An Ancient Egyptian, a Viking and a Cowboy Walk Into a Bar... A short History of Drinking Through the Ages
When the word ‘university’ comes into conversation in New Zealand, there is one word commonly associated with it: ALCOHOL. It’s no secret that the binge drinking culture in New Zealand is huge, particularly among university students. According to the Salvation Army’s public policy and research study ‘Under The Influence: Reshaping New Zealand’s Drinking Culture’, young drinkers are an especially tolerant age group when it comes to risky drinking behaviour, such as drinking to excess or binge drinking. The New Zealand Alcohol and Drug Use Survey, last ran in 2007/08, also showed that the heaviest drinkers on average were those aged 18-24.
However, I’m not here to lecture you on why alcohol is bad or why you shouldn’t drink so much. I love a cheeky bottle of wine as much as the next white girl. What I want to talk about is a short history of getting drunk, shown in a range of time periods and locations around the world, to compare different traditions and viewpoints with our drinking culture in modern day NZ.
ANCIENT EGYPT’S ‘FESTIVAL OF DRUNKENNESS’ - 1470 BC
New Zealand uni students of today tend to use New Year’s festivals, such as R&V, as the perfect occasion to get absolutely hammered and fuck anyone in sight. Ancient Egyptians used the ‘Festival of Drunkenness’ instead.
In Alan Boyne’s 2006 NBC News article ‘Sex and booze figured in Egyptian rites’, archaeologists were reported to have found evidence in the ruins of a temple in Luxor, showing that the Festival of Drunkenness consisted of “sex, drugs and the ancient equivalent of rock ‘n’ roll”.
Johns Hopkins University’s Betsy Bryan summed up her team’s findings in this iconic quote, used in Boyne’s article. “We are talking about a festival in which people come together in a community to get drunk. Not high, not socially fun, but drunk — knee-walking, absolutely passed-out drunk.”
The book ‘A Short History of Drunkenness’ by Mark Forsyth also reveals details about this festival. Enormous amounts of beer and wine were handed around the event, but with very little food in tow. There was only one aim in mind for the Egyptians: sacred drunkenness. You had to be ‘wholly drunk’ to be considered a holy drunk, which meant no food to slow down the process. I always get Macca’s after a night out, so I guess that makes me a flop.
The Pharoah’s quote “Let him drink, let him eat, let him shag” meant there was NO room to be frigid. Literally everybody fucked each other, turning into a massive orgy. They didn’t care who saw or what happened, the temple hall was simply filled with people having sex everywhere. If someone got pregnant to a complete stranger, these children would literally grow up to be heavily praised, gaining automatic entry into the priesthood when they became old enough too. I think a LOT of us would be priests if those were today’s entry requirements.
Ancient Egyptians knew how to get fucking rowdy. You could argue that they went even harder than us uni students, making us pale in comparison. Yes, you see the odd couple making sweet love on the street, but it’s not very often you attend a house party that turns into a full-blown sex fest. Food places are also packed to the brim once the clubs close, making us a collective flop of unholy drunks. Take me back to Ancient Egypt, man.
THE ALCOHOLIC VIKING SOCIETY - 8TH-11TH CENTURIES
“Alcohol and drunkenness didn’t need to find their place within Viking society, they WERE Viking society. Alcohol was authority, alcohol was family, alcohol was wisdom, alcohol was poetry, alcohol was military service and alcohol was fate.” - Forsyth, 2017
We probably all know who Vikings are, but I’ll sum up the Wikipedia definition anyway for context. Vikings is the name given to the seafaring Norse pirates who roamed southern Scandinavia in the late eighth to the eleventh centuries. And man, did they absolutely FROTH getting on the piss. Like Forsyth described, alcohol was an integral part of Viking society. In particular, the tradition of ‘drinking and boasting’ competitions was a key part of the Viking drinking culture.
In the 2007 thesis ‘Old Norse Drinking Culture’ by Jesús Fernando Guerrero Rodrìguez, ‘Mannjafnaor’ (a comparison of men) was described as the ultimate competition, consisting of both drinking and boasting. There are a loooooot of elements within these competitions, but Rodrìguez generalises it as “games by which men tried to state their place in society by declaring how powerful they were”. However, one aimed to remain SOBER while drinking. This is because many men would often become too drunk, boasting about things they hadn’t achieved or would not be able to achieve. Wanting to be sober while drinking, though? Sounds like a waste of alcohol to me. If I’m drinking, I either want to be out of my fucking mind, or I’m going home.
