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Bees in Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Grahame Clark
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Extract

As purveyors of honey and wax, substances rated high by early man, bees would seem to deserve more attention from archaeologists than they have in fact received. In this respect they serve to point a moral. The tendency has all too frequently been to concentrate on those aspects of ancient cultures which lend themselves most easily to classification, to the neglect of those which promise the closest insight into the working of the societies under review, thus inverting the true outlook of the archaeologist and turning him away from the activities of human beings towards a world of abstractions. The thesis one would like to urge is that the prime concern of archaeology is the study of how men have lived in society, of how within the social frame-work they have striven to satisfy and multiply their wants. From such a standpoint the means adopted to gratify the taste for sweet things, a taste shared by man and beast and physiological in its basis, merits at least as much attention as current fashions in safety-pins and other topics beloved of ‘museologists’

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 16 , Issue 63 , September 1942 , pp. 208 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1942

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References

1 Geography, 15, 1, 20.

2 Cambridge Economic History of Europe, I, 355.

3 This is illustrated for instance by the following figures for estimated sugar consumption in Great Britain : in 1700, 10,000 tons, in 1800 150,000 tons, and in 1885, 1,110,000 tons.

4 Reproduced from Francisco Hernandez-Pacheco, ‘Escena Pictoria con Representaciones de Insectos de Époco Paleolitica’, Real Soc. Española de Hist. Nat., T.d. 50 Ann., pp. 62-67, (Madrid, 1921). An analogous scene is probably represented in the Cueva de la Vieja, Alpera.

I have to thank Mr M. C. Burkitt for his great kindness in looking out and reproducing this illustration and for providing the full reference. Absence from libraries has, in general, prevented me from doing more than indicate in broad outline the scope of what I believe to be a subject of importance for the student of early man.

5 Procs. Prehist. Soc, 1939, V, 220.

6 F. Hartmann, L’Agriculture datts l’ancienne Egypte, pp. 205-6. (Paris, 1923).

7 E. E. Evans, Irish Heritage (Dundalk, 1942), p. 78.

8 Possibly the honey buried in a glass bottle in a Romano-British grave at Bartlow Hills was therapeutic in intention. See L. C. West, Roman Britain : the objects of trade (Oxford, 1931), p. 24. Pliny, Nat. Hist., XXII, 50, is eloquent on the medical virtues of honey.

9 A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials, p. 132.

10 Hartmann, op. cit. 208.

10a e.g. Pliny, Nat. Hist., XXXV, 2 and XXI, 49. Pliny makes the point that wax can easily be made to take colours.

11 Lucas, op. cit. 133, found that though friable bees-wax from Egyptian tombs appeared to have undergone no drastic change. From eleven instances he established a range of melting from 64° to 70°C, which compares with 63°C. for modern commercial bees-wax.

12 Ancient Records, IV, 220, para 454.

13 op. cit. 132 and 133.

14 Hartmann, op. cit. 204-6.

15 Procs. Soc. Ant. Scot., LXIX, 424-30.

16 I. Manninen, Die Finnisch-Ugrischen Völker (Leipzig, 1932), 215-17, and 243-4.

17 Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 1, 483. An example of such, a dispute is that in which the people of the city of Riga were involved with the Livs in 1349 over the ownership of honey trees.

18 e.g. in 15th century Lithuania. See Rutkowski, ibid, 409.

19 Sufficient would be left for the winter. Any that remained would be collected in the spring.

20 Strabo must have been referring to hives like those in use among the Finno-Ougrians when he wrote that ‘In Hyrcania . . . bees have their hives in the trees, and honey drips from their leaves’. Similar hives were said to have been in use in Media and Armenia. Geography, II, i, 14.

21 See note 20. Strabo also refers to the bitter honey of Colchis. Geography, XI, ii, 17.

22 It should be remembered that fodder-crops like clover played a very minor role in prehistoric times.

23 Equally significant is Isaiah’s reference (VII, 15, 22) to a diet of curdled milk and honey, symbolizing invasion and the conversion of agricultural into pastoral districts.

24 Geography, VI, iii, 6.

25 ibid, IV, vi, 9.

26 ibid, IX, i, 23.