Honey Before Sugar: Sweetness in the Ancient World, from Cave Paintings to the Tomb of Tutankhamun
Imagine a world in which the only sweet things are ripe fruit, in season, for a few weeks a year, and one substance made by insects, gathered at real risk from a hollow tree. That was the human condition for almost all of our history. Sugar cane was a Southeast Asian curiosity until the medieval period and an affordable commodity only after the plantations of the Caribbean, which means that for roughly ten thousand years of settled life, "sweet" meant honey. It was food, medicine, preservative, currency, offering and embalming fluid, and the people who kept bees held a craft closer to alchemy than farming. Our honey guide covers what is in the jar; this is what the jar meant before there was a jar.
The honey hunters
The oldest record of human honey gathering is a painting on a cave wall in eastern Spain, at Cuevas de la Araña near Valencia, some eight thousand years old: a figure climbing ropes or ladders toward a hole in a cliff, surrounded by bees, one arm reaching into a wild nest. Honey hunting of exactly this kind continues today in Nepal and parts of Africa, and it is dangerous. The reward was the most calorie-dense food in the landscape, and human beings will do a great deal for it; some anthropologists argue that honey was as important as meat in the diets that grew our large brains.
Egypt: the first beekeepers
The Egyptians did not hunt bees; they kept them. Tomb reliefs from about 2400 BCE show beekeepers working rows of horizontal clay hives, smoking the bees, removing comb and pressing the honey into jars, and the bee itself was a royal symbol, the hieroglyph of the king of Lower Egypt. Honey sweetened bread and beer, dressed wounds, because its low water content and acidity kill bacteria, a fact Egyptian doctors knew and modern hospitals have rediscovered, and went into the tombs as an offering. Jars of honey found in pharaonic burials are famously still edible after three thousand years, because honey does not spoil. Beekeepers moved their hives up and down the Nile on rafts to follow the bloom, which is what a migratory beekeeper still does with a truck.
Greece and Rome
The Greeks made honey a subject of philosophy and poetry. Aristotle wrote about bees at length and got much of it wrong; the honey of Mount Hymettus near Athens, thyme-scented, was the most prized in the ancient world and is still sold under the name. Honey was mixed with wine, poured as a libation, offered to the gods and to the dead, and the Greek word for it gave us melissa. The Romans farmed it on an industrial scale; the agricultural writers Varro and Columella give detailed instructions for hive management, and Roman cooking, as recorded in the recipes attributed to Apicius, used honey in nearly everything, savory and sweet, often alongside vinegar and fish sauce in a sweet-sour balance the modern palate would recognize from a glaze. Mulsum, wine sweetened with honey, opened Roman dinners.
Mead and the north
Where grapes would not grow, honey became alcohol. Mead, honey fermented with water, is among the oldest alcoholic drinks in the world and the drink of the Norse and Anglo-Saxon halls; Beowulf's warriors drink it, and the word for the hall itself, mead-hall, tells you what it was for. Medieval northern Europe drank mead the way the south drank wine, and its decline in the early modern period tracks the rise of hops and beer and, later, cheap sugar for distilling.
The monastery hives
Through the Middle Ages, beekeeping was in large part a monastic craft, because the Church needed beeswax for candles and honey for the infirmary and the kitchen, and because monks kept records. Monasteries across Europe had skeps, the woven straw hives that are still the symbol of beekeeping, and the knowledge of how to manage a colony passed through them. The word "honeymoon" is medieval, possibly from the custom of drinking mead for a month after a wedding, possibly from the waning of early sweetness; the etymologies disagree and both are pleasing.
Then sugar
Cane sugar reached medieval Europe through the Arab world as a rare, expensive spice sold by the ounce alongside pepper and cinnamon. It stayed rare until European plantations, first on Atlantic islands and then, catastrophically for the millions of enslaved people who worked them, in the Caribbean and Brazil, began producing it by the ton in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the eighteenth century sugar was cheap enough for the English working class to put in its smuggled tea, which our tea history recounts, and honey lost the job it had held for ten thousand years. It became what it is now: a flavor rather than a sweetener, chosen for what it tastes of rather than for the fact that it is sweet.
What the history explains
Why honey keeps forever: the same chemistry that made it medicine in Egypt, low water and high acidity, means a sealed jar never spoils, and crystallized honey is not bad honey. Why varietal honey exists: a honey tastes of the flowers the bees visited, thyme on Hymettus, orange blossom in Andalusia, chestnut in the Apennines, and once honey stopped being the only sweetener, that variation became the reason to buy it. Why honey and cheese go together: the pairing is Greek and Roman, and our cheese plate math treats it as settled law. And why a good honey costs what it does: a jar is the work of tens of thousands of bees over a season and a beekeeper who moved them to the bloom, exactly as on the Nile. The varietal honeys on our honey shelf are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com, and any one of them would have been worth a king's ransom at the court of Tutankhamun.
