In Ancient Babylonia, soups and stews reigned supreme. Food historians are now using taste-tests to recover their forgotten flavours. No-one knows exa

What the Mesopotamians had for dinner

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2024-11-23 21:00:09

In Ancient Babylonia, soups and stews reigned supreme. Food historians are now using taste-tests to recover their forgotten flavours.

No-one knows exactly where they came from; for a long time, no-one really understood what they said. The little slabs of clay covered with dense, wedge-shaped cuneiform writing were thought by Yale University scholars to involve medicines. Unearthed in an archaeological dig in the Middle East, they have probably been in the Yale Babylonian Collection since 1911. It wasn't until the early 1980s, however, that French scholar Jean Bottéro finally figured out what the tablets were saying. In their understated way, for nearly 4,000 years, they've been talking about dinner.

The four tablets – the larger ones the size of a large bar of soap, the smallest, more than a thousand years younger, a mere round handful of clay – are inscribed with the ingredients not of pharmaceuticals but of dishes. Dated to at least 1730 BC, the three larger tablets mostly contain descriptions of stews; the smallest, from a later period, speaks of a broth.  

The mere fact of their existence is a mystery. In ancient Mesopotamia, people rarely wrote about preparing food, said Agnete Lassen, the assistant curator of the collection. "Out of hundreds of thousands of cuneiform documents, they are the only food recipes that exist," she said. "We don't have an explanation."

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