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From The Inns of Greece & Rome, and a history of Hospitality from the Dawn of Time to the Middle Ages, by W. C. Firebaugh, with an Introduction by Wallace Rice and Illustrations by Norman Lindsay, Chicago: Pascal Covici; 1928; pp. 18-26.
THE INNS OF GREECE AND ROME
18Assyrian and Babylonian inns conducted by women — Laws regulating inns — Drinking led to most unbridled extremities — Entire city of Nineveh in different degrees of intoxication — Aromatic wines — Hebrew conception of hospitality — The inn at Bethlehem where Joseph and Mary were forced to take shelter in the stable in which Jesus was born — O’Donovan’s description of the caravanseraei at Kuchan.
In closing our account of the professional hospitality amongst the Egyptians we should bear in mind that they regarded the affairs of everyday life, whatever their tenor, as of little importance; on the other hand, they lavished untold wealth and meticulous care upon their tombs as the places of eternal silence and the sanctuaries to which they withdrew themselves to sleep out time. In these tombs the character of the Egyptian, king or noble, was accurately mirrored, and a sense of dignity, aloof and impersonal, was probably as deeply imbedded in his character as the desire for life itself.
Our information as to Assyrian and Babylonian inns and taverns is necessarily limited because of the fact that their ruins were buried deep below the surface of the country as it is today. Until a relatively recent period we knew little of their records and experienced the greatest difficulty in deciphering such of their inscriptions as had come to light. Now, however, clay tablets, sherds, and tiles have begun to give up their information and the picture is becoming more and more distinct, though they are still far from complete. In the code of Hammurabi (B. C. circa 2225) we have a few facts from which we may infer with reasonable certainty that wine and beer were vended and drunk upon the premises. The ownership of such beer-houses, wine-shops, or taverns, as were conducted in 19 Nineveh and Babylon seems to have been vested in the hands of big merchant princes who installed women as managers, and these women actually conducted the resorts. Payment seems to have been made in grain, the price of which was fixed by statute. Patrons were given credit and the score was paid after the harvest. Women conducting such places were forbidden by law to demand money, as this might have caused the customer embarrassment or inconvenience, and the establishment would also have profited if, after the harvest, there had been a fall in the price of grain. Each evasion or contravention of this law was punishable with death. The paragraphs vital to our subject follow:
No. 108.If any of the wine-selling women have not accepted grain in lieu of money, but have insisted upon money in ordinary coin, and thus have assisted in lowering the price of drink and grain, she shall be summoned and thrown into the water.
No. 109.If rebels have assembled in the house of a wine-selling woman, and she has not seized upon them and led them to the fortress, she has forfeited her life.
No. 110.If a priestess who does not reside in the convent have opened a dram shop, or if she have entered there with the purpose of drinking, she shall be burned.
It is of interest to note that the huge block upon which the laws were inscribed had been erected in the temple at Esagil, which was the temple of Bel Merodach, in Babylon. It was discovered in 1901-2 by De Morgan, French archaeologist, and a Dominican monk named Scheil, in the acropolis at Susa. Evidently it had been removed from Babylon by the Elamites. Its contents prove an astonishing degree of civilization in early Babylon 20 and only recently it was invoked as a precedent by a jurist in St. Louis, Missouri.
In addition to the native products, such, for example, as the wines made from palms and dates, caravans also transported the choice vintages of neighboring countries. Drinking was almost universal. Royal banquets were always heavily provided with wine, as both Daniel and Curtius Rufus testify, and the daily fare of the upper classes would have been ill esteemed without the benign and cheering influence of the spirit of the grape. In the houses of the wealthy, fruit juices were fermented and mead and cordials were common. Curtius Rufus, in his history of Alexander the Great, states that in Babylon drinking was an out and out vice, and that in many instances it was carried to the most unbridled extremes and led to excesses such as even the court of Rome knew but infrequently.
As to Assyria, Maspero has drawn the following picture from original sources:
“The Assyrian is sober in ordinary life, but he does not know how to stop if he once allows himself any excess. Wines of Assyrian and Chaldaea, wines from Elam, wine from Syria and Phoenicia, wines from Egypt, amphorae and skins are emptied as soon as opened, without visibly quenching the universal thirst. After one or two days no brain is strong enough to resist it, and Nineveh presents the extraordinary spectacle of an entire city in difference degrees of intoxication. When the festival is over several days are required before it resumes its usual aspect. Whilst the people are becoming tipsy outside, Assurbanipal feasts the leading chiefs and the ministers of state within the palace. They are seated on double chairs, two on each side of a small table, face to face. The chairs are high, without any backs or footstool upon which the guest can rest either elbows or feet; the 21 honor of dining with the king must always be paid for with some fatigue.
