Breads ancient and modern
By Owain Williams
I do not think it is a controversial statement that humans love bread. Not much beats the smell of bread fresh from the oven or eating a warm slice of bread with butter. The sheer variety of bread types in the world today – the Deutsches Brotinstitut (German Institute of Bread) recognizes over 3200 different kinds of bread in Germany alone! – attests to humanity’s ongoing love of the loaf. The many different types of bread available to us also act as cultural markers. The baguette, for example, is distinctly French, while the tortilla is Mesoamerican.
The same was true in antiquity. Bread formed a staple of ancient diets. In the Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Šamhat, the woman who brought Enkidu out of the wild, called bread “the symbol of life”, underlining its importance to Mesopotamian society. In ancient Greece, similarly, bread is a marker of humanity. A man, for example, is called an “eater of bread”, while a Cyclops is not (Odyssey 9.191). Indeed, in Classical Athens, bread – or sitos – provided the main staple of every meal and was accompanied by opson.
Texts from ancient Mesopotamia attest to the diversity of different bakers. An Assyrian text from Fort Shalmaneser, for example, records the presence of Assyrian, Aramean, Babylonian, and Suhean bakers, with each group likely producing different types of breads based upon cultural and ethnic practices. An administrative document records the offering of several different types of bread to different deities. The names of these breads can tell us a lot about what breads were available. As Nicholas Postgate writes:
“Some of these terms are self-explanatory. They may specify the ingredients—barley bread, wheat bread, white (grain) bread, raisin bread, bulgur bread, coarse flour (bread), sweet bread—or just the size or shape—big, small, long, thick, round. Other terms seem to be attested only as the word for the particular type of bread, and hence are hard to interpret” (p. 163).
One of these breads is called ḫaršu, which was once believed to refer to fruit, but is now thought to refer to a bread incorporating fruit.
Much like the modern world, then, bread was an important element of people’s diet. There were many different breads to choose from, some higher quality than others, with some incorporating additional ingredients, such as fruit. Furthermore, just like in the modern world, it seems that different types of bread could serve as cultural markers. Would a traveller notice the different breads being made across different regions?
You can read more about ancient Mesopotamian bread in Nicholas Postgate ‘The Bread of Aššur’ published in the journal Iraq 77 (2015), pp. 159–172.
