Baking with the Ancient Mesopotamians

They ate a lot of bread in ancient Mesopotamia. We know this from a Babylonian letter written by a grumpy son, who was surprised that his parents were not sending him new clothes at a time when in their house ‘wool is used up like bread’ (Oppenheim, Letters from Mesopotamia). Indeed, so important was bread in their lives that they thought of it as the epitome of life, as shown in the epigraph on the previous page from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Etymologically, this aspect is best illustrated in the words the Akkadians developed for ‘to eat’ and ‘bread’: the first is ‘akâlu,’ and the second is ‘akalu’ (Bottéro, The Oldest Cuisine).