So Karen, today I have a couple of props to accompany my question. I have a bottle of wine and a bottle of beer, and my question is which of these would we prefer to drink? Well, assuming that we move in the social circles that we've been discussing all along... So we are wealthy, at least well-to-do, urban Assyrian ladies living in the heartland of the empire. We would definitely drink wine not beer because beer isn't a luxury item and we would be very keen to ostentatiously live a lifestyle that is fitting the Assyrian Empire. And that's why we would go for wine. And especially, if we lived in the seventh century BC when wine had left its original connotations as a luxury item that was consumed in temples and in palaces. By the seventh century, because of the wealth that was accumulated due to the empire, the well-to-do families in the heartland routinely drank wine, even the women drank wine. And that went so far as that the citizens of the city of Assur would send out trade expeditions with the explicit purpose to bring back wine. Okay. So this is a lovely introduction to our theme of the week which is luxury items. So, can you please tell me a little bit more about what the luxury goods were in our period. Yeah. So speaking about the 9th-7th century BC, luxury goods would be consumables, foodstuffs - we've already mentioned wine - high-quality textiles. We have discussed, of course, the fact that in terms of the economy of the Assyrian Empire, sheep, flocks played a very significant role. This was when we discussed the environment. So wool obviously, is then the most important fabric that the Assyrian people would be wearing. As the influence of the empire became ever greater, linen made out of flax, a plant fiber, became more widespread. Never, however really endangered the domination of wool. And later on, cotton and silk started to play a role, but really only in the highest levels of society. Some tombs of Assyrian queens have been excavated, and some of their garments were made of cotton and of silk which would have probably been imported at that point. So the most usual types of fabrics would be wool, some linen, and the difference would then be in colour. Yeah. So a white, brown, black, everything that would occur naturally, would be the least expensive fabrics. And everything that requires dye, especially hard to make therefore expensive dye, would be considered luxurious. And the most important colour would be red. Why is that? Well, until now, red has of course this, or purple really, has this association with royalty even though now, if you see someone wearing a red T-shirt, we would think, "Oh, my God, that must be an exceptionally wealthy person." Don't think that anymore because our dyes, our colours are artificial, our chemical colours. But until the 19th century, that was of course very different. In any type of dye that is created either by grinding up expensive stones or, as in the case of red, grinding up rare little mollusks that only occur in a particular part of the eastern Mediterranean coast - anything that requires so much effort and labour is bound to be rare, and therefore expensive, and therefore a hallmark of high social and economic status. And that was more than anything true of the colour purple but also all kinds of blue. But red was considered the colour of royalty in Assyria, and if you saw someone wearing red garments, you knew this was most likely a member of the royal court or at least someone who was in close contact with the royal court. When the Assyrian king wanted to honour someone, he would give them red cloth and golden things. A golden sword, a golden cup, something like that, because this was what was typically reserved to the King and to those closest around him. So the colour red was very expensive, was very rare and therefore of course, something that people aspired to wear, to own. There was not a great range of different garments available in the Assyrian Empire. Men and women largely dressed in identical garments, which is true for much of the ancient world, of course. So they would wear sort of tunics, woollen tunics typically. So like a long T-shirt that come down to your knees, short-sleeved typically and over that short undergarments. They would wear a wrap-around dress if you will, like a toga essentially - a long piece of fabric that you would wrap around yourself in order to suit your specific needs. And people wore shoes. Again, you don't need to wear shoes, so shoes of course are then a good object to display your high social status with. And people would wear sandals or boots depending on context and season of course. But typically, you could not really tell their social standing by the shape of their garments or the cut of their garments because that was very simple as we said, a long T-shirt and the wrap around shawl, but by the quality of the textiles, by the colour and by the decoration of the garments. So it's the details that matter here a great deal. So thinking about fabric, as you've just just been discussing, or thinking about wine and thinking about this idea of quality, was there a wine that was particularly coveted or a fabric that was considered to be particularly fine that would only be worn by the wealthy and seen as a luxury good? Yeah. Well, I think we'd covered that for the textiles. With the textiles, it's really the colours. If you've got a decoration with a gold thread or something like that, that would really signal, this is the best that can be. And that quality matters, that also goes for the wine. And, in a way, one can say that Assyrian culture is the first to foster this idea of connoisseurship, of terroir, when it comes to wine. So, the origin is very important that you as the consumer understand what you are drinking, that you know that you are now drinking wine from wherever. That's all important. Where is the wherever? Where does the best wine come from? Well, there are two regions that the Assyrian consumer would be very, very, very fond of. One is wine from Izalla. And Izalla is the region of modern-day Tur Abdin, that's part of the Taurus Mountain range that separates Turkey from Syria today. And the Tur Abdin, that's a volcanic area so that influences, of course, the taste of the wine. It's still a wine area. There are still Christian monasteries there and they need wine. On the whole, wine nowadays in the Middle East is not a big thing due to the fact that in Islam alcohol is forbidden. But in Christian areas, some very, very ancient vineyards are surviving and the Tur Abdin is one of them. So, that's easily reachable in a way in a world that sees the Euphrates and the Tigris as the main lines of communication, because the Tur Abdin is accessible from the Tigris. So, you could bring wine from Izalla relatively