, but it gave the drink a disgustingly bitter flavour - just the thing to cool you down in the heat of summer!
It may be that my readers will think that this is a French peculiarity - eat snails, cut the legs off frogs, swig down the bitter wormwood - so let me hasten to point out that Tutankhamun may well have enjoyed his wormwood too! Archaeologists investigating the contents of some ancient pots found in Egypt have discovered that they contained not only wine or beer but a cocktail of herbs as well. Among the possible sources of the chemicals found in the residues are blue tansy, balm, coriander, mint, sage, thyme - and wormwood.
There were also traces that the archaeologists interpreted as senna - better known to generations of constipated children as senna pods. As all too many of the tourists who go to Egypt have found, constipation is not a problem in Egypt - it is the opposite, known colloquially as "Pharaoh's Revenge" or "Gippy Tummy" which affects you, so drinking something that includes senna comes under the heading of gilding the lily or taking coals to Newcastle or something of the sort.
As these pots date back to pre-Dynastic times, it would seem that herbal cocktails have a long as well as disreputable pedigree. Patrick E. McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology talks hopefully about "medicinal wines" - and there is evidence that the Egyptians thought wormwood killed off intestinal parasites and worms - but the discovery that some of the wines also contained resin, like Greek retsina, is probably a stronger clue to the purpose of these herbs. Resin was commonly used to seal wine bottles and jars to keep the air out and prevent the wine oxidising, but it made the stuff taste so disgusting that just about anything added to it can only improve the flavour - and if it sends you blind as well, who needs eyes anyway?
© Kendall K. Down 2009
