Long gold and silver tubes found in the ancient burial mound in Southern Russia could apparently be giant drinking straws. They were reportedly used to consume mass quantities of beer from a communal jar.
This has been revealed by a new study of the tubular metal artefacts undertaken by archaeologist Viktor Trifonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the History of Material Culture, and his colleagues.
The mound was first excavated in 1897 by Professor Nikolai Veselovsky of St Petersburg University on the outskirts of Maikop, a small town in the north-western Caucasus. In due course, the Maikop mound, famed for its extremely rich burial and evidence for extensive cultural connections, would lend its name to the Maikop Early Bronze Age Culture.
According to the new study, the Bronze Age Maikop kurgan is one of the most richly furnished prehistoric burial mounds in the northern Caucasus. Its excavation in 1897 yielded a set of gold and silver tubes with elaborate tips and decorative bull figurines. Interpretations of these tubes include their use as sceptres and as poles to support a canopy.
Re-examination of these objects, however, suggests they were used as tubes for the communal drinking of beer, with integral filters to remove impurities. If correct, these objects represent the earliest material evidence of drinking through long tubes—a practice that became common during feasts in the third and second millennia BC in the ancient Near East.
"If our Maikop drinking tubes hypothesis is correct, it may also explain the position of the tubes within the grave and their grouping in a set of eight. The upside-down position of the bull figurines on the tubes with respect to the skeleton—an alignment inappropriate for standards or sceptres—accords with the ‘working’ position of the drinking tubes: with the tip-strainer pointing downwards, as though ready to immerse in a vessel of beer, with the inverted bulls appearing the right way up to the drinker," the researchers say.
The significance of the drinking tubes being placed next to the body of the deceased becomes clearer when considered in the context of contemporaneous images of banqueting scenes. These frequently show two individuals flanking a large vessel, each with a tube held to their mouth and the other end inside the vessel. Often two to four more straws are depicted protruding from the same vessel alluding to the presence of other individuals sharing the beverage, even if space and style constrained the artist from portraying the whole group of drinkers.
"The set of eight tubes of precious metal from the Maikop kurgan have been interpreted in diverse ways since their discovery over a century ago. Here, we have argued that they were used as drinking tubes. If our interpretation is correct, these represent the earliest known drinking tubes, recovered not from the heart of the ancient Near East, but from the remote periphery of that world, in the northern Caucasus. While this does not mean that drinking tubes were invented in the Caucasus, it implies long-distance contacts, and that by the middle of the fourth millennium BC, these devices had become part of local funerary practices, Trifonov pointed out.
A CNN report said the Maikop straws came from a site that is hundreds of miles away from where straws were used in Mesopotamia, suggesting that the use of straws must have spread between regions.
"The finds contribute to a better understanding of the ritual banquets' early beginnings and drinking culture in hierarchical societies," Trifonov said.
"Before having done this study, I would never have believed that in the most famous elite burial of the Early Bronze Age Caucasus, the main item would be neither weapons nor jewelery, but a set of precious beer-drinking straws," Trifonov noted