easily down to Assur and Nineveh if you wanted to do that. And you would not ship the wine in bottles because they didn't have bottles. They did have glass but they used glass basically as replacements for gemstones. Yeah. So, small ersatz glass stones in a way for a blue lapis lazuli or something like that. They were not yet technically able to create big glass containers, so wine was never bottled. Instead the wine was put into wineskins, so animal skins. And if you had to transport it down the Tigris, as you had to if you wanted to bring wine from Izalla to Assur, you would tie several of these wineskins together, a couple of dozens, and create a raft out of them. Put some timber on top. I’ve already said timber is also something that you need very much in order to build your house for the roof or for the door. And then you would basically ship down your raft to your consumers in the Assyrian heartland. And only there would you fill the wine into other containers. And those, again, wouldn't be small like this. They would be quite large vessels that would be stored in cool areas. And wine would then be taken out as it was consumed and it was mixed with water always. So, there's this whole drinking culture that therefore also is important because you mix the wine with water. You need several vessels, you don't just need the bottle and the wineglass, that's not all. No, no you need to fill the wine into a vessel. Then you have to have another vessel with water, then you mix it, then you let it go through a sieve, and so on and so forth. So, it's all quite complicated until you finally have your wine in the container from which you will drink it. And that is not a glass but a bowl that you balance on the tips of your fingers like this. And it, of course, creates a natural obstacle to getting too drunk. Okay, so as I said one region is Izalla and it's sort of reasonably well-connected to the consumer in the Assyrian heartland. The other wine that becomes more and more popular, especially in the 7th century, is from a region that is until now, again, well-known for its wines near Damascus. So, it's a totally different scenario, of course, because to get wine from the region of Damascus to northern Iraq, that requires a long, long, long, long, long trip for that wine, some of which can't be achieved by just shipping it on a river. Because the good thing about that is that the river water would cool the wine, and would hinder it from becoming vinegar. So, that of course means that if you must drink wine from the Damascus region in Assur, and then you tell your drinking companions about it, that does a great deal for your prestige. Because you would say, well what we are drinking here is not wine from Izalla, although that’s very nice and, our families have been drinking this for the past hundred years. No, this is wine from Syria. This is actually wine from a khulb unud, that's how it's called. This is wine from the Damascus area. And let me tell you, it was a nightmare to get it here. Half of it's spoiled. But you know this, you know. And so this, of course, is totally unnecessary if all you want to do is drink wine, drink the wine from Izalla and be happy with it. Drinking wine from Damascus in central Assyria is nothing but showing off. Is nothing but proving to your peers and to whoever is interested that you can afford to make this extra effort to use resources to bring something that you might as well procure more locally to your own dinner table. And by doing that, these customers in the Assyrian heartland imitated the behaviour of the king. The king, of course, had been doing this for a long time. The king had been the person who could dazzle whoever came to join him in the feast, in a banquet, with exotic foods, with exotic wines. And it was really at the heart of the imperial project, if you will. So, if you came to the city of Kalhu during the reign of Ashurnasirpal in the 9th century, when this city was inaugurated as the new capital, there was a huge banquet. We actually know the list of foodstuff that was served there because Ashurnasirpal felt that this was so important that he committed that to an inscription, that he put into the most important courtyard of his palace. So, we know what they drank, how much wine they drank, and so on and so forth. And the people in the well-to-do households of cities like Assur they imitated this behavior by making a big deal about the provenance, especially the exotic provenance, of the foods that they drink. So, again, quality or provenance is what matters here. And that's, in a way, what the people of Assyria appreciated about the empire. The fact that it gave them the opportunity to source things that they might not necessarily need and to make statements about their social standing, about their economic possibilities, about their meaning, their standing in the world by just going about in their normal usual way, by dressing however very expensively, by consuming expensive foodstuff. So, we've seen that it was a culture that valued luxury goods, that brought them in from far-flung places, that basically invented the concept of connoisseurship. Is there anything that you would like to add about luxury goods and their place within the empire as a whole? Well, luxury it enabled social distinction and social layering. And that was considered desirable by the state. The state wanted the people of Assyria to be able to express their social standing in this way and encouraged them to do this. As we said, people are imitating court life. This starts at the court. And the idea of luxury as something that turns a necessity into something that is desirable and aspirational. It starts at court in that when you dine with the Assyrian king, according to the fabric, the material from which your dinner service is made, reflects your social standing as seen by the king. So, the more important you are, the better quality your bowls are. And the highest ranking members of court society would use gold, then comes silver, then comes bronze, and then comes various qualities of ceramics. And this introduces this idea of luxury into society, I would say, because it creates a desire to have the better quality ware. To not be happy and content with your very nice clay bowl from which you can drink wine just as well as from the golden one, but to aspire to the better type of material because that highlights your standing in this society. And then basically, there's this desire to have the better quality, to show it off and so on. That turns people in the Assyrian Empire to participants in this project of the Assyrian Empire to create a diverse and socially-structured society where everyone sort of knows their place. And the closer you are to the centre of things, to the palace, the better you are.
