Ancient literature and linguistics, alongside archaeology and genetics, reveal wine’s origins in the Caucasus and Levant. Myths from Mesopotamia, Israel, and Greece preserve cultural memories of early viticulture, while the shared word for wine across languages shows how the culture spread through contact and trade.
See also Tracing the Origins of Wine in the Ancient Mediterranean (Routledge, 2025).
By Luke Gorton
Senior Lecturer in Classics and Religious Studies
University of New Mexico
October 2025
Much excellent work has been done in recent years on the question of the origins of wine from disciplines such as archaeology, paleobotany, and plant genetics. Scholars such as Patrick McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania have made significant progress in determining the when and where of the earliest wine culture, pinpointing the area south of the Caucasus Mountains in modern-day Georgia and Armenia as the region that first began to produce wine on a large scale during the sixth millennium BCE (McGovern 2019). However, lines of evidence from philological disciplines such as literature and linguistics also contribute to our understanding of both the origins and the early spread of wine. These lines of evidence not only help confirm what data from the other fields are telling us, but also give us a clearer picture of matters pertaining to the question of “how” and “who”: how did wine and wine culture spread from place to place, and who spread it? In this article (based on material from my recent book Tracing the Origins of Wine in the Ancient Mediterranean), I will outline some of the most interesting evidence that can be gleaned on this topic from the literary traditions of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean before moving on to discuss the important contributions provided by the field of historical linguistics. Along the way, I will compare and contrast what the philological evidence suggests with the conclusions being reached by way of data from other fields.
The literary testimony left behind by the cultures of the ancient Near East is replete with mentions of wine and its attendant culture. Even as far back as the earliest written testimony from Sumer and Egypt, wine is present as an object of culinary, commercial, and religious value. This basic fact confirms that wine was already a well-established commodity throughout the region by the end of the fourth millennium BCE. All the same, wine seems to be something still exotic in the earliest literary testimony from these areas. In Sumerian literature, wine is frequently connected with the mountains on the fringes of Mesopotamia, while Egyptians associated the strip of land to their northeast (the Levant) with wine production. This confirms that the grapevine and winemaking were not native to these lowland regions, but rather were perceived by both cultures as a foreign (if prestigious) element.
Later literature from Mesopotamia written in Akkadian is even more full of wine than Sumerian literature, but those writing in Akkadian continue to portray wine as a “drink of the mountains.” Yet often, they are more specific: wine is frequently associated with the mountains to the north of Mesopotamia, with wine coming down the Tigris and Euphrates as a trade item from their headwaters. Writing in Greek much later, Herodotus even mentions the use of wooden barrels to transport wine from Armenia to the wine-thirsty cities in the lowlands. As such, Mesopotamian literature provides welcome confirmation that wine was indeed specially associated with the mountainous region south of the Caucasus.
Moving west, the literature of ancient Israel likewise has much to say about wine. Specifically relevant to our purposes, the Hebrew Bible contains a fascinating etiological account of the origins of the beverage. In Genesis 9, Noah exits the ark and famously proceeds to plant a grapevine and get drunk off of the product. The location of this story is clear from the context: Noah is in the region of Mount Ararat, or Mount Urartu if we restore the likely original vowels to the Hebrew text. Whether Ararat or Urartu, it appears that Noah’s primordial experimentation with winemaking is set in the region south of the Caucasus in the vicinity of modern-day Armenia and Georgia. Remarkably, modern scientific disciplines place the origins of wine in precisely the same region that an ancient Israelite familiar with the account handed down in the book of Genesis might have done.
But not all ancient societies of the Levant appear to have been predisposed to think of wine as a product with distant origins. While the extant literature from Ugarit records no account comparable to the story of Noah from Genesis that might explicitly reveal Ugaritic beliefs about the location of the origins of wine, it does mention a god Gapn (“grape” or “grapevine”) who, along with his partner Ugar, serves as the messenger of the great god Baʿal. Baʿal, in turn, lives on Mount Zaphon, the prominent peak visible from Ugarit. While not an explicit narrative about the origins of wine, this suggests that those living in Ugarit may in fact have associated wine not with some far-away place but with a local mountain where the grapevine did indeed grow and wine was produced in abundance.
As such, we see two opinions as to the location of the origins of wine broadly represented across the literature of the ancient Near East. The first and most widespread belief was that wine was uniquely associated with the region to the south of the Caucasus Mountains in the area of modern-day Armenia. The second belief was that wine was in some way connected to the region of the Levant. Given the modern consensus that wine culture was in fact born in the former area, should we simply dismiss the ancient narrative that the Levant was also notably associated with viticulture? Until recently, this evaluation might have been defensible. However, very recent improvements in our ability to trace plant genetics have led to a new study (Dong et al. 2023) positing not one but two early domestications of the wild grapevine. This is notable because the domesticated grapevine has much plumper grapes than the wild iteration (among other useful mutations), thus making the possession of the domesticated grapevine a virtual prerequisite for the development of a wine culture. If the grapevine was domesticated primarily in two places, then each of those places may have independently developed a wine culture at an early period. According to the recent study, one of those regions was predictably the area to the south of the Caucasus, modern-day Georgia and Armenia. But the study also pinpointed another region of grapevine domestication that was more surprising to modern scholars. This area? The northern and central Levant. It is extraordinary indeed that cutting-edge studies are beginning to tell us much the same thing about the origins of wine and its attendant biological technology that literature from the Bronze Age had already intimated.