Does Forsyth’s quote about alcohol make Viking society sound fun? At first glance, yeah, it does. But in reality, this environment made for a violent society in which warriors were made to drink too much too quickly, brag and insult others in drinking competitions, and they were ALL carrying swords at the time. In Forsyth’s book, he quotes an unknown poet’s highest praise of Beowulf (after the famous Viking) in the poem literally named ‘Beowulf’ was that he “never killed his friends when he was drunk”. Yup, men have been getting praised for the bare minimum for far too fucking long.
We all know THAT guy who gets super fucking cocky after a few drinks and thinks he’s God’s gift to the earth. He claims he’s a beast at beer pong. After he loses ‘cos his aim is shit, he goes on to talk about how he was the “basketball captain in high school, man, no one got as many baskets as me, fucking oath”. Most likely, every other guy listening wants a piece of the action, and they’ll engage in some other meaningless competition to determine who reeks the most testosterone. It usually ends in a fight too, because throwing fists is seen as ‘manly’ in our society.
Safe to say that drinking and boasting competitions are still running rampant among the NZ drinking culture for uni students, especially men. Could it be argued that the Vikings started the rise of toxic masculinity? Maybe. At least nowadays, it’s not typical to just have a casual sword on hand.
THE WILD WEST SALOON - LATE 19TH CENTURY
Luke Barnes’ 2017 Daily Mail article ‘When the West was wild: Fascinating 19th century photographs reveal the brawl-heavy, liquor-filled world of cowboy saloons’ describes the history behind the Wild West drinking culture. Tbh, the most Western movie I’ve watched is the 2011 animated children’s film ‘Rango’ about the little lizard who becomes a sheriff in the Wild West. However, the article does give off Rango vibes, prompting me to explore it further.
The first saloon was opened at Brown’s Hole, Wyoming, in 1822. By the late 1850s, ‘saloon’ became a common term for ‘an establishment that specialised in beer and liquor sales’. Saloons began opening everywhere, with most western towns beginning to have more saloons than churches. They were open 24 hours, seven days a week. Alcohol was also HELLA cheap. Beer cost a fucking NICKEL, and two drinks of hard liquor (spirits) only cost a QUARTER. Fuck, what I would give to have a bar in New Zealand with those hours and prices. What a blissful little dream.
Forsyth gives a little more background to the saloon era in his book, showing that the opening of saloons was also sparked by the amount of people migrating from the East Coast to the West. The Wild West offered double the wages than the East Coast did. Shit, I’d uproot my life and move too for that cash.
But, like most olden day eras, the Wild West certainly wasn’t as progressive as the world we live in now. It was mostly only white men who were in saloons; a black man might be tolerated, Native Americans were banned by law, and the Chinese were really not welcome because the racist white cunts hated them.
‘Respectable’ women also weren’t seen in saloons. Only ‘saloon girls’ were allowed in, deemed to have been somewhere in between ‘respectable and rentable’. Ahhh the sweet smell of misogyny. However, Barnes tells the tale of how these respectable women got their revenge, helping to start the ‘Anti-Saloon League’ in 1893. This league protested for the prohibition of alcohol in the United States, which led to many Wild West saloons being forced to close their doors. Girl power at its finest. They really said if women can’t drink, the rest of you fuckers can’t drink either, soz.
Our bar hours and prices are an absolute joke compared to the Wild West, which has sent me absolutely spiraling. But to be honest, I’d rather spend a little money than drink in that racist, sexist environment of the late nineteenth century. You win some, you lose some. And by that, I mean you win basic human rights but you lose a shit ton of money. What a world.
In conclusion, our current drinking culture amongst university students in New Zealand has its similarities with the drinking cultures of other time periods and locations of the past. For example, men still love to act like Vikings by asserting their manliness through a game of beer pong and bragging about how they peaked in high school.
However, we do have our fair share of differences too. We definitely don’t go as hard as the Ancient Egyptians, and anyone who says we do is delusional. Name one yearly orgy that is commonly known and normalised in New Zealand. Exactly, you can’t. The regulations around drinking are also a lot less racist and sexist (don’t get me wrong, there is still a LOT of growth to be done, but at least women and people of colour aren’t banned from bars in our country). I’ve seen ‘respectable’ university gals drink the boys to shame, and it’s a fucking delight to see. The days of white men being the only ones allowed to drink can rest in hell.
The next time someone wants to lecture you on our binge drinking culture, refer them to the Ancient Egyptians, the Vikings, and the saloons of the Wild West. I’m not trying to glorify the drinking culture of NZ, because obviously it has its own fucked up consequences that deserve attention and solutions. But, you’ve gotta weigh up the positives with the negatives. Uni students like to drink, okay? Like the Pharoah of Ancient Egypt liked to say: “Let them drink, let them eat, let them shag.”