The context for this image is a section of wall at Edfu in which there are a number of offering tables with bread. These breads are mostly unlike what one generally finds in Egyptian iconography. Here is an example of one such carving below the image depicted, above. While most research into Egyptian breads seems to focus on the conical mold-shaped breads that were produced in mass quantity, there is a vast quantity of Egyptian breads. The conical bread form was important, but was not a typical bread form. The walls of Edfu are a good place to see something of the incredible variety of ancient Egyptian breads.

Up to the Ptolemaic period, all Egyptian bread was made with Emmer. The Greeks, however, did introduce common bread wheat, so there is a chance that some of these breads could have been bread wheat breads, although I personally feel that all temple breads were made of emmer, always, because in a religious contex. The rise and fall of the Nile, the harmony of life was effected through keeping the gods fed, and happy. I personally feel it is unlike one would change recipes on them, after all those thousands of years of bounty! That said, tines do change, and these Edfu breads may attest to changing traditions, even at the level of temple breads during the Hellenistic period.

It is the stacked breads on the offering table where we see breads that might be made with bread wheat. These forms feel to me to be novel and don’t seem to be ones for which emmer is the natural choice. That said, at this point, I have not run baking tests.

Today, I’d like to focus on the circular bread with the sun-burst pattern. This imagery is not Egyptian. It derives from sources. of solar symbolism that are from outside of Egypt. The eight rays or eight spokes of a wheel (Hittite) imagery for the sun at the center of the image is a Greek motif, but I think should be understood to have been the common iconography for the sun outside of Egypt. In its sun imagery, as in so much else, their white clothing, their graphic style, Egypt celebrated and asserted its uniqueness in ways that differentiated themselves from others. What I find interesting is that the 32 marks on the rim of the disk is also found in this image of Helios, 300-275 BCE. The sculpture is now in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

There is no bread in the Egyptian repertoire that I am aware of that is similar to the Edfu ornamented flatbread that is illustrated here. If you know of one, please post in the comments. As the iconography of this flatbread references religious a religious tradition that is that of the rulers, rather than that of the native Egyptian religious traditions, does this bread offer insight it deep changes taking place in Egypt during the Hellenic period?

Pharaoh Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE focused on the sun god, Aten. For our purposes, what is important to note is only the rays that we can feel warming our faces are symbolically represented.

There is no central repository of bread images from Egyptian temples and tombs. Is this only one apparent representation of bread patterned with the rays of a foreign sun? In what ways might this bread be showing us changing cultural patterns? What would local family — local do Edfu — have though about its iconography? Thee can be no question, it is different enough that people, for sure, noticed it and discussed it. Comments welcome.