ABSTRACT
Some seventy years ago the Orientalist H.F.Lutz tried, in his work Viticulture and Brewing in the Ancient Orient (1922), to give an overview of viticulture in the whole of the ancient Orient including Egypt “from the beginning of historic times down to the wine-prohibition of Muhammed.” The most important point of Lutz’s work, which still holds true today, was that, once upon a time, the Near East was the home of remarkable wine and beer cultures, the traces of which—like the great civilizations in which they flourished—have been so thoroughly obliterated or transformed by the passage of time and humankind that one could never imagine their former existence without turning to the ancient records. Mention of “the wine-prohibition of Muhammed” is no accident, for Lutz clearly had in mind another Prohibition, under whose gathering cloud and dismal reality his work came into existence.
