Bread loaf was fermented and made by mixing flour with water; wheat, barley & peas used in preparation
Catalhoyuk in southern Anatolia is among the largest and best-preserved Neolithic sites in the world. Photo: iStock ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, reads a line in The Lord’s Prayer. Roti, Kapda Aur Makaan (Bread, Cloth & House) was the title of a popular Bollywood movie. The importance of bread has been highlighted in various cultures. Now, scientists in Turkiye say they have discovered the ‘oldest bread’ in the world.
The bread loaf was discovered in Çatalhöyük, an important archaeological site dating to the Neolithic Period (10000 Before Common Era till 2200 BCE). It is located in the Çumra district of Konya Province.
Konya, in turn, is located in the Asiatic part of Turkiye, Anantolia, which constitutes the bulk of the country’s area. The European part, Thrace, borders Greece and Bulgaria and is separated from Anatolia by the Strait of the Bosphorus.
Çatalhöyük, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012, was home to approximately 8,000 people during the Neolithic. It is one of the first places in the world where urbanisation took place, according to a statement by Turkey’s Necmettin Erbakan University, which analysed the loaf.
Researchers found a furnace-like structure in the area called “Mekan 66”, where there are mud brick houses adjacent to each other.
“In the vicinity of the bakery, which was largely destroyed, a palm-sized object was found, which turned out to be food as it was made of wheat, barley and peas,” the statement added.
The University’s Science and Technology Research and Application Center (BITAM) carried out radiocarbon dating on the object. “The spongy residue was fermented bread dating to 6600 BC,” the University statement said.
Head of the excavation committee Ali Umut Türkcan told Turkish state news organisation, Anadolu Agency:
We can say that this find in Çatalhöyük is the oldest bread in the world. Considering the observations, analysis and dating of this organic remain, we can say that it is a bread that is approximately 8,600 years old.
Gaziantep University lecturer Salih Kavak, one of the academicians who contributed to the study, mentioned in the statement by Necmettin Erbakan University that the bread was prepared by mixing water and flour. It was left for a while to be fermented.
“It was prepared next to the oven but was not cooked or could not be cooked,” Kavak added.
A map of the Fertile Crescent from iStock
Anatolia is not far from the historic ‘Fertile Crescent’, so-called as it is shaped like that. It stretched from the Holy Land and Syria to the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The Fertile Crescent was a ‘cradle of civilisation’. Ancient civilisations like Philistia, Phoenicia, Assyria, Sumer, Akkad and Babylonia flourished here. The civilisations of Ancient Iran and Ancient Egypt were its neighbours.
Interestingly, both wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) were first domesticated by humans in the Fertile Crescent. Their domestication has been dated to 10,000 BCE.
It was at around this time that itinerant humans first started farming and made the transition from hunter-gatherers to settled farmers.
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