Our Daily Bread (eBook)

II. Trails and traces

Ceres. Etching by F. Perrier.Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Bread followed paths that took it through space and time, memory and oblivion. It is hard to say where these journeys begin and where they end. Most often they moved from east to west, following the sun. Sometimes the paths returned the same way, at others they took a different route, all the while crossing plains, scaling mountains, roaming deserts. Grain was transported across seas and along rivers by ship, and on land by carts and packhorses, and even on the shoulders of men and women. Travellers, merchants and caravans all passed through these crossroads, evoked by prophets, preachers and poets. Futile though it often is, let us try to imagine what the past was like in prehistoric times, for memories of those times have been preserved in stories and legends.

Bread does not travel well: it goes hard, turns stale, becomes rotten. What does travel well are seeds, customs and the need for this daily sustenance. Objects, implements and surviving traces attest to the cultivation of grain since preliterate times: grindstones are more durable than grains; the hoe came before the plough; the mortar is older than the mill and the millstone is contemporaneous with flour. The vestiges of cereals have been preserved in long-extinguished hearths, although the ashes of firewood are similar to the ashes of burnt grains. Rye and barley seem to be more resistant to decomposition than other varieties, whereas wheat is sensitive and quicker to spoil. The various places in which grains were preserved had in common a darkness and silence that helped the seeds to retain their form, if not their fertility. We may never know how long they survived or when they died. The past does not always leave
behind a legacy.

Time erases, changes or augments the story.

* * *

Depictions of different grains are found on clay tablets from the ancient cities of Uruk and Ebla, as well as in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics of Memphis and Thebes. Mesopotamia was one of the first cultures to sow and harvest grains, and this civilization situated “between two rivers” worshipped Nisaba, the goddess of grain. According to the author of the Avesta, the sacred Persian book of wisdom, the goddess’ long tresses flowed around her as she walked in the field, amongst the stalks of grain. The book also pays tribute to the stone and iron pestles that crushed the grain for the “offerings of bread”; the water used to make it “rushed down from the top of Hukairya to the Vourukasha sea”, spilling into the shimmering sun-drenched fields of Mithra, where golden-hued plants, including the sweet-smelling hadhanaepata, were cultivated, in tune with established ritual. Up above, the star Tishtrya shone brightly at night, giving its name to the prophet Zarathustra.

The Avesta also tells us the differences between “farmers”, “warriors” and “priests”, who each had different kinds of bread, from the very best to the most mediocre.

“A bread-offering to all the ancestral gods” was brought to the grave of Gilgamesh, sun of Ninsun. The ferryman Utnapishtim made him “seven celestial loaves” for the afterlife. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Akkadian and translated into Hittite, Sumerian and other languages, also celebrated bread.

Thus, perhaps, spake Zarathustra.

Pre-Semitic communities shared similar origins and fates, and more than one particularity differentiated them in the course of their migrations: Sumerians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Assyrians and Syrians, Amorites and Arameans, Akkadians and other peoples of western Asia cited in holy and other books, sometimes drew together and at other times moved apart. Migrating tribes followed various routes to reach the fertile plains bordering the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, while Semitic tribes arrived in Palestine via Suez. Some came through the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, which was narrower in ancient times than it is today. The names of these people reveal, among other things, their origins: the word Arab most likely comes from arab’ah, meaning “desert”; Hebrews, from ibray (ibri), which means “across”, are those who come from the other side of the river, though the name may also come from the verb habiru – “to cross”. You had to cross the river to reach the fertile grain fields.

Linguists do not agree on the genesis of the first names given to cereals, but they do offer us a chance to establish a link between their interpretations and our suppositions. The names of the first cities and their ruins are often mentioned in tandem with the names of their rulers. Places like Ur, Ugarit, Nineveh, Ashur and Ebla are immediately associated with such figures as the Babylonian kings Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar.

In the third and second century BCE, farming and building work such as the world had never seen before – and history has since forgotten –
flourished in the “land between two rivers”. City and state, literacy and law all came into being at the same time. Legislature and the state protected the production of bread, and the administration and its scribes confirmed its importance, as can be confirmed by the cuneiform clay tablets that they created. King Ashurbanipal had commanded that everything worth remembering be inscribed on the tablets, and the king’s order was carried out.

The strange markings conveyed to posterity the first basic knowledge about the art of bread-making. Dagan, the god of grains and fertility, was worshipped from one end of Mesopotamia to the other. His name is associated with the ancient Semitic word dgn, which means “wheat”. Worshippers prayed to him and brought him sacrificial offerings, and thus emerged the “measure of sacrificial bread”. No one knows how many kinds of bread the servants of Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II served to the ten thousand guests at the banquet he gave to mark the opening of the Palace of Joy, but we do know that the festivities lasted some thirty days.

Bread and its “measure” entered the daily life of the Ancient World.

The cuneiform tablets give, among other things, the names of the cereals. Barley, for instance, is sheh (in Akkadian, sheh-u), wheat is ziz (in Akkadian, zizu), spelt is gig (in Akkadian, kibtu). In the ancient Assyrian language, the word for flour is tema. It is not unusual to find drawings that depict ears of grain standing tall, straight, one might even say proud. Some names are easier to figure out than to translate. The Sumerian word ninda and its Akkadian synonym akalu seem to denote all types of bread. Tablet number XXIII, listed in a glossary known as “Har-ra”, names a number of them – more than ten, less than one hundred. They are differentiated by whether they are leavened or unleavened, sweet or savoury, whether they are made with coarse or fine, sieved or wholemeal flour, whether other ingredients have been added such as oil, beer, garlic, onion, herbs, honey, and so on. Coriander and saffron were in the bread served at the table of the king who ruled Mari. Grindstones found next to the ancient Palestinian settlement of Kebara were used to pound wild grains. That was before Semitic tribes crossed Suez and Bab al-Mandaba to settle there.

The title of a handbook composed during the era of the Third Dynasty of Ur (c.2094–c.2047 bce), could be translated as “Recommendations for the Farmer”. When Herodotus passed through these lands, a millennium and a half later, he was amazed to see how fertile they were: “Cereal crops grow so well that a yield of 200 times the weight of the seed grain is not unusual and, when the soil is exceptionally fertile, the yield can increase to 300 times the weight of the seed grain … Blades of wheat and barley grow to a width of at least four fingers.”

Despite its rich and fertile soil, Mesopotamia witnessed its own lean years and “lean cows”. Inscribed on a clay tablet from the end of the Ugaritic period are the words: “Our land has no more grains.”

Archaeology and photography have a grip on the past and the history of ancient Egypt and they won’t let go. As for literature on the subject, scholars have done the bulk of the work, for they have discovered and described what Upper and Lower Egypt once looked like, how they united and then separated, what the words “miracle of the Nile” in its Upper and Lower course signified, what damage the river’s highest and lowest water levels could cause. Homer admired “the hundred-gated Thebes”. The land of the pharaohs venerated the god Osiris, ruler of the underworld, along with the goddess Isis of magic and healing, and their son Horus, ruler of the sky. There are descriptions of the sacrifices offered to them, the rituals honouring them, the celebrations dedicated to them. The hieroglyphics that mention, name and honour them have already been deciphered, and these myths are now an incontrovertible part of history. Bread marks its beginning there, as well as its end: remnants of “ancient Egyptian bread” have been preserved and are exhibited in museums. Various specimens of grain are laid out in boxes and implements are on display behind glass, while the surrounding sculptures and paintings depict scenes of sowing and harvesting, threshing and bread-making or women bending over and pounding the grain or working with the flour. The altar to which the sacrifices were brought resembled a huge...