Honey during ancient Roman

Most of 100 hundred million people who lived in Roman empire were peasants or worker in the land. They normally kept bees for honey and they had no sugar. They relied on honey for sweetening.

Romans did not drink pure wine but mixed it in varying proportions with water and flavored it with honey.

Normally a white wine sweetened with honey was served with the first course; for the main course there was wine mixed with water.

Their meals in rich households included shellfish, edible snails, roasted duck or chicken, birds were cooked in honey.

Even boiled eggs were to be eaten with a sauce compounded out of soaked pine-kernels, pepper, lovage, honey and vinegar with some of the inevitable liquamen or fish sauce.

Roman also gave milk and honey to a newborns to ward off sickness and evil spirits.

Honey was not only appreciated as a food, it was also the food of the gods.

The church welcome the milk and honey custom into worship since it could and re-imagine it as the fulfillment of God’s promise to their ancestor that he would lead them to a land flowing with milk and honey.

When the first bakers and confectioner opened their shops at Rome by 170 BC they soon sold all kind of honey-cakes which figured as dessert and sweets on the tables.
Honey during ancient Roman

Honey in ancient Egypt

It is quite certain that the alcoholic fermentation of honey was known to the ancient Egyptians when history began.

Honey was traced in a mash of beer-bread of Eleventh Dynasty date (2000 BC) and it was certainly used in another Egyptian mash of Roman date (1st century AD) found in the Fayum.

Honey was the main sweetener in Egypt – sugar was still unknown. The people of this time valued honey highly thus it was commonly used as a tribute or payment. Honey was also used to feed sacred animals.

Not only used for the preservation of meat, but was also the most widely used medication. Of nine hundred remedies recorded in various papyri, over five hundred were based on honey.

As early the sixth dynasty an official named Sebni takes honey on his expedition to the country of the negroes to exchange it for their goods.

Both bees and honey were considered sacred in ancient Egypt and honey featured prominently in religious ceremonies, including offerings to the dead.

In about 1200 BC, King Ramses III offered the gods of the Nile tens of thousands of jars filled with honey, estimated to weigh about fifteen tons.

Beekeeping is thus an ancient activity. It was one of the important minor industries in ancient Egypt and honey is mentioned frequently in the ancient records, the earliest references to it that can be traced being of the Sixth Dynasty.

Egyptians learned to cultivate bees and even how to use smoke to drug them so that honey could be collected without paying the price of stings.
Honey in ancient Egypt

Mead the Fermented Honey

Mead can be traced be back many centuries before Christ.

It was probably the fermented drink perhaps another food accident. May be honey was left out, rain fell, yeast settled on the mixture.

Up to the middle ages, mead was made from fermented honey and water by secretive monks.

Invention of mead was a passage for nature to culture, a process defining behavior.

In Brazil the Mocovi people make ritual use of mead as a ‘sacred, shared beverage’ a festivals and the natives lived in a constant state of intoxication.

In both Greece and Rome, before winemaking, mead was offered to the gods.

Honey was a mysterious substance to ancient people, Greeks, knew bees connected to it, but not exactly how.

Romans thought honey fell from heaven and landed on leaves, “the saliva of the stars.”

The Bambaras of Mali regard mead in a much more serene, light, although they consider it divine. To them it is the drink of wisdom, knowledge and truth, by virtue of the honey and the bees who made the honey.
Mead the Fermented Honey

History of Honey and Early Man

History of Honey and Early Man
During the Pliocene, when honey storing bees had already existed for perhaps a hundred million years, early hominids lived in tropical Africa and fossils of them have been dated to 4 million years ago.

Later, species of Australopithecus developed in Africa, but the whole genus died out some time during the Pleistocene.

Meanwhile another branch of hominids appeared: Homo, the directs ancestors of modern man. The first was H. habilis, perhaps about 2.5 millions years ago, who had the same sources of honey and who made and used tools.

Then came H. erectus about 1.7 millions years ago, whose fossils have been found in Europe and Asia as well as Africa.

Colonies of a “temperate-zone” types of Apis mellifera which survived cold winters were living in Europe by the time H. erectus arrived there.

Within Homo sapiens, two subspecies have been recognized: H. s. neanderthalensis and H. s. sapiens (modern man).

Neanderthal man is known only from Europe and western Asia, In tropical regions, including Java, there were three honey bee species: Apis dorsata, A. cerana and A. florae: in northern China and Japan ecotypes of A. cerana survived cold winters.

Homo sapiens people were hunter gatherer obtained food by hunting animas, and collecting plants and their seeds and fruits. Bee’s nests were usually sought and honey combs collected by men on hunting trips.

Man was at first confined to the Old World – Africa Europe and Apis, where most regions had at least one species of honey bee (Apis).
History of Honey and Early Man