Photo by Sanket Shah on Unsplash
I couldn’t get enough of those little clay tablets the first time I saw them. They were thousands of years old, and they bore some of the world’s first written words.
I first saw Mesopotamian cuneiform at an exhibit at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History here in New Haven in 2019. Just stop for a moment and think about that: the world’s first written words. For those of us who are readers, there’s something almost sacred about the emergence of written communication.
The cuneiform tablets made a similar impression on other museum goers the day I went to see them as a reporter for the online magazine Daily Nutmeg. I opened my subsequent piece with this anecdote:
A young visitor to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History’s newest exhibition was trying to make sense of what he’d just been told: that he was looking at the very first written language in the world. Ever.
“So, they couldn’t talk?” he asked, trying to wrap his mind around this.
Yes, his adult companion explained, they could talk. But before this, no one wrote down what was said.
An adult scholar visiting the exhibition less than an hour later expressed a similar reaction in a different way. His mind, he said, was “blown” by what he was seeing and learning.
Ancient Mesopotamia included parts of modern Iraq and Syria, the region between and near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Cuneiform was invented here in about 3500 BC and remained in use for three and a half millennia, when other alphabets that had emerged alongside it gradually took over.
The Mesopotamians wrote with a reed stylus on clay—the word cuneiform literally means “wedge-shaped” or “nail-shaped”—but instead of dragging the reed across the clay surface the way we drag a pen or pencil across a piece of paper, they pressed marks into the pliable clay, which later dried, preserving them. If you know how to write using cuneiform, you can do so as quickly as we shape our own letters today.
Legend has it that the Mesopotamians’ system of writing emerged when a dispute between two rulers became so complex that the messenger sent to deliver the latest message experienced information overload: “the matter was too demanding.” So, “The Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put (his) words on it like a seal. Before that day, there had been no putting words on clay.” So says the Sumerian epic poem Emmerkar and the Lord of Arata.
The actual history is that Mesopotamians had already been pressing numbers and symbols into clay tablets and objects for the purposes of commerce and record-keeping before attempting to send complex messages like Emmerkar’s throw-down to his rival. Then, in the city of Uruk, the written word “emerged already fully developed,” write researchers Eckart Frahm and Klaus Wagensonner in the exhibition catalog Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks—essays from which are the source for this post. The uniformity of this earliest writing “suggests a single locus of invention and the presence of a centralized institution,” the researchers concluded.
At first, the cuneiform was made up of signs representing words. A single character might mean “fish” or “woman,” and the symbol would often look like the thing it represented.
Cuneiform also used rebuses, “whereby a word could be represented by a sign that was phonetically identical or similar.” If you ever watched the TV game show Concentration, you’re familiar with rebus puzzles.
Concentration host Bob Clayton, 1972, NBC Television (public domain)
So, what were the ancient Mesopotamians writing about? Incantations and spells, epics (the Epic of Gilgamesh is the most famous Mesopotamian literary work), letters, legal documents, the histories of kings and queens, trade records, medical prescriptions, school texts, prayers and hymns, calendars. And recipes. Among Yale’s collection of ancient cuneiform tablets are the world’s first cookbooks, dating back to 1730 BC or earlier.
Yale’s collection includes four cookbook tablets, containing dozens of recipes, although for many years, they were mistaken as recipes for pharmaceuticals, not food. It’s interesting that the recipes were written down at all—why? Cooking knowledge seems like the kind of information that would have been passed down orally from mother to daughter, as in some families it continues to be today. Yale’s catalog acknowledges this mystery:
Like weaving, child rearing, or musical performance, training in how to prepare food was “silent knowledge” passed from one generation to the next without recourse to writing. It is therefore remarkable that four collections of food recipes from ancient Mesopotamia survive.
In fact, no one knows why these recipes were written down, and they are believed to be unique among cuneiform collections.
So, if you’re thinking what I was thinking, what you really want to know is whether anyone has tried to cook these recipes. The answer is yes. It was no small feat. Researchers worked hard to translate some words, to figure out from scant information how the recipes might have been prepared, and to test many different possible amounts and ways of treating ingredients, partially by drawing upon knowledge of cuisine of the area today, in order to come up with edible products. Here’s the translated text of a recipe for something called “unwinding.”
Unwinding. Meat is not used You prepare water. You add fat. (You add) kurrat, cilantro, salt as desired, leek, garlic. You pound up dried sourdough, you sift (it) and you scatter (it) over the pot before removing it.
Even the name of this recipe is mysterious.
The recipe comes out fairly bland, but with a pleasant mild taste of cilantro and onion. It looks to be a kind of “comfort dish” known also from later medieval tradition. Perhaps this explains the name of the stew, or perhaps the “unwinding” refers to what happens when the dried sourdough is added to the soup before serving.
These tablets aren’t Jamie Oliver or Joanna Gaines material. They’d be unlikely to hit the bestseller list for cooks in 2024. But how amazing is the written word that it can bring us everyday knowledge across five millennia? That sure is food for thought.