Bread in Ancient Egypt Venice Ibrahim Attia

Bread in Ancient Egypt

By
Venice Ibrahim Attia

The base of Ancient Egyptians diet

depended mainly upon bread, thus it has
been used as food for all Egyptians
wealthy and poor and was consumed at
every meal, and no meal was considered
complete without them.
Bread as made from wheat grains
consisting mainly of starch, proteins,
traces of vitamins and minerals it played Harvevting in ancient Egypt

an important role in the ancient

speaking harvest time was a time of hard
Egyptians life, economy and religious cult
working from sunrise to sunset with
rituals.
occasional breaks for drinking and
Bread was mainly made from wheat
eating.
grains but sometimes almost any cereal
grains was used in bread making, and
that what made variability of Egyptian
bread the structure and texture.
Bread production depended mainly on
farming which was the main business of
ancient Egyptians and wheat, grainsas
well as fruits were the primary
cultivation, and generally.

Farming in ancient Egypt

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Bread in Ancient Egypt
The process of bred production began
with cleaning an area of the ground in the
field then the grain stalks are gathered,
packed in heaps, threshed to remove the
outer chaff and this was don mechanically
resulting in the separation of husks from
grains using cattle or sheep which were
driven over the cultivated, gathered and
heaped stalks of grains by men wielding
sticks.
using cattle or sheep in farming
Followed by treading the kernels out of
their husks, then the straw was swept
away with brooms and the grains by
throwing it into the air and letting the
wind carry off the lighter chaff after that
sieves were used to remove finer chaffs.
Sieving grains
gathered wheat or grains are then placed
in bowls, pounded with a pestle making
coarse flour, and to make finer flour, the
grains was ground and milled into flour
between two heavy stones or the cracked
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Venice Ibrahim Attia
wheat was put onto a quern, a sloping
stone with a bowl or trough at the lower
end for collecting the flour, after this
other ingredients were added to make
dough that was baked into bread, thus the
commonest type of bread was made
with just flour and water, kneaded made
into flat pancakes of dough cooked on a
shelf over the fire or by being slapped
onto the wall of a clay oven, taking in
consideration and knowing that there
were many types of bread, including
pastries and cakes.
The procedure of bread baking involved a
sort of fermentation, thus the first records
of bread are in ancient Egyptian, where
possibly