This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Anyone who has ever woken up with a hangover will recognize its physical and psychological effects: headache, nausea, self-loathing, regret and perhaps even some shame at the uninhibited behavior that accompanied the intoxication. In these days of smartphones, any shame experienced by the foggy memory of drunken behavior the night before is invariably worse when there is photographic evidence online forever for all to see and judge.
The old adage that the best thing for a hangover is not drinking too much alcohol the night before is of little help to the afflicted. Drinking to excess has a long cultural pedigree. In Plato's Symposium (circa 385–370 BC), which documents a drinking party where guests debate the nature of love, the disruptive drunkenness of the gatecrasher Alcibiades contrasts with Socrates' capacity to drink to excess while staying sober and avoiding a hangover.
Worshippers of the Greek god of wine Dionysus, meanwhile, advocated intoxication as a means of reaching a state of transcendence. For example, in an ancient Greek collection of hymns addressed to various gods and attributed to the mythical poet Orpheus, Orphic Hymn 29 calls upon Dionysus to "give me in blameless plenty to rejoice." The Greeks and the Romans believed that it was dangerous and barbaric to drink wine undiluted. The ancient historian Herodotus wrote that Cleomenes I, the king of Sparta, went mad from drinking undiluted wine with Scythians—the much-feared and reputedly savage nomadic warrior tribes that originally hailed from ancient Siberia.
The Biblical Noah gets drunk on wine from the vineyard he planted after being spared from the flood. He is discovered lying in a drunken stupor in his tent by his son Ham, who promptly reports this to Noah's other sons, his brothers Shem and Japheth. These two brothers cover Noah without looking at his nakedness.
When Noah wakes up "and knew what his younger son had done unto him", he curses Ham's offspring. Biblical scholars have interpreted Ham's action (what he "did" to Noah) variously as voyeurism, castration or incestuous rape. According to researchers John Sietze Bergsma and Scott Walker Hahn, it's specifically maternal incest since elsewhere in the Bible the nakedness of the father is synonymous with that of the mother.
Of course, none of this explains why Noah feels blameless for getting drunk in the first place. The same question applies later in Genesis when Lot twice becomes so drunk that his daughters have sex with him on consecutive nights, apparently without his knowledge, so that they might bear children. We are not told whether Noah or Lot suffer from a hangover—although Noah's irascibility certainly suggests one.
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