Part of a Zoom Seminar, Thursday, March 27, 2025: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rubel-seminar-finding-a-focus-to-bread-culture-in-two-neolithic-breads-tickets-1260147578329?aff=oddtdtcreator Note: I will be re-testing this weekend – March 22 & 23 updating as tests suggest modifying the approaches outlined here. Wm. These two breads were described by Andreas Heiss in his paper on two breads found at the Parkhaus Opéra, Zurich, Switzerland, Late Neolithic…
Category: Bread
William Rubel’s 45th Bread History Seminar: Finding Focus to Bread Culture in Two Neolithic Breads
Register at EventBrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/seminar-45-finding-a-focus-to-bread-culture-in-two-neolithic-breads-tickets-1260147578329?aff=oddtdtcreator Join me, along with other bread and grain lovers, for my 45th Thursday Bread History Seminar on March 27, at 9:00 am Pacific. We’ll recreate recipes I’ve developed utilizing the archeologist Andreas Heiss’ analysis of the breads. We will taste them, and then talk about where these breads fit into the…
Hellenistic Influence on Egyptian Bread Shapes, Edfu
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…
Is The British Museum Right? Is she grinding grain? Asking questions about a Greek baking figurine circa 450 BCE.
Guys! We can’t accept it just because it is said, even by a major museum. We have to think. Perhaps, if we were looking at this figurine in person, rather than via a lowish resolution photograph, that we would see something that would make it clear. But, I don’t think so. The British Museum labels…
Delwen Samuel Papers
The joint website of Delwen Samuel and Mark Nesbitt, Ancient Grains, is no longer up on the internet. To find their website, you can go to the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine: Archived website, Ancient Grains. I am cutting and pasting Samuels publications from the page on the WayBack machine to help keep them accessible. Mark…
Bread and the Military
“It [bread consumption in Japan] only started coming back in around the 1840s, when the military started adding bread to the soldiers’ rations during the second Opium War. Egawa Hidetatsu, who was in charge of coastal defenses around Tokyo Bay during the time, enlisted a military science researcher to create a hard, long-lasting bread as…
Lara Gonález Carretero & Andreas Heiss along with the papers of Delwen Samual and Mark Nesbitt
This page begins to bring together the foundational texts and the study of ancient breads. Lara Carretero is a leading archeobotanist. One of her specialties is scanning electron microscopy. She is most well known for her analysis of the Epipaleolithic carbonized starches excavated from the Natufian Shubayqa 1 site in Jordan from which the so…
Two Breads from a Late Neolithic Swiss Community Described by the Archeobotanist, Andreas Heiss.
I am posting the PDF of the paper that describes two breads, one, a coarse barely bread, and the other, a more refined bread made of a mixed grains, barley and wheat. The later bread was flavored with an expensive seed, that of the wild parsley. This is the clean science story. How do we…
Bread, the soul, and Muslih-ud-Din Abdullah Saadi Shirazi, the 13th Century Persian Poet
Artist Gerda Roosval-Kallstenius (Swedish painter) 1864 – 1939 I would like to thank my friend Lynn Marks Bowden for introducing me to this gorgeous painting by Gerda Roosval-Kallstenius paired with a poem attributed to the 13th century Persian poet, Muslih-ud-Din Abdullah Saadi Shirazi. If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft, And from thy slender…
Bronze Age Rings Made of Bread Dough
These carbonized rings were studied by Andreas Heiss, one of the leading archaeologists working today. These are made of uncooked dough. They were found along with clay rings that had been used as loom weights. Heiss, the primary author, may not be the only archeobotanist with a sense of humor. But he is the only…