A set of ancient gold and silver tubes dating to about 5,500 years ago and unearthed in North Caucasus in Russia could be the world’s oldest surviving drinking straws, experts have claimed.
The eight thin-walled tubes, each more than a metre in length with a narrow perforated tip, were found in the largest of three compartments containing human remains, discovered during the excavation of a mound near Maykop in the summer of 1897.
The tubes, now in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, date to the fourth millennium BC, and were made of segments joined together. Four of the tubes also feature gold or silver bull figurines that have been slid on to them.
Experts have previously suggested the tubes may have been used to support a canopy used in the funeral procession, or that they were sceptres. A team of experts in Russia, however, said they were likely to be straws for drinking beer from a shared pot.
“If correct, these objects represent the earliest material evidence of drinking through long tubes – a practice that became common during feasts in the third and second millennia BC in the ancient near east,” the researchers wrote.
Writing in the journal Antiquity, the team suggest the items are drinking straws “designed for sipping a type of beverage that required filtration during consumption”.
The researchers say their theory is backed by evidence including depictions on seals from Iran and Iraq dating to the fifth to fourth millennium BC of people using straws to drink, while in the third millennium BC “banquet scenes showing groups of people sipping beer through long tubes from a shared vessel became popular in Mesopotamian art”.
The authors add that a reed stem, wrapped in gold foil, as well as two metal drinking tubes, were previously found in the grave of the woman known as Queen Puabi in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, dating to about 4,500 years ago.
The tubes’ perforated tip is consistent with detachable metal straw tip-strainers used on the ends of reed straws in the Levant and Mesopotamia in the second millennium BC.
“The set of eight drinking tubes in the Maykop tomb may therefore represent the feasting equipment for eight individuals, who could have sat to drink beer from the single, large jar found in the tomb,” the authors wrote.
The team said they found evidence of barley starch in the tip of one of the tubes, although the finding is not conclusive proof of the presence of a drink such as beer.
“The position of the tubes alongside the body emphasises both the importance of the feast in the funerary rite and the high social rank for someone who throws a banquet,” said Viktor Trifonov, first author of the research from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Prof Augusta McMahon of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the research, said the work was very convincing, adding that the proposed purpose was fancy but functional.
“Beer in the past was probably ‘chunky’ with sediment, and filter straws were a necessary implement,” she said, adding they were well known in Mesopotamia during the third to second millennia BC.
“These drinking straws reveal the importance of past communal eating and drinking as a powerful creator of social connections, as feasts and parties are today,” she said.
