A New Look at Old Bread: Ancient Egyptian Baking Delwen Samuel
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ARCHAEOLOGY INTERNATIONAL triangles. Sometimes they were formed A new look at old bread: into more elaborate shapes, such as human or animal figures. The crusts are sometimes ancient Egyptian baking decorated with incisions, !:!rick marks and Delwen Samuel raised strips. Occasionally the marks of fin gers and hands can be distinguished, giving Despite abundant archaeological, pictorial and textual evidence a little hint of the baker who made them. of ancient Egyptian life and death, we have little detailed infor By observing a loaf with simple magni mation about the staple diet ofmost of the population. No w exper fication we can detect what is in it: inten imental work by a postdoctoral We llcome Research Fellow in tional ingredients such as flour, cracked grain and flavouring; as well as unwel Bioarchaeology at the Institute is revealing how the ancient come additions such as chaff, grit and ash. Egyptians made their daily bread. Among flavourings added were dates, figs and coriander seeds. The cereal most com he most famous accomplish excavated in houses, estates, temples, and, monly identified in the loaves that still sur ment of the ancient Egyptians recently, in a complex associated with the vive is emmer wheat, which today is very was probably pyramid build Giza pyramids. Bread loaves or magical rarely grown. However, emmer was one of T ing, an activity that required representations of bread were commonly the first plants to be domesticated and it skill and imagination. So why included in burials, as part of the essential became one of the staples of human diet, are the builders of the pyramids thought to provisions for the journey to the afterlife. especially for farmers living in the temp have subsisted on coarse, chaffy, gritty Model loaves, which probably functioned erate Old World. Emmer and barley were bread? Many Egyptologists have portrayed as military ration records, have been recov virtually the only cereals that the ancient this dietary staple ofthe ancient Egyptians ered from ancient forts. Egyptians grew, and emmer was one of as a food of very poor quality. It has even their most important crops. been blamed for rapidly wearing down Ancient loaves Because emmer is so seldom cultivated Egyptian teeth. Previously, most research Surviving loaves of bread provide the best today and is unfamiliar to many people, ers have drawn conclusions about ancient evidence for ancient Egyptian baking (Fig. most of those who have studied ancient Egyptian bread from tomb art and a few 1). They are often in excellent condition, Egyptian bread have not appreciated how examples of surviving bread loaves, but because they have been preserved by com much it differs fr om bread wheat, the recent archaeological research has estab plete desiccation in Egypt's arid climate. cereal now normally used for baking. lished that ancient Egyptians could be as Most loaves have been found in tombs and Emmer is a hulled wheat, in which the good at baking as they were at building.1 burial sites, although a few examples are grains are enclosed by tough scale-like A study of Egyptian baking has value known from settlements. They are rare and bracts that, when threshed, produce a lot of beyond satisfying curiosity about an are held in museums scattered throughout chaff. Its ears have two main characteris ancient foodstuff. Together with beer, bread the world, but there are probably a few tics that make it more difficult to process was one of the most important ancient hundred altogether. than bread wheat, which is not hulled and Egyptian foods. All members of society ate Examination of a well preserved bread which threshes freely (Fig. 2). The central bread and it was one of the most important loaf yields much information about how it stalk of the emmer ear breaks apart fairly offerings to the gods. From harvested crop was made. Ancient Egyptian loaves come in easily, but the chaffy bracts surrounding to final product, bread preparation was a a wealth of sizes and shapes. Often they are the grain are very tough and hard to daily activity that occupied much of the simply disks or low oblong mounds, but remove. In contrast, the stalk of the bread population. Breadmaking thus played a bread was also made into cones, craters and wheat ear is tough but the chaff falls away central role in many aspects of Egyptian life, and an understanding of bread pro duction reveals much about how this ancient society worked. There is abundant archaeological evi dence of bread production. Bread ovens and cereal processing tools have been Figure 1 An ancient Egyp tian disk loaf (maximum diameter 14 cm) of the Ninth Fi gure 2 Threshed hulled wh eat (left) and free-threshing wh eat (righ t). Th e threshed Dyn asty (c. 1500 BC}, now at the Ashmolean hulled wh eat ear falls apart into spikelets whereas the chaffof fre e-threshing wh eat fa lls Museum, Oxford (m useum no. 1921.1395). cleanly away from the grain. 28 ARCHAEOLOGY INTERNATIONAL A process similar to de-husking emmer desiccated. In these circumstances plant is the preparation of Turkish bulghur, or remains can be recovered from different cracked wheat, from which the bran (the places where they were dropped in the thin covering that surrounds the kernel) course of various activities. In one ancient has been removed. Different types of wheat house of the Amarna village, a mortar was can be used and in some Turkish villages discovered set into the corner of a room the old method of de-branning is still prac (Fig. 4). Scattered on the floor around the tised (Fig. 3). Mortars and mallets are used mortar was a large quantity of emmer chaff. and the grain is wetted prior to pounding. It ranges from complete spikelets still con The result is whole grain with the bran taining the grain, to whole spikelets with stripped off, just as de-husking emmer pro no grain inside, to shredded chaff frag duces whole grain with the chaff stripped ments. This is precisely the scattered away. Although not precisely the same remains one would expect to result from process, bulghur-making provides a useful pounding whole spikelets in a mortar with parallel that helps us to understand emmer a wooden pestle. de-husking. One difference between the mortars used in ancient Egyptian and most mortars Archaeological evidence used now or in the recent past is that the Is today's method of emmer de-husking former were much smaller. This may have similar to that used by the ancient Egyp been because, unlike traditional Turkish tians? The archaeological record suggests processing, emmer pounding in ancient that it is. Shallow stone mortars are com Egypt was done in the household, not as a monly excavated from ancient Egyptian communal village activity. Large stone Figure 3 Women in a Turkish village de houses. In exceptional, very arid, condi mortars are very heavy and difficult to branning grain for bulgh ur using a large tions, even complete wooden pestles have move. These common household tools had stone mortar and wooden mallets, 1991. been recovered. What makes the connec to be reasonably transportable for ordinary tion between the mortars and emmer de people to obtain and install them. One way readily. When bread wheat is threshed, it husking secure is the evidence of plant of investigating how the small mortars is easy to free the grain from the ear, but remains from the site of Amarna, an affected emmer processing, and indeed of when emmer is threshed the ear falls apart ancient Egyptian city some 230 km south of confirming whether the shredded emmer into little packets which are known as Cairo that dates from about 1350 BC. found in the plant remains could have spikelets. They consist of the grain tightly Part of the site of Amarna consists of a been produced in them, is through exper enclosed in chaff. Skilled extra work is village located about 2 km from the Nile imental replication. needed to break up the chaff to free the flood plain, in the highly arid eastern grain without crushing it. desert. Here, plant remains have been Experiments with emmer In ancient Egypt, cereal processing had recovered in abundance, preserved by processing to be carried out by hand with relatively desiccation. Those found on archaeologi Many of the stone tools excavated at simple technology, and the best way to cal sites have usually been preserved by Amarna are in excellent condition and find out how this was accomplished is by charring through contact with fire (e.g. they presented an ideal opportunity to try investigating how emmer is processed tra around ovens), which arrests their decay. experimental reconstruction of emmer ditionally today. Under arid conditions no such intermedi processing. The equipment made from ary process is needed to preserve plant organic materials, such as wooden pestles Ethnographic examples of fragments, which survive because they are and wooden and grass sieves, is not robust traditional cereal processing Although emmer is now rare, it could until recently be found under cultivation in some remote mountainous areas in Europe, Tur key and Ethiopia. The number of farmers who cultivate emmer continues to shrink and traditional processing practices are dying out even more quickly. Fortunately, some records have been kept of how emmer used to be treated, and a few com munities still employ traditional tech niques of cereal processing. In many areas where emmer was grown, the chaff was removed by pounding the spikelets in wooden or stone mortars with wooden pestles or mallets. The key to the process is wetting the spikelets first.