It might seem that our era of expensive restaurants, celebrity chefs and exotic edibles is novel. O'Connor's delightful book examines what similar practices looked like in the past, considering texts and archaeological evidence from ancient Europe and Asia. The result is both historically rich and remarkably contemporary in its concerns.
O'Connor asks us to consider ancient drinking vessels and cooking wares, such as those now housed as ‘art’ in the British Museum, as ‘the remains of countless ghostly feasts’ (p. 2) brimming with life, politics and conflict. Ancient literature was obsessed with feasting, and O'Connor skillfully weaves together such narrative texts with archaeological finds and material culture to produce an interdisciplinary ethno-archaeological account of feasting in antiquity.
O'Connor critiques the idea that banqueting is an inherently commensal act, a perspective she sees as grounded in contemporary experience. She presents ancient feasts as competitive, tense, stressful affairs where status was on display for all to see, exclusion made painfully public, and eating part of the serious business of politics and conquest. Food and alcohol are both essential to banquets, but O'Connor separates them, showing how alcohol sometimes complemented, but more often contrasted with, banquet food. She argues that ‘the consumption of alcohol produces a kind of embodied magic in which the experience of reality is transformed’ (p. 206). On the one hand it brought humans into closer contact with the divine, but it also served as a release from the formal, competitive nature of feasting itself. Thus alcohol often recreated commensality by breaking the boundaries of hierarchy formed through banquets and reincorporating those people whom feasts excluded or marginalized.
O'Connor takes a bird's-eye view, highlighting continuities of how food and drink have been used cross culturally. Although this approach occasionally requires glossing over particular temporal or geographical moments, it does not preclude detailed analysis. This book is full of delicious historical tidbits: the most elaborate feast in history, where Ashurnasirpal II fêted almost 70,000 people for 10 days in the ninth century bc (p. 57); the fourth-century bc Greek drinking game of kottabos, vaguely reminiscent to modern eyes of beer pong (p. 105); the election of Guyuk Khan, an event attended by 4000 envoys from China to Georgia to Baghdad (p. 135); the imperial cat banquet hosted by Emperor Teishi of Japan in 999 ad (p. 195). O'Connor focuses each chapter on a separate ancient civilization, adopting an ‘emerging perspective in which Europe is seen as Western Asia’ (p. 24). The chapters can be read independently to supplement readings on particular ancient empires, making this book useful as a teaching text.
Beginning with Mesopotamia, O'Connor argues that Sumerian society—despite spanning 3000 years and a diverse population—had coherent views on ‘food, feasting and the gods’ (p. 30). Beer and bread were central to civilized human life and divine offerings. Great irrigation and agricultural works made abundant food production possible, although they also threatened fields with salination and may have shifted production from wheat to more salt-resistant barley. Temples acted as centralized administrations for receiving and redistributing food in a non-currency economy, taking in offerings to gods and returning rations to people in ways that revealed social hierarchies by gender, age and profession. A later shift in power from temples to kings is demonstrated by the latter taking on the role of providing feasts. Meals were spaces to demonstrate the relative prestige of queens, diplomats and envoys by publicly displaying how close they sat to the king, as well as the quality of foods, number of dishes and type of cups they were offered. Culinary techniques such as browning meats, reducing broths and use of herbs further distinguished elite from ordinary fare.
Chapter 3 remains in Mesopotamia, but moves forward in time to the Assyrians and Achaemenid Persians (c. 1200–530 bc). Here O'Connor points out how the archaeological emphasis on conquest and warfare often elides the ‘foodscape’ that soldiers move through. Ancient artistic representations and literature highlight productive fields, complex irrigation systems and abundant orchards. Assyrians counted feasting dishes among their booty of war, and looting these was itself an act of violence. This foodscape of war linked conquest and agriculture through art, battle and literature.
O'Connor employs the technique of considering how different ancient societies wrote about each other, allowing her to consider two contrasting emic perspectives in ways that illuminate both. For example, she argues that understandings of food distinguished the ancient Greeks from the Persians in the context of Greco-Persian Wars (fifth century bc). The Persians saw themselves as the standard-bearers of civilization and fine cooking; feasting showed the power of the king and his (literal) consumption of the areas he conquered. The Greeks, in contrast, eschewed what they called tryphé, a term encompassing luxuries such as elite cuisine, as leading to weakness and decadence (p. 63). Alexander the Great, after defeating the Persians, destroyed a brass column he found at Persepolis describing one of the feasts of King Cyrus, not recognizing that this document was more political than gastronomic (p. 70). Ancient Greek stereotypes about Persian excesses have painted a negative picture of the ancient Persians that persists today.
Chapter 4 considers the ancient Greeks more fully, starting with the Mycenaean cultures (1600–1400 bc). Despite their rejection of over-luxurious foods, archaeological evidence shows the prevalence and importance of Greek feasts through artistic representations, burial goods of basins, bowls and drinking vessels, and hierarchically arranged feasting sites. Dishes of ceramics, bronze, silver and gold distinguished the ranks of those who used them. Here, O'Connor productively highlights the differences between literary text and historical reality, showing how mythic and narrative texts can be both idealistic and useful for historical interpretation. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey describe idealized feasts and the values these represented. While actual feasting in the period Homer describes was an elite, stratified practice that inscribed power and influence, Homer's literary heroes feast in small groups on simple fare and drink wine from common bowls as a ‘band of brothers’ (p. 92). O'Connor explores the disjuncture between Homeric literature and the historical reality, showing how Homer's fictional feasts form a moral narrative—one where women, slaves, servants and domestic life were effectively hidden from view—that nevertheless influenced how Greek elites later saw their own feasting practices as reflecting a ‘mythic Panhellenic past’. This disconnect between practice and literature highlights the tensions between hierarchy and egalitarian democracy in ancient Greek societies.
Chapter 5 moves east to consider feasting among the steppe cultures of the nomadic horse-peoples of Eurasia. Ancient texts about these groups were largely written by their Greek or Chinese neighbours, who (with the exception of Herodotus) saw them as illiterate barbarians without agriculture or cuisine. O'Connor draws on these accounts and archaeological data to flesh out the longue durée of steppe culture from the Scythians to the Tartars and Mongols. Burial goods and archaeological data show the importance of equestrian mastery, extensive long-distance trade routes, the use of local and imported cooking and drinking wares, and feasting. Steppe cuisine was vastly different from that of ancient Greece and Persia; milk and domesticated meat (horse, cattle, camel, sheep and goats) was most valued, although supplemented with gathered plants and game. Nevertheless, feasting still served as a political arena of status, hierarchy and competition. Drawing on thirteenth-century ad accounts of European envoys to the Mongol Empire, O'Connor shows how drinking especially was central to politics, although centralized food supplies also formed an important form of social control.
In chapter 6, O'Connor considers China, discussing how ancient written records from the Shang Dynasty (1600–1000 bc) focus on bronze vessels and tend to ignore the heaps of butchered animal bones uncovered by archaeologists. Bronze vessels, used for both eating and drinking, were multivalent: they indicated earthly status, transformed food into offerings for ancestors and gods, and were buried with elite individuals. Tracing political and social changes in China over the next several millennia, O'Connor shows how changes in feasting mirrored changes in political structures. She suggests that lacunae in ancient narrative texts are not just the result of the inherent incompleteness of the written record, but also ‘bespeak heavy-handed editing with a political agenda’ (p. 169). Feasting has continued to be deeply political in contemporary China, as evidenced by both its prohibition by Mao Tse-tung and its embrace by many diasporic Chinese communities.
Chapter 7 turns our attention to Japan, focusing on the Kamakura era (beginning in 1192 ad) to the present. Considering the Wei Zhi Chinese chronicle of the third century ad and the Sarashina Diary written in the eighth–twelfth centuries ad, O'Connor attempts to reconstruct the longue durée of Japanese cuisine, arguing that Japanese foodways accepted and transformed foreign influences from China, Europe and elsewhere into a distinctly local culinary tradition.
This book is a fascinating read for those who would like an introduction to the history of ancient foodways, or to consider how archaeology, literature and art can speak to each other. O'Connor lays bare the sheer magnitude and opulence of ancient feasting, only the remains of which is left in museums around the world. Her methodology of making archaeology, ancient texts and material culture speak to each other reveals both how culturally specific feasting is and how similar concerns about status, wealth and warfare transcend across the societies of Europe and Asia. Given the increasing importance of food in the contemporary world, including the emergence of elite cuisines in restaurants, hotels and TV shows, this serious consideration of it makes ancient feasting seem both exotic and deeply familiar.