“The tables are covered with fringed cloths, upon which the dishes are placed by the slaves. Unlike the common people, the nobles eat little, so that few dishes of meats are placed before them, but cakes and fruits of different kinds; grapes, dates, apples, pears, and figs are brought in continued relays by long lines of slaves.
“On the other hand, they drank a great deal — with more refinement, perhaps, than the common people, but with greater avidity. Upon this occasion, the king has distributed the most precious vases in his treasury, cups of gold and silver, the majority of the moulded or chased in the form of a lion’s head. Many of them were formerly sacred vessels which the priests of vanquished nations used in their sacrifices; some are from Babylon or Carchemish, some were taken from Tyre or Memphis, whilst others belonged to the temples at Samaria and Jerusalem. By using them for a profane occasion, the Assyrians insult the gods to whose service they belong, so that to the pleasure of drinking is added that of humiliating the foreign deities in the sight of Assur whom they resisted.
“The wines, even the most delicate, are not drunk in their natural state; they are mixed with aromatics and various drugs, which give them a delicious flavor and add tenfold to their strength. This operation is performed in the hall, under the eyes of the revelers. An eunuch, standing before the table, pounds in a stone mortar the intoxicating essences, which he moistens from time to time with some substance. His comrades have poured the contents of the amphorae into immense bowls of chased silver, which reach to their chests. As soon as the perfumed paste is ready they put some of it into each bowl and carefully dissolve it. The cup-bearers bring the cups, 22 draw out the wine, and serve the guess. Even the sentinels at the doors receive their share, and, standing spear or club in hand, pledge each other as they mount guard. The only persons who do not drink or who drink very little, through the necessity of retaining their sobriety, are the eunuchs — who stand behind the guests to fan them — the servants, and the musicians.”
The ancient Hebrew conception of hospitality was based upon tenets as pure as those of Menelaus, though in later times the right was not binding upon them unless the wayfarer was of their own people.
The place where Zipporah and her son stopped when Moses returned to Egypt may well have been one of the inns along the road between Egypt and the northeastern countries. Owing to the fact that the Hebrews made no distinction between a harlot and an hostess, we cannot be certain that Rahab did not conduct an inn rather than a house of ill fame. In any case, the spies of Joshua found shelter under her roof and she received her reward. The same may be said of the harlot at Gaza whose hospitality Samson shared; but one episode there is which admits of no double meaning; I refer to the return of the sons of Jacob from Egypt. They stopped at an inn and opened their sacks to give fodder to their sumpter mules. One is also impressed with the fact that they carried supplies for the return journey. Such places differed little from the khans of present day Asia; establishments where there was shelter for man and beast but where it was necessary to provide supplies. On the second journey the brothers received from the ruler of Egypt an abundance of supplies and a train of mules and wagons as well. One well furnished with necessities and perhaps a few comforts was confronted, in these towns of Judaea, with some difficulty if he had no friends or acquaintances, and often was compelled to go into camp in the public place, like a modern 23 Bedouin; proof positive that in the Hebrew villages there was often no shelter except that of the shrine of the oldest of professions.
When the angels arrived at Sodom they would have remained in the streets had not Lot pressed his kindly hospitality upon them, which probably meant that there was no inn to which they could apply.
The Levite of Ephraim, a stranger at Gaba, had gone into camp in the public place with his women, his servant, and his beasts of burden; the latter had received their fodder and he was even then getting ready to serve supper, when an old man, a fellow countryman, came to offer, in his own house, a hospitality which was accepted because of the common tie between them.
One can still see in the Jewish villages the open places where travelers pitch their tents, those spaces in the khans where the caravans still find shelter, and conditions today differ little from those of the days of Joseph. The khans are, generally speaking, built within the villages, whereas the enormous caravanserais are constructed along the roads and at distances of about eight miles from each other. Some described by O’Donovan are enormous and the discomfort which they offer is only exceeded by their size.
