In vino falsitas.
If Herodotus is to be believed, the hireling of Eratosthenes would have drunk barley beer, rather than wine, as the Egyptians lacked the proper agricultural conditions and infrastructure for vineyards (
Herod. II.77.4). However, it should not be assumed that its properties were anything like our contemporaneous beers of modernity, in fact by the Ancient Greek metric (i.e. by comparison to wine) the Egyptian
zythos (the beer) was considered extremely strong (
Xen. An. IV.5.27). If wines average at a strength of 10% volume (for the sake of argument), there are 10ml, i.e., one unit of pure alcohol per 100ml. Let us assume that Egyptian beer was somewhat stronger - let's use the conservative figure of 12% (12ml alcohol per 100ml).
Egyptians drank beer from oval jars, such as this typical specimen pictured below, discovered at Giza by AERA:
Based on the scale, the jar looks to be approximately oval-shaped, roughly 15cm around and 30cm tall.
Treat the jar turned on its side as an oblate spheroid for the purpose of approximating its volume.
Let 'a' and 'b' = equatorial radii of the beer jar, and let 'c' = polar radius of the beer jar
(i.e., a = 15cm, b = 7.5cm, c = 7.5cm).
The volume of any ellipsoid is equal to (4/3) * π * a * b * c.
Therefore the volume of the beer jar is approximately (4/3) * 3.14 * 15 * 7.5 * 7.5 cm
3.
4/3 = 1.33...
1.33 * 3.14 * 15 * 7.5 * 7.5 = 3523.66... cm
3.
Assume 1ml of beer per cubic centimetre. Therefore the capacity of the beer jar is approximately 3523ml, or 3.5 litres of potent Egyptian beer.
If we assume that this degenerate stopped at Naucratis, Merimda, Heliopolis, Memphis, Itjtawy, Heracleopolis, Oxyrhynchus, Thebes, Coptos and Sebennytus, consuming on average one jar of powerful Egyptian zythos in each of these towns, he would have imbibed 4 litres of pure alcohol by the time he reached Syene, enough to kill a normal human four times over (the median lethal dose of alcohol in mammals is around 1.4g/kg bodymass. If a human weighs 70kg, the median lethal dose will be 98g [i.e., ml]). This gives you some idea of the level to which our globularist hero, Erastothenes' Earth-measurer, would have sunk. He was either incredibly fat, incredibly resilient to alcohol - from years of abuse - or, most likely, a combination of both. By the time he reached Syene he was, in any case, if the above estimations are correct, as drunk as a lord.
If he had only been better at measuring his crippling alcohol dependency, he might just have been a little better at measuring the Earth.
REFERENCESHerodotus.
The Histories.
Xenophon.
Anabasis.
UCSB Laboratory Safety Program. (2008) 'Basic Toxicology'.
University of California Website. Retrieved 22/04/10 from URL:
http://www.ehs.ucsb.edu/units/labsfty/labrsc/lstoxicology.htmAncient Egypt Research Associates. (2007) 'AERA - Ancient Egyptian ceramics, Ancient Egyptian pottery'.
AERA Website. Retrieved 22/04/10 from URL:
http://www.aeraweb.org/lost_city_age.asp