An Ancient Shopping List

In third-century Greece, chickpeas were a pantry staple

This papyrus scroll, written in ancient Greek by Heraclides to his brother Petechois in the third century, is essentially a shopping list. He asks him to buy poultry, bread, lupines, chickpeas, kidney beans, and fenugreek at various prices. Such documents provide important evidence of the level of literacy in the Roman world, and offer insight into the everyday lives of ordinary people, and the role that chickpeas played at that time.