It is in the khans, however, that we find the nearest approach to the shelters which, in the times of Jacob, were to be found along the roads leading from Egypt; shelters which the Latin translators of the Holy Writ have probably rendered erroneously by their term deversorium, and the bleak desolation and utter lack of commissary are eloquent commentary upon the wisdom which prompted the sons of Jacob to prevent themselves from being placed at the mercy of those conducting such places, more especially where they were otherwise unknown and friendless.
24The inn at Bethlehem where Joseph and Mary were forced to take such shelter as they could find in the face of the emergency which confronted the expectant mother was one of the khans such as are still the rule in those regions. The crowd of travelers, caravan hucksters, which had already arrived, left not even a corner for the weary pair, and they were forced to find such comfort as they could in the stable. There the mother gave birth to Him who was thereafter to be the Saviour of all humanity; she wrapped Him in swaddling clothes and laid Him in the manger because there was no room in the inn.
If the inns were by no means numerous in the Hebrew countries, the taverns were not more so, and an exhaustive analysis of the Holy Writ will produce no allusion to a cabaret, and this, notwithstanding the fact that much wine was consumed and that the Hebrews also knew how to brew beer. In addition to the native vintages, and some of them were of the finest, wine was imported from Phoenicia and from Egypt, and, later on, from the Greek Archipelago and Ionia.
The promised land which lay at the end of the long exodus from Egypt was a land of milk and of honey, a land of wine and of plenty. The grape and the pomegranate flourished, and the wines of Engeddi, Carmel, and Gelboa were famous, although not produced in sufficient quantities to meet the demand, and pomegranate wine and various artificial products were made.
Before quitting the subject of Levantine hospitality, we wish to introduce the readers to two pictures which, it is hoped, will enable the mind to visualize both sides of the subject, the sordid and the beautiful. For this purpose we quote O’Donovan’s description of the caravanserai at Kuchan, as he found it in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The quotation is apt because the conditions he describes are in no way different from those 25 which beset travelers in pre-classical ages, in the Levant, and could with equal propriety be attributed either to Persia or Palestine.
“After some experience of Kuchan, and especially of its caravanserai, I felt the strongest desire to get away from it. Of all the wretched localities of this wretched East, it is one of the worst I have been in. To people at a distance, the petty miseries one undergoes in such a place may seem more laughable than otherwise; there they do not at all tend to excite hilarity in the sufferer. For four days and nights at a stretch I did not enjoy ten minutes’ unbroken rest. All day long one’s hands were in perpetual motion, trying to defend one’s face and neck against the pertinacious attacks of filthy blue-bottles, or brushing ants or various other insects off one’s hands and paper. With all this extra movement, each word I wrote occupied me nearly a minute. Dinner involved a perpetual battle with creeping things, and was a misery that seldom tempted one’s appetite. As for the time spent on the top of the house, lying on a mat, and which it would be a mockery to call bed-time, it would be difficult to say whether it or the daylight hours were the more fraught with torment. Every ten minutes it was necessary to follow the example of the people lying around, and to rise and shake the mat furiously, in order to get rid, for a brief space, of the crowds of gigantic black fleas which I could hear dancing around, and still more distinctly feel. The impossibilities of repose, and the continual irritation produced by insects, brought on a kind of hectic fever which deprived me of all desire to eat. All night long three or four scores of donkeys brayed in chorus; vicious horses screamed and quarrelled, and hundreds of jackals and dogs rivalled each other in making night hideous. After sunset the human inhabitants of the caravanserai mounted to the roof, and sat there in 26 scanty garments, smoking their kaliouns, and talking or singing until long after midnight.”
In contrast to this dreary picture we have O’Donovan’s tribute to a comfortable hotel in Teheran. It is worthy of notice that there were and are certain establishments in Ispahan and other centers which have a charm scarcely to be found elsewhere except in some secluded garden in Seville or in the private grounds of one of the smaller potentates of the Asiatic tropics. The Café de Roses, the Café du Fleuve, the Café de la Porte-du-Salut, with its sycamores, happy patrons and servants, lovely gardens and artificial waterfalls, has all the enchanting and haunting charm of a half remembered dream in which complete rest and relaxation fade slowly into oblivion only to waken to a reality that becomes more haunting as it is better understood. Well did the philosopher remark that East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.
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