Moving west to the literature of ancient Greece, we find an even richer plethora of narratives concerning the origins of wine, the grapevine, and the cultural elements that tend to go along with it. While Greek literature offers occasional overt statements on these topics, it is in the stories of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus, that we find the richest vein of perspectives. A famously complex deity with many seemingly contradictory features, Dionysus boasts an extremely thorny and superficially self-contradictory origin story. Although apparently born in Thebes to a Greek princess (albeit one whose father was an immigrant from the Levant), he was then spirited away as a baby for safekeeping and raised in a location called Mount Nysa somewhere to the east or south of Greece, only to return to his birthplace as an adolescent to proclaim his godhood. Over the years, many Greek commentators attempted to pinpoint the location of this Mount Nysa in various places throughout Asia and Africa. The lexicographer Hesychius attempts to delimit the possibilities, perhaps with a touch of irony: “Nysa and the Nyseion mountain: not in one place, since it is in Arabia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Babylon, Eritrea, Thrace, Thessaly, Cilicia, India, Libya, Lydia, Macedonia, Naxos, around Pangaios, [and it is] a place in Syria.” If we are attempting to ascertain the “real location” in which Dionysus was raised, then we, like the ancient Greeks, are liable to conclude that such a search is at best difficult and at worst useless. However, our essentially modern emphasis on separating “fact” from “myth” may be blinding us to the function that myth can have as an allegory for other truths. Much as the association of the Ugaritic god Gapn with a particular location may have been a way for ancient Ugaritic storytellers to “encode” their belief (perhaps based on distant historical memory) that the location in question had a fundamentally close association with wine and the grapevine, so also this seeming confusion across Greek literature about the “origins of Dionysus” may in fact be a means by which Greeks recorded their understanding about the complex origins of wine in the region of the Aegean. How then might these narratives of Dionysus be understood?
Greek myths about Dionysus often centered on wine, but various stories involve Dionysus introducing disparate elements of wine culture at different times. At one time he may be portrayed introducing the grapevine (perhaps of the domesticated variety) to Greece; elsewhere, he is shown to introduce knowledge of viticulture and winemaking; elsewhere still, he teaches mortals how to use the gift of wine in moderation. Thus, Dionysus’s mythology suggests that Greeks understood their own wine culture to contain various elements that were brought to Greece at different times. When we look at modern data from archaeology and paleobotany, we find that the Aegean was indeed a crossroads which benefited from transfers of technology from different directions over a broad period of time. To start, the wild grapevine grew naturally in Greece, suggesting a certain autochthonous element to Dionysus. But the domesticated grapevine was imported at some point from the east (the Levant and/or the Caucasus), with northern Greece (Thrace) serving as a likely point of connection with Anatolia and the points east from which the domesticated grapevine likely came. Paleobotanical evidence, for its part, reveals that Thrace was the earliest region of Greece to receive the domesticated grapevine, while in Greek myth Dionysus has special connections to Thrace. Meanwhile, the island of Crete in the far south is the first place to exhibit a mature wine-drinking culture in the archaeological record, complete with pitchers and drinking cups. This suggests a stimulus to increased wine-drinking from the south and east, likely over the sea from Egypt and the Levant. When we turn to the literary evidence, we find that Dionysus also has a notable mythological connection to Crete. As such, it is the very places that Dionysus is most closely associated with in his myths that modern research most closely associates with the arrival of various elements of wine culture to the Aegean. When the Greeks tell us that Dionysus was “from” Thrace, Crete, Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant, and even Greece itself, they may well be passing down a dimly recalled historical memory about the complex origins of wine and wine culture in their part of the world.
Thus far, we have discussed literature from the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean that bears upon the question of the origins and spread of wine. This literary evidence accords unexpectedly well with the evidence from modern scientific disciplines. Yet quibbles are possible, of course: perhaps the stories of Noah or Dionysus did not mean to ancient listeners what we think they meant, or perhaps it was partially or entirely fortuitous that they got the story largely correct. Such are just some of the difficulties with working with literature from any period. But the words that have been handed down to us from antiquity contain other information beyond mere semantic content. In particular, the word for “wine” has been remarkably similar across most languages of Europe and the Near East for thousands of years. Using the principles of historical linguistics, we can make this word give up its secrets and reveal to us yet more information about the early spread of wine, information that might be invisible in the archaeological record and forgotten to ancient literature.
The common word for wine occurs across many ancient languages, and not just those from one family. Indo-European languages attest a plethora of similar but distinct forms such as Greek woinos, Latin vinum (where the v is of course pronounced like a w), and Hittite wiyanas. But many Semitic languages also possess the term, such as Arabic wayn- and Hebrew yayin. (Like all Northwest Semitic languages, Hebrew prehistorically changed word-initial w sounds into y sounds, so the earlier form would have been wayin or the like.) In addition, the term occurs in Egyptian as wnš and in Kartvelian languages like Georgian as γvin- (where the initial letter is a rolled g sound). Etruscan also possesses the term as vinm. Given the similarities in the word shape across all of these languages, it is likely that the term originated in one language and spread to the others. But which one?
As we attempt to answer this question, morphological considerations are paramount. When we try to ascertain the source language for any widespread term, it is useful to discern in what language the term makes sense (that is to say, is composed of meaningful parts as opposed to being a morphologically meaningless set of sounds). Take our English word vodka; while we understand the referent for this set of sounds, the word is not made up of meaningful units in English. But in Russian, the term is made up of the two morphemes vod- “water” and -ka (a diminutive suffix). Without any further knowledge, we would surmise based on this data that the term is native to Russian and not English, and we would be correct. However, the drink vodka need not be an invention of Russian speakers for this to hold true; the fact that English borrowed this term from Russian is an artifact of a particular moment of cultural contact rather than a guarantee of ultimate origins.
The same logic will guide us as we consider the ancient word for wine. As we examine different families for evidence of morphological suitability, we find only one family in which the term contains plausible connections to other morphemes. The Indo-European family contains a well-attested root *weih₁ which means “twist, weave,” or the like. As evidenced by the oldest-recorded branch of Indo-European languages, the Anatolian family, a common particularizing morpheme -n- was added to this root to make a noun with the literal meaning of “the twisty thing.” This, then, was the native Indo-European term for the grapevine. Sensibly, derivations of this word were used to refer to the primary beverage derived from “the twisty plant,” and in this way the word “wine” in its usual sense was born.
If the “wine” word is an Indo-European coining, then it follows that the other language families of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East that possess the term all borrowed it from an Indo-European language at some point. Indeed, the source language and approximate time and place of borrowing are typically easy to pin down on linguistic and historical grounds: the Etruscan term likely comes from the surrounding Italic Indo-European languages, the Egyptian term appears to come from the Anatolian Indo-European languages, and the Kartvelian term was borrowed from neighboring Armenian gini (itself containing a typical Armenian mutation of initial w sounds into g sounds, likely via a fricative of the sort still seen in the extant Kartvelian terms for wine).
Yet it is the question of how languages of the Semitic branch came to possess wayn- words that is the most complex but also historically notable when it comes to borrowings of this term. The Semitic languages appear to have possessed the word reaching well back into their prehistory, perhaps before the end of the fourth millennium. While there is uncertainty as to the location that early Semitic languages were spoken, a good guess places them in upper Mesopotamia. Meanwhile, Indo-European languages (with the exception of the Anatolian branch) were blossoming during the fourth millennium on the Pontic-Caspian steppe to the north of the Caucasus (see most recently Mallory 2025). Due to linguistic considerations too complex to consider here, the wayn- term in Semitic does not appear to have been a borrowing from an Anatolian Indo-European language, but rather from a dialect of the steppe. When and where would such a dialect have come into contact with an early Semitic language? During the last few centuries of the fourth millennium, the steppe group known as the Yamnaya was extremely mobile, riding hundreds of miles east and west on horseback across the steppe. Yet there is also evidence that they went south as well and established themselves for some time in the region south of the Caucasus—the region, as we have seen, that was the home of wine culture. It was at this moment in history that an Indo-European group became associated with wine to such an extent that, as they came into contact with Semitic speakers to their south, they handed on their own word for wine. It is noteworthy that there was a significant expansion in the cultural importance and use of wine in the late fourth millennium, and these Indo-Europeans may well have contributed to this renewed impulse.
Thus, the value of comparing data from all lines of evidence is clear as we seek to understand the origins and spread of wine and wine culture. When we bring together current conclusions from archaeology and paleobotany with the perspectives yielded by ancient literature and historical linguistics, we find that we are able to tell a more complete story. The literary data, for its part, is in notable agreement with the most current conclusions from other fields, confirming that ancient narratives associated wine most strongly with those very regions to which modern data points. Meanwhile, the linguistic data adds color and nuance to the archaeological account by allowing us to understand the role that early Indo-Europeans played in the dissemination of wine culture and wine vocabulary beginning in the late fourth millennium. The identity of the ultimate inventors of wine culture remains thus far a mystery—but perhaps this is simply the next thing to be discovered!
References
Dong, Y. et al. (2023). “Dual Domestications and Origin of Traits in Grapevine Evolution.” Science 379, 892–901.
Gorton, Luke (2025). Tracing the Origins of Wine in the Ancient Mediterranean. Routledge.
Mallory, J.P. (2025). The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How A Scientific Revolution Is Rewriting Their Story. Thames and Hudson.
McGovern, Patrick (2019). Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viticulture, 2nd edition. Princeton.