The Ancient Near East and Egypt

‘There is no god like one’s own stomach: we must make sacrifices to it every day.’

‘Man’s chief god is his stomach. And service to this god is daily.’ — the Yoruba song Hunger

Meaning — through a gastronomic lens, as a cultural code:

• This is not directly about religion. It is about the primacy of need. Before philosophy, art and even morality comes a basic truth: we have to eat every day.

• ‘Sacrifice’ here is not a bloody metaphor, but a very earthly one: the time, work, money and attention we give to food each day.

• In gastronomy, this sounds like a reminder to chef and guest: taste does not exist outside reality. The ingredient, hunger, availability, season and market are all part of a dish’s ‘story’.

• As a bridge to food art: if art concerns meaning, food gives meaning its driving force. Hunger is the most honest curator: it immediately reveals what is real and what is decoration.

Prehistoric periods and dates:

• Bronze Age — 3500–100 BC

• Archaic period — 600–480 BC

• Classical period — 480–323 BC

• Hellenistic period — 323–31 BC

• Roman Empire — 27 BC–AD 330

We shall focus on:

The Assyrian Empire — the twenty-fifth century BC to 612 BC, under King Ashurbanipal, who ruled in the late seventh century BC; Ancient Egypt — 3100–30 BC, where Cleopatra, 69–30 BC, was Egypt’s last active pharaoh before it became a Roman province; the Hellenistic period; and the Roman Empire. Information about food cultures recorded in texts and images begins in Mesopotamia with the Assyrians.

The oldest art in which we see food consists of Bronze Age rock paintings.

However, we have little information about the meaning of rock art. The animals in these images may have symbolised food, fertility or worship. Beyond rock paintings, people of the time left signs and symbols on objects such as horns and jawbones. These may have been a form of artistic expression, or they may have been tools, ornaments or ritual objects. It is impossible to know for certain whether any of these animals were cooked and eaten. For such a remote period, neither the images nor other finds provide enough information.

‘As we move forward in time, art becomes more sophisticated, and we have more information about the period because we know how these communities settled, how they farmed, what they ate and how they stored food. There is more evidence with which to connect images to real life. This does not always mean that the images reflected real life. Symbolism is therefore always present; our task is to read it.’

[Illustration page in the source PDF: Çatalhöyük, horns and a wall painting of an aurochs; the captions give the dates 7500–5700 BC.]

The further we go into the depths of time, the fewer ‘fantasies’ there are and the more everyday life can be read as the menu of an era. People no longer simply draw an animal. They leave traces of how they obtained food, how they grew it and how they stored it. But there is an important nuance: even when domestic life becomes more intelligible, an image still need not be a ‘photograph of reality’. It more often functions as a label of meaning. For ancient people, this was honest packaging: showing not the object, but what it meant.

Look at the horns at Çatalhöyük. They are not ‘decoration’. They are a sign of resources. The horns are incorporated into the space as a reminder: the community has strength, reserves and a claim to tomorrow. Translated into the language of a product, it is like a logo on a façade: we know how to obtain, store and share.

Then the aurochs appears. In images, it is often larger, fiercer and more frightening than its ‘official description’. An aurochs is not simply meat. It is meat that must still be earned. It is simultaneously food and threat, a festive table and the risk of never returning. Red works here as antiquity’s universal seasoning: blood, danger, life. All in one taste, without separation into ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

This is where genuine gastronomic anthropology begins: such drawings are not about aesthetics for their own sake. They concern ritual around food. Respect for the source of protein. Fear and gratitude mixed in a single gesture. Today we would call it ‘the ingredient’s story’. Then it was shorter and more honest: if food gives life, it demands meaning.

Ancient Assyria

Written records appear in this period, and evidence about food begins to occur in literature, poetry, hymns and palace accounts, helping specialists connect the dots. Studies of pottery fragments reveal what was cooked in them. The Assyrians hunted for food as well as for sport. They ate a variety of foods and also offered food to the gods. Lion hunting is a very typical subject in reliefs. In the background of these hunting reliefs are trees, gardens, rivers full of fish, vines, grazing animals, field kitchens and preparations for a hunting picnic.

A field kitchen is depicted in a relief from the ninth century BC.

People recorded agricultural events and activities for accounting purposes, but also to appease the gods — to make them less angry. These gods were responsible for storms, floods and drought, so bribing and pacifying them mattered greatly. The gods liked food and drink. These were taken to temples as offerings, after which they were taken for the king and temple staff.

Clay seals tell us a great deal about everyday life in detail: offerings of livestock, groups of men feasting or drinking, and gods and heroes fighting animals. Seals were decorative and served as magical amulets to ward off evil. For example, this seal showing beer being drunk through a straw:

Cylinder seal, left, and modern impression, right, showing beer being drunk through long reed straws. Early Dynastic period, around 2600–2350 BC. Khafajeh, Iraq.

This seal shows how people drank beer that had sediment at the bottom and debris or particles floating on top. Beer was made from toasted bread and grains, usually barley, sweetened with dates and flavoured with herbs and plants. Beer drinking was very important in the Assyrian Empire. Assyrian texts contain many songs and legends about beer. Beer was already the national drink in the third millennium BC, whereas wine grown in northern Mesopotamia was expensive and available only to the royal household or the very wealthy.

Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, feasts with his queen. He reclines, a position later adopted by the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans.

His wife, by contrast, does not recline. He is on a higher level than she is, indicating hierarchy.

Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome. The oldest cookbooks in the world.

Assyrian cuisine is the oldest cuisine for which written recipes survive. Two clay tablets in the Babylonian Collection, currently at Yale University, written in Akkadian, contain the oldest known cooking recipes.

They date from around 1750 BC, the time of Hammurabi, known for his famous code of laws. The cuneiform writing system was complex, and generally only scribes who had studied for years could read and write. These cookbooks are therefore unlikely to have been intended for an ordinary cook or chef. Instead, they were written to document culinary practices. The recipes are complex and often require rare ingredients. It can be inferred that they represent Mesopotamian ‘haute cuisine’ intended for a royal palace or temple. From thousands of tablets recording food deliveries and supplies, vocabulary lists of different foods, and records of payments to workers and soldiers, specialists can obtain a fairly accurate picture of the standard Mesopotamian diet. Various grains, vegetables and fruits such as dates, apples, figs, pomegranates and grapes were integral to the ancient Near Eastern diet. Meat included beef, mutton, goat, pork, venison and domestic or wild birds; birds supplied both meat and eggs. Fish were eaten alongside turtles and shellfish. Roots, bulbs, truffles and mushrooms were gathered. Salt and various herbs added flavour to food. Honey, dates, grape juice and raisins were used as sweeteners. Milk, clarified butter, animal fats and vegetable oils — sesame, linseed and olive — were used in cooking. The texts mention many kinds of bread, from barley bread issued to workers as rations to sweetened and spiced cakes or pastries baked in decorative moulds in palace kitchens.

In 2018, New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and its Department of Nutrition and Food Studies held an event called An Appetite for the Past. They interpreted recipes recorded on one of the two cuneiform tablets. This was undertaken by Harvard University team member Gojko Barjamovic, and the recipes were cooked and repeatedly tested in the Harvard Science and Cooking Lab by food chemist Pia Sörensen and Patricia González of the Basque Culinary Center. The project is highly distinctive because it connected the study of ancient texts with the culinary arts. The Yale–Harvard team prepared three recipes, all from one tablet: two lamb stews — one with beetroot and another with milk and grain flatbreads or cakes — and a vegetarian recipe enriched with ‘beer bread’.

This tablet contains 25 stew recipes: 21 meat stews and 4 vegetable stews. The recipes list the ingredients and the order in which to add them, but give no quantities or cooking times. Old Babylonian period, around 1750 BC.

This matters because it gives us a sense of how difficult it is to assess something from the past using our present-day perspectives and tools. These recipes were, in a sense, interpreted and translated; above all, their ingredients had to be matched to what can be found today. There are holes in the tablets, so not all the text is available, and we do not know how the dishes were supposed to taste or look.

Nevertheless, this approximation offers an idea of what people ate 4000 years ago and how it comforted them.

There is a beautiful thought: recipes are memory. But in the oldest recipes on Earth, memory is austere. Assyrian cuisine reached us not through a grandmother’s notebook, but through cuneiform on clay. Nor was it written for the ‘home cook’. It was written by those who could read and record reality. In other words, the elite.

This is an important turn: food becomes a document. Not simply ‘what tastes good’, but ‘how the world is organised’. Supply lists, payments to workers and soldiers, temple records, palace kitchens. All of this forms a single picture: diet as the bookkeeping of life. The menu as a map of civilisation. Reading the list of foods feels like opening an ancient pantry. Grains, vegetables, dates, figs, pomegranates, grapes. Different meats. Fish, turtles, shellfish. Roots and bulbs. Mushrooms and truffles. Salt and herbs. Honey, dates, grape juice and raisins as sweeteners. Oils: sesame, linseed, olive. Here taste works as a cultural code. Not ‘sweet and sour’, but ‘who you are’. Even bread is not a single thing. There is the worker’s barley bread — a ration, fuel for the body. And there are sweet, spiced products baked in decorative moulds: status, ritual, a display of the ability to ‘play’ with an ingredient. At this moment, the ingredient becomes a language: calories for some, symbols for others.

Why an ancient recipe is always a little like a dream. The most honest thing about these tablets is that they contain ingredients and their order, but no grams or minutes. Not because someone forgot. Because cooking then was not ‘precision’, but tradition, the hand’s habit and knowledge of the environment. Salt ‘from memory’. Fire ‘by ear’.

When a modern team attempts to reconstruct these dishes, it has to translate not only the words, but the era. More difficult still, the tablets have holes. Literally. The flavour is unfinished. The appearance is not described. We do not know what it should ideally be like.

The final, forceful thought: the oldest recipes teach a simple lesson. Taste is not an ornament to life. It is the way life is organised. If you can read food, you can read civilisation.

‘What can ancient art give us?’

