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…
Category: Culture of Bread
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…
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…
The Bread of the Baker’s Wife
What is there to say besides? Wow! Please, open a bakery in my town! The cheerful handsome baker and his wife showing of a selection of their breads captures, forever, the spirt we find in bakeries throughout the world. Proud artisans. The baking couple was not invented in the 17th century. The couple, whether within…
The Egyptian Triangle Bread
One apparently common bread during the pharaonic period was a bread shaped in the form of an equilateral triangle and painted white. The example here is from the the downtown Egyptian Museum. Note the white covering and the areas where the white has chipped off. The equilateral triangle was an important shape in ancient Egypt….
Egyptian Text: The Inundation
Joy over the Inundation They tremble, that behold the Nile in full flood. The fields laugh and the river-banks are overflowed. The god’s offerings descend, the visage of men is bright, and the heart of the gods rejoiceth. Pyramid Tex circa 2500 BCE. The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, Adolf Erman, Ed. Aylward M. Blackman,…