Making flour in ancient Egypt
Ready for more?
This is what it took to make flour from emmer wheat in the period between about 1600 and 1100 BC in Egypt.
Take uncleaned spikelets of wheat from your store. Sieve or winnow them to get rid of straw, chaff etc. Hand pick to take out weed seeds, stones, etc. Now you have clean emmer spikelets.
Put the spikelets in a mortar, sprinkle with water, and pound with a long pestle. This gives you a mix of chaff, freed grain, some large cracked grain, all damp.
Put all this to dry in the sun or over heat.
Now winnow. Several times. This gives you grain with the heavier bits of chaff.
Now start sieving, scooping the chaff from the upper layers. Do this several times.
Now pick out the last bits of chaff by hand. Now you have clean grain.
Now grind the grain on a simple grindstone.
Have fun.
None of this is my research I hasten to say. It’s the work of Delwen Samuel, currently at King’s College London. In 1996, I ran across a fascinating paper in Science on how to investigate the early history of bread and beer using correlative microscopy by someone called Delwen Samuel. I fired off a letter never expecting a reply. Well lo and behold one turned up and we have been corresponding on and off about grinding ever since.
Anyway here’s Delwen’s flow chart–a bit small to read–that I have summarized above.
Go to ancientgrains.org the website that Delwen and her husband Mark Nesbitt maintain where you can find the full text of the article from which this flow chart is taken “Brewing and Baking” in Paul T.Nicholson and Ian Shaw, eds. Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
I bet you will be as awed as I am at the range of expertise it takes to work out what was going on in food processing in the ancient world from the morphology of wheat to electron microscopy from experimenting with tools to the chemistry of yeasts. And I bet you will enjoy as much as I do the very careful weighing of evidence and argument that Delwen brings to these issues.
And do look at the resources on Delwen and Mark’s site, particularly the list of other people working in this area. There should be some fascinating stuff coming out in the next few years.
Thank you, this is really fascinating!
Now I want to know who was doing all of this – men vs. women vs. children vs. different social classes, and how this varied through time in different societies in different areas with different levels of sociopolitical organization. :-)
I’m familiar with the expertise you mention from the years I studied archaeology and archaeobotany, but have always thought it was a shame that this information is so rarely presented to the general reader in an interesting way. If this isn’t the subject of your current book (I just started reading your blog last month, so forgive me if this is something you’ve blogged about in the past), I think you should make it the subject of a future one.