Honey in the Ancient World: From Knossos to Aristotle

Honey is the best-documented sweetener of the ancient world: pressed into clay tablets at Knossos, carved onto Egyptian temple walls, poured out for the dead in Homer, weighed up in Aristotle’s natural history and costed in a Roman farming manual. No other food of the ancient Mediterranean left a trail this long or this legible. This page follows it in order — Crete first, because that is where the writing begins.

The record runs from a Bronze Age clay tablet at Knossos to Aristotle and the Roman apiary manuals — offerings, tombs, poems, trade and craft, source by source.

Plate I · ArtefactRecord

Where does the written history of honey begin?

On Crete. A Linear B tablet from Knossos, catalogued KN Gg 705, records an offering sent to the harbour town of Amnisos — among the earliest written records of honey anywhere, and the earliest we can read in Europe. In Ventris and Chadwick’s translation: “Amnisos: One jar of honey to Eleuthia, One jar of honey to all [of] the gods.” Eleuthia is Eileithyia, the childbirth goddess worshipped in a cave near Amnisos that held offerings reaching back to the Neolithic. The Knossos tablets belong to the late Bronze Age — their exact date is still argued, between about 1400 and 1200 BC — and the scribes’ word for honey, me-ri, is the word Greek kept as méli: already in the ledgers more than three thousand years ago.

A second tablet from the same archive records honey “to all the gods” and honey to the Mistress of the Labyrinth. Karl Kerényi pointed out the arithmetic: she alone receives as much honey as all the gods together.

These are accounting records, not literature, which is what makes them strong evidence — someone counted, sealed and dispatched actual jars. The geography holds too: the tablets were dug from ground a short drive from slopes the island’s beekeepers still work.

Plate II · ArtefactRecord

What is the oldest picture of beekeeping?

Egyptian, and older than the tablets by a thousand years. The earliest beekeeping scene yet found is a relief in the sun temple of Niuserre at Abu Ghurab, from about 2400 BC — one of only four recorded across some two thousand years of Egyptian art when F. Filce Leek surveyed the evidence in 1975. The fullest is in the Theban tomb of Rekhmire, vizier of Egypt under Tuthmosis III around 1450 BC, whose painted walls show, in Leek’s description, “two servants extracting honey from hives, a second group filling and closing jars, and a third applying seals to the vessels”. In the latest, in the tomb of Pabasa around 600 BC, “a man kneels with his hands outstretched towards a number of rounded cylindrical hives, lying horizontally” — Leek’s words again — the same horizontal hive form, nearly two millennia apart. No ancient Egyptian hive survives to set beside the pictures — mud and clay perish — so the reliefs are the record.

Around the pictures sits the paperwork. For some 2,650 years, from Menes, about 3000 BC, to Nectanebo II, every pharaoh bore a title written with the sedge and the bee — “he who belongs to the sedge and the bee” — the bee standing for Lower Egypt. The annals of Tuthmosis III at Karnak count, among the ransom of conquered cities, “slaves, gold, bulls, cattle, wine—and large quantities of honey”; the Silsileh stela of Seti I lists honey in the daily rations of the King’s Messengers; and in the Tale of Sinuhe, from about 1900 BC, a good land is praised in three words: “copious was its honey”. Myth went further: the Salt Papyrus tells that “the god Re wept and the tears from his eyes fell on the ground and turned into a bee”, and out of the tears came wax and honey. That is a story about a god, reported as one; what it documents is the bee’s standing.

Plate III · PaintingRecord

Was edible honey really found in Egyptian tombs?

A label was. Howard Carter catalogued two pottery jars from the tomb, numbers 614j and 614k, inscribed in hieratic “honey of good quality” — but they “were practically empty, except for a trace of dried material adhering to the inside”, and chemical tests on that residue could not confirm honey. The more famous tale of a jar of still-liquid honey, from the earlier tomb of Yuaa and Thuiu, fares worse: Lucas, the excavation’s chemist, analysed the contents and found “little doubt that the sample is Castor Oil that has become very acid”. Honey does keep exceptionally well in a sealed vessel; edible honey from an Egyptian tomb is nevertheless a story the excavation records do not support. The genuine find is the inscription — honey labelled for quality and sealed for a king.

What does Homer say about honey?

That it belongs to the gods and to the dead. Some seven hundred years after the Knossos tablets were fired, the harbour and its goddess were still on the map: in Odyssey 19, the disguised Odysseus describes ships anchoring “at Amnisus, where is the cave of Eilithyia”. Same place, same goddess, honey in between — the longest single thread in this whole record.

The dead come first in the pouring. At the edge of the underworld in Odyssey 11, the libation Odysseus makes to all the dead begins with milk and honey — the mixture the Greeks called melikraton — “first with milk and honey, thereafter with sweet wine, and in the third place with water”, with white barley meal sprinkled over. Before wine, before water: that is the precedence honey held in the oldest Greek poetry. What the poems make of honey among the gods is at food of the gods; the rest of the ancient Greek table is at ancient Greek food.

Plate IV · ArtefactRecord

What did Hesiod and Aristotle know about bees?

Hesiod, around 700 BC, already takes kept bees for granted: the Theogony pictures “thatched hives” in which the bees “lay the white combs” — the earliest Greek poetic glimpse of managed hives.

Aristotle looked harder than anyone before him, and got the central fact wrong. In the History of Animals, written about 350 BC, he records that “honey is distilled from dew, and is deposited chiefly at the risings of the constellations or when a rainbow is in the sky”; the bee, on his account, “does not make, but merely gathers what is deposited out of the atmosphere”. Honey falling from the sky, collected ready-made — a belief that outlived him by centuries.

Set beside the error, the observation is sharp. He ties the season to the stars — “there is no honey before the rising of the Pleiads” — judges that “the autumn honey is the better of the two”, and puts the work in sequence: “The honeycomb is made from flowers, and the materials for the wax they gather from the resinous gum of trees”, the comb built first, the brood and stores added after. Wrong about where honey comes from; exact about when it comes, and in what order the bees build. That is where antiquity left the question.

Did the ancient world rank its honeys?

By ground, exactly as the shelf does now. Writing under Augustus, Strabo counts the honey of Hymettus — the thyme-covered mountain above Athens — among the assets of Attica: “Hymettus also produces the best honey”, in the same breath as the marble quarries and the fading silver mines. A honey ranked first because of the mountain it comes from is a varietal reputation, and the idea is at least two thousand years old. Thyme slopes still carry that kind of name in Greece — our guides to thyme honey and Greek honey cover the modern shelf.

What did beekeeping look like as a living?

Like a trade worth planning for. Varro’s farming manual, written in the first century BC, tells of the brothers Veianii, veterans holding barely an acre, who ringed their villa with an apiary while the rest of the plot “had been planted in thyme, snail-clover, and balm”. The return: “These men never received less than 10,000 sesterces from their honey, on a conservative estimate.” Thyme, deliberately farmed as bee pasture, in Italy, two thousand years ago.

Varro also catalogues the hive-maker’s options: “Some build round hives of withes for the bees to stay in, others of wood and bark, others of a hollow tree, others build of earthenware, and still others fashion them of fennel stalks.” And the keeper’s routine reads familiar — site the yard near the villa, facing the winter sunrise; in spring and summer “examine them about thrice a month, smoking them lightly”, and sweep the hive clean. Smoke, inspection, forage planted on purpose: the working parts of the craft were already settled.

Plate V · IllustrationRecord

Fig. I · The written record of honeyDiagram

Where THYMELIA stands

THYMELIA is a UK house of Greek foods working two harvests — raw thyme honey from Chania in western Crete, and early-harvest olive oil from the hills above Kalamata — the island where this record begins. The continuity needs no embroidery: thyme still flowers on the same mountains, the island’s beekeepers still work the slopes, and honey still comes down by the jar, as it did when a scribe at Knossos logged two of them for the gods. What has changed is what can be known about the jar: the ancients could taste a honey and name its mountain; we can test what they could only taste — what we will measure and publish is at testing. There is no shop yet, and we name no date for one.

The rest of the Greek table, ancient and modern, is at Greek food.