What is the earliest written reference to honey?
Short answerIt depends
Honey appears in Egyptian records from the third millennium BCE, in offering lists, administrative titles and medical prescriptions, and in Mesopotamian cuneiform of comparable antiquity. The earliest surviving text that describes setting up beekeeping rather than merely using honey is a much later Mesopotamian inscription. Both answers come with a translation problem attached.
The translation problem
Several ancient languages use one word for bee honey and for concentrated fruit syrup, usually date syrup. Older translations were not consistent about which they meant, and individual passages are still argued case by case. A great many confident statements about honey in the ancient Near East rest on a word that may not mean bee honey at all.
The inscription that describes starting beekeeping
An eighth-century BCE inscription from the middle Euphrates records a provincial governor claiming to have introduced bees from the mountains and to have established beekeeping in his district. It is the earliest surviving text anywhere describing the setting up of beekeeping rather than the use of its products.
It establishes that one official said this and thought it worth boasting about. It does not establish that beekeeping was new to the region: a boast is a genre with its own conventions, and Egyptian reliefs already showed a developed practice more than a thousand years earlier.
Sources
- The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting — Routledge (1999) · Historical text
- The Tears of Re: Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt — Oxford University Press (2015) · Monograph
- The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore — Houghton Mifflin (1937) · Ethnographic record
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.