4,000-Year-Old Recipes from Ancient Mesopotamia

No one knows exactly where they came from, and for a long time no one understood what was written on them.

Small clay tablets covered in cuneiform, unearthed during an archaeological dig in the Middle East, have probably been in the Yale University Babylonian Collection since 1911. They were thought to contain recipes for medicinal drugs.

It was only in the early 1980s that French researcher Jean Bottéro was able to understand what the tablets said.

They’ve been talking about dinner for nearly 4,000 years.

The largest of the four tablets is the size of a bar of soap, while the smallest, dating back more than a thousand years, fits in the palm of a hand. And they are filled with ingredients for food, not medicine.

Three large tablets, dating to at least 1730 BC, contain mostly stew recipes; the smallest is from a later period and mentions broth.

Even their existence is a mystery.

In ancient Mesopotamia, people rarely wrote down recipes, says Agnete Lassen, assistant curator of the collection.

“Of the hundreds of thousands of cuneiform documents, these are the only ones that contain recipes, and we cannot find an explanation.”

There are unknown materials today

Assyriologist Gojko Barjamovic from Harvard University said that the inscriptions revealed unknown materials today. Asum means myrtle and salu means cress seed. So what is hurrium?

Just reading the list of unknown spices in the article by Barjamovic, Lassen, and their colleagues conjures up images of a lost garden nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers: Kurullu, kuruš, ninu. Silaru, zanzar, zibibianu.

The tablets have the same curious assumption as many recipes, ancient or modern: the author expects the reader to already know what he is essentially aiming for.

The instructions are short and concise.

As with many old recipes, the quantity is not specified.

Meat broth stew is still a staple of Iraqi cooking today

A few years ago, experts including Barjamovic, Lassen and Iraqi food historian Nawal Nasrallah did some work on what these dishes would look like today.

They updated the translations of recipes made by Bottéro, removing an ingredient that made the dish unbearably bitter and obscured the detection of other foods.

Nasrallah notes that it is striking that the recipes all consist of stews and broths.

The stew, consisting of meat and vegetables in broth, is a staple of modern Iraqi cooking and was also a prominent feature of medieval Iraqi food.

The recipe for lamb stew known as Tu’hu, found on one of the tablets:

Of the four recipes, this is Lassen’s favorite.

But people’s tastes can change over time. For example, some of the most famous foods of the Romans do not exist in Italian cuisine today.