The world has basically been in decline since before life began. Or at least that’s how some people perceive it.

Winding the clock forward, our coffee must be even weaker, weaker beyond words. Can you imagine how amazing coffee must have been in his youth?

Return the slab

TIL there were hipster baristas in ancient Sumeria

So the people who drink their coffee black have always been the minority? 🤔

Isn’t that like 4,000 years before the first records of coffee being prepared as a drink?

Edit: upon a little research, the tablet in the image is a version of the Instructions of Shuruppak. The oldest known copies we have, of which the depicted tablet is one, do indeed date back to around 2,600 BCE. However, the text is supposed to be the words of an ancient king given as advice to his son much earlier. In fact, the first part of the text is, “In those days, in those far remote days, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years, at that time the wise one who knew how to speak in elaborate words lived in the Land.” The speaker is said to be the son of king Ubara-Tutu, who is mentioned on the Sumerian king list as having reigned for over 18,000 years prior to the great flood of Sumerian myth. We can’t really put any actual dates on that and have no archaeological evidence for basically anything relevant, but some archaeologists date it around some known localised flooding around 400 years earlier than the writing of this tablet

Anyway there’s nothing in there about coffee or even about the habits of The Youth These Days, but it does contain such pearls of ancient wisdom as “you make bad decisions when you are drunk” and “hurting yourself with an axe is bad actually”. There is a missing chunk that mentions beer and the god Ninkasi, herself associated with brewing and beer, so it’s possible that there was something about the flavouring of beer in that bit, but the trasnslation I’m looking at makes no mention of it

https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr561.htm

Edit again: also the original poster was joking

I know this is a joke, but you really haven’t had bad coffee until you’ve had percolated coffee. We live in enlightened times.

I’m an American in 2025, I’m just glad I can still kind of afford the very cheapest coffee I can find. Not gonna complain too much about the taste as long as I get my sweet coffee buzz in the morning.

I want this to be true, but it is so on the nose it would be great to know for sure. Any sauce for this one?

(I tried searching but only found walls of reposted shitty copper reviews)

Okay, Sumer.

His lawn, get off it.

Same as it ever was

I thought coffee was only discovered much later in present day Ethiopia. Are you sure he wasn’t talking about beer or wine?

This must just be a “chunk” of the “script” how do scholars glean that much context out of those crude symbols?