The foundations of ancient art and the reconstruction of Roman cooking

Summary

The lecture emphasises that ancient art is a foundation of Western culture and art. It helps us understand human creativity, the evolution of thinking, and aesthetic and historical connections with the present. The discussion then moves to ancient culinary practices: written sources and images allow eating habits to be reconstructed, while contemporary initiatives — food blogs, historical events, cookery workshops and museum programmes — attempt to recreate ancient recipes in order to understand the tastes and experiences of the past more fully. Examples mentioned include an event at Yale centred on cuneiform tablets and an Italian cookery workshop in Verona. Dishes reconstructed from the Roman period included conditum paradoxum, a sweet spiced wine; sala catabia, a bread-based dish resembling bruschetta; minuta, a pork-and-apricot stew; and conchiglie, a pea purée. It is noted that exact reconstruction is impossible because conditions, ingredients, equipment and taste preferences differ. The purpose of such attempts, however, is to approach ancient life imaginatively, which closely matches art’s purpose: to set the imagination in motion.

Key points:

1) The importance of ancient art to Western culture

Ancient art as a foundation

• Ancient art underlies Western art and culture; later traditions developed from it.

• Understanding ancient art helps establish aesthetic and historical connections with the present, linking the ‘language’ of the past to contemporary interpretations.

Studying art as a way to understand humanity

• Art history is presented as a route to understanding the development of the human mind and creativity, and thus to answering ‘what does it mean to be human?’ in different periods.

• This is not simply a ‘catalogue of objects’, but a discussion of the cognitive and cultural processes behind the creation and perception of art.

2) Ancient cooking and contemporary reconstructions

Sources on food in antiquity

• Written texts and other works, including images, provide information about recipes, ingredients and the social contexts of food.

Contemporary attempts to recreate ancient recipes

• Reconstructions take the form of blogs, historical events, workshops and museum programmes.

• Their aim is to understand flavour profiles and cooking methods; this is both an educational and an experiential practice for food historians and gastronomes.

Examples

• An event at Yale devoted to cuneiform tablets and ancient culinary texts.

• A workshop in Verona on Italian cuisine from different periods, organised by the speaker.

Roman dishes that were reconstructed

• Conditum paradoxum: sweet spiced wine, reflecting the Romans’ love of seasoned and sweet drinks.

• Sala catabia: a bread dish somewhat reminiscent of bruschetta.

• Minuta: a pork-and-apricot stew, an example of combining meat and fruit in a savoury dish.

• Conchiglie: pea purée, an example of a pulse-based dish.

• According to the speaker, all of these were not only edible, but ‘quite tasty’.

The limitations of reconstruction and the meaning of such experiments

• Exact repetition is impossible: the conditions, ingredients, technologies and modern palate are different.

• The main aim is to imagine what life might have been like thousands of years ago; this creates a ‘bridge’ to the past and engages the imagination, just as art does.

Learning assignment: reconstructing ancient dishes

1. Review written sources on ancient cooking, such as cuneiform tablets and Roman texts, and select at least 3 recipes suitable for contemporary reconstruction.

2. Plan a small cookery workshop on Roman dishes — conditum paradoxum, sala catabia, minuta and conchiglie — specifying ingredient substitutions and adaptations of equipment.

3. Record sensory observations — taste, texture and aroma — and compare them with interpretations from historical sources.

4. Prepare a short reflection on how reconstructing dishes helps deepen our understanding of ancient art and culture, with an emphasis on the role of imagination. Ancient Egypt was a prosperous country situated on the Nile’s fertile floodplain, which provided the ruling classes with abundant food. Tomb paintings on the walls of burial chambers are the most interesting source showing what the rich and powerful ate. Food was needed on the journey to the afterlife and beyond it.

Beer and bread formed the basis of the everyday diet. Images and small models were placed in burial chambers, together with ingredients and servants, so that everything needed for the journey could be prepared.

Ancient texts, such as the Book of the Dead, explain what was offered to the gods and what the deceased was expected to enjoy.

In tomb paintings, fish and birds symbolised rebirth and renewal. Hunting in Ancient Egypt was a leisure activity, so fishing and hunting scenes in tombs celebrate fertility, abundance and the enjoyment of prosperity. Tomb art also depicts workers tending fields and gathering harvests. Agriculture and animal husbandry were the principal sources of livelihood. Some adornments occur whose meaning we do not understand. A necklace of celery leaves, for example, may have been merely decorative or may have served as an insect repellent. Egyptian tombs also depicted servants at work in kitchens, including scenes of bread baking and beer brewing. Interestingly, these are not step-by-step instructions, but they convey the process and the ‘sense of activity’ very well.

As food historians explain, there was no need to illustrate instructions: workers already knew how to do their jobs, while instructions were of little importance to the elite. Such images therefore conveyed the essence and atmosphere instead, rather like mid-nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings of cafés in the Parisian belle époque. Assembling all this information requires both archaeological finds — vessels and food residues in excavated kitchens — and written records. A tomb relief shows workers engaged in agricultural activities: threshing, a granary, reaping with sickles, digging, felling trees and ploughing, from the Tomb of Nakht, Thebes, Eighteenth Dynasty.