Before cane sugar became widely available, humans sweetened their food with honey, fruit syrups, boiled-down grape juice, tree saps, and even plant exudates scraped from desert shrubs. For most of human history, sweetness was rare and seasonal, obtained from whatever local plants or insects could provide it. Refined sugar from sugarcane didn’t reach Europe in significant quantities until the Crusades around the 11th and 12th centuries, and it remained a luxury spice for several hundred years after that. Everything sweet before then came from nature with minimal processing.
Honey: The Universal Sweetener
Honey was the dominant sweetener across nearly every ancient civilization, and its use stretches back at least 8,000 years based on Stone Age rock paintings depicting honey collection. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Assyrians all relied on it. In Egypt, honey appeared in 500 of the 900 known medical remedies, and Egyptians offered it to their gods as a sacrifice. It was both food and medicine, used in wound salves dating to between 2600 and 2200 B.C.
The Greeks built an entire set of beverages around honey. Hippocrates prescribed oxymel (vinegar and honey) for pain, hydromel (water and honey) for thirst, and honey-water mixtures for fevers. Oenomel, a drink combining honey with unfermented grape juice, was a common refreshment. For the ancient world, honey was the closest thing to an all-purpose sweetener, and in many regions it held that role until well into the Middle Ages.
Nutritionally, honey is roughly 35 to 40 percent fructose and 30 to 35 percent glucose, with a glycemic index of about 58, compared to 60 for refined white sugar. The difference is modest, but honey also contains trace minerals, enzymes, and other compounds that pure sugar lacks entirely.
Grape Syrup in Ancient Rome
Romans had no access to cane sugar, so they developed an ingenious alternative: boiling fresh grape juice down into thick, intensely sweet syrups. These reductions went by different names depending on concentration. Carenum was grape must boiled to two-thirds of its original volume. Defrutum was reduced by half. Sapa, the thickest and sweetest, was boiled down to just one-third. Writers like Cato, Columella, and Pliny all described the process in detail, and these syrups were used to sweeten wines, preserve fruit, and flavor sauces.
There was a serious problem, though. Romans often boiled their grape must in lead-lined pots. The acidity of the juice reacted with the lead to produce lead acetate, sometimes called “sugar of lead” because of its sweet taste. Research on the chemistry of this process found that must reduced to one-third its volume in a lead-lined pot contained roughly one gram of lead per liter, a level with serious health consequences. Lead poisoning in children may have contributed to the high infant mortality rates found in Roman skeletal remains. The Greek poet Nicander wrote one of the earliest descriptions of acute lead poisoning in the second century B.C., describing a frothing mouth, dry throat, retching, chills, and delusions.
Date Syrup in the Middle East
Across Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Levant, dates served as the primary source of concentrated sweetness for thousands of years. Date syrup, known by various names including silan, dibs, and rub, was made by cooking dates and pressing out their thick, dark juice. It has been a staple for millennia in the region, used in cooking, baking, and as a table condiment much the way maple syrup is used in North America today.
Dates held cultural and religious significance as well. They remain one of the ritual foods in Sephardic and Mizrachi Rosh Hashanah celebrations. In many parts of the Middle East, date syrup never disappeared from kitchens, even after cane sugar became cheap and abundant. Its deep, caramel-like flavor offers something refined sugar simply cannot replicate.
Tree Saps and Plant Exudates
In North America, indigenous peoples tapped maple trees long before European contact, boiling the sap down into syrup and sugar. This was one of the few concentrated sweeteners available in the cold northern forests, where honeybees were not native and fruit seasons were short.
In the Americas and Caribbean, the agave plant served multiple purposes. Indigenous peoples like the Aztecs used its fibers for clothing, paper, and building materials, while fermenting its sap into pulque, an alcoholic drink central to religious ceremonies. The sweet sap itself could also be reduced into a syrup.
A more unusual category of sweetener came from plant exudates collectively called “manna.” These are sugary substances that ooze from the bark or branches of certain trees and shrubs, often triggered by insect bites or physical damage. In the Middle East, species of tamarisk, camel thorn, and ash trees all produced edible, sweet deposits that dried in the hot air and could be collected. Even certain lichens, sometimes called “manna lichen,” were gathered as a sweet food source in desert regions. The biblical manna may well refer to one or more of these natural exudates.
Grain-Based Sweeteners in East Asia
China developed a completely different path to sweetness: malted grain syrups. The technique relied on mold species that could break down the starches in rice, millet, and other grains into simple sugars, primarily maltose. This process, called mold saccharification, is a uniquely Chinese contribution to food technology, with roots going back thousands of years. The same technique was foundational to Chinese fermented beverages, which have a confirmed history of at least 9,000 years.
Maltose syrup produced this way has a gentler, less intense sweetness than honey or cane sugar. It became a key ingredient in Chinese confections and traditional medicine and is still used today in dishes like candied fruits and certain stir-fry sauces.
Licorice Root and Other Botanical Sweeteners
Some plants offered sweetness without needing to be processed into syrups at all. Licorice root, native to parts of the Middle East and southern Europe, has been used for millennia as both a sweetener and a remedy for coughs, constipation, and digestive trouble. The root contains a compound that tastes intensely sweet, and it was chewed directly or added to beverages, confections, and even beer. Its use in sweets and cakes persists across Europe and the Middle East to this day.
Other plants contributed sweetness in more localized ways. Various berries, figs, and carob pods were dried and used as sweetening agents in different regions. Carob, sometimes called locust bean, was particularly common around the Mediterranean and provided a chocolate-like sweetness that needed no processing beyond drying and grinding.
Why Sugar Replaced Everything Else
All of these earlier sweeteners share one limitation: they carry strong flavors of their own. Honey tastes like honey. Date syrup tastes like dates. Grape syrup, licorice, and malt all bring distinctive flavors that change whatever dish they’re added to. Refined cane sugar, by contrast, is pure sweetness with virtually no competing flavor. It dissolves cleanly, crystallizes predictably, and can be produced in enormous quantities once you have the right climate and labor force.
Sugarcane was first domesticated in New Guinea and slowly spread westward through India and Persia. Arab traders brought it to the Mediterranean, and European colonizers eventually built massive sugar plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil, fueled by enslaved labor. By the 18th century, sugar had gone from a rare luxury to an everyday commodity in Europe. One by one, the older sweeteners were pushed to the margins, surviving mainly in regional cuisines and traditional recipes where their distinct flavors were the whole point.