Some Thoughts on the Diet of Mesopotamia from c. 3000-600 B.C.

Abstract

kept and food issued to the gods, to the king and his household and to ordinary people. Unfortunately this evidence is not evenly spread for every period or every town. Texts giving information about food are abundant at Laga? during the reigns of Lugalanda and Urukagina in the Early Dynastic III period, at Ur in the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, at Mari during the reign of Zimri-Lim in the early second millennium and at Nuzi and Nippur during the mid-second millennium (e.g. Deimel 1931, Pinches 1908, Birot i960 and 1964, Bott?ro 1957, Lacheman 1950, Clay 1906). But there are many gaps and there are few, if any, ration lists during the Neo-Assyrian period. The identification of many terms is uncertain and disputed. This difficulty in interpretation does not only apply to texts. To take another example, the scenes on cylinder seals are small and often stylized. They may have ritual rather than practical significance and of course they may be inaccurate, showing what the craftsman believed happened and not what actually did. However, there was no great division between town and country and one job and another so that a seal-cutter living say in Tell Harmal would be familiar with the activities of a farmer, or a brewer or a baker. They may have worked next door to him and indeed the seal-cutter's wife probably brewed her own beer and baked her own bread, so that if he included these activities in his designs there is no reason why he should be inaccurate, or at any rate any more inaccurate than the scale of his picture and the limitations of his material made necessary. Despite these problems it is possible to make some general statements about the diet. Cereals provided the staple foodstuffs. The grains were roasted and eaten whole, boiled and eaten as gruels and porridges, brewed as beer, and ground into flour and made into bread. In the Near East today there are two main types of locally-made bread? unleavened bread which is baked in the ashes of a fire, either laid on hot stones or on thin metal sheets or on pottery plates, and leavened bread which is baked on the inside of tannour-ovens. Many varieties of these breads are produced and there is a wide range of methods used to prepare them. It is probable that these two types of bread were produced in ancient Mesopotamia. A scene on an Assyrian relief of ASSurbanipal's campaigns (Barnett 1976, PI. LXVL?) shows unleavened bread being prepared and cooked in the ashes of a fire. An Elamite prisoner is kneeling by the fire, tossing a flat disc of bread between his hands, and another disc is already placed in the ashes. In addition, tannour-ovens have been found on