Dairy Products

Up until the 1960s, city people did not have to go to the stores to buy milk. A movable dairy, so to speak, used to deliver fresh unadulterated milk every evening. Um il-haleeb (the milkmaid) would come with her cow and her bucket, and milk the cow right in front of her customers’ eyes. Then, with a funnel, she would pour warm foamy milk into their bottles. But all that ended with the advent of commercially pasteurized milk products.

Whereas milking in the modern scene is an exclusively feminine occupation, in ancient Mesopotamia it was allotted to men. In the Sumerian milking scene frieze, which goes back to the period around 2900 bc, a calf is placed at its mother’s head to make the cow yield milk more readily. A milkman is sitting on a stool behind the cow, near a shed made of reeds. A little way off, another man sits on a stool rocking a large narrow-necked jar lying on its side to make butter-fat coagulate. To his left, two men are shown straining the resulting buttermilk. Today’s peasants make butter by rhythmically swinging a suspended shichwa, a bag made of dried sheepskin.