Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Van Ness, and every week I sit down for a 40 minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa

and an expert on ancient drinking culture, Dr. Sarah E Bond, where I ask her, would I have

been the toast of the ancient world?

Welcome to getting curious, this is Jonathan Van Ness.

I'm so excited for our guests this week and for our topic

because it is so interesting. So without any further ado, welcome to the show

Professor Sarah E Bond Honey. So here's the question. How did we start drinking? Where did it come from? There's so many like layers to this question and I feel like you're really the leading person in this field to talk about.

You just have how you write about the history of drinking is just so interesting.

Your works incredible and welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you. thanks for having me.

I think there are a lot of different people working at different angles on this.

I think that one of the coolest things is that people are starting to reconstruct ancient

alcohol and the recipes from it.

So there are a lot of archaeologists working at the University of Pennsylvania who work with for instance like

Dogfish Brewery which is in Delaware and they're remaking a lot of these ancient

bruise because they've been scraped off the bottom of ceramic vessels that have been found

archaeological digs. So that's one way to kind of recreate the past and for me I like to look at the

social aspects of drinking and

particularly to think about the trade and alcohol throughout the ancient Roman

empire so I specialize in in Rome, but actually drinking goes way back to ancient Mesopotamia and was really born there in the fertile crescent.

So what's modern day Mesopotamia?

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