Eat Like The Ancient Babylonians: Researchers Cook Up Nearly 4,000-Year-Old Recipes
Written on four tablets, three of which date back no later than 1730 B.C., the recipes are considered to be the oldest known. And they taste pretty good, says a scholar who recreated them.
What did a meal taste like nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Babylonia? Pretty good, according to a team of international scholars that has deciphered and is recreating what are considered to be the world's oldest-known culinary recipes.
The recipes were inscribed on ancient Babylonian tablets that researchers have known about since early in the 20th century, but that were not properly translated until the end of the century.
The tablets are part of the Yale Babylonian Collection at, who put together the interdisciplinary team that is reviving these ancient recipes in the kitchen. A fourth tablet was produced about 1,000 years later. All four tablets are from the Mesopotamian region, in what is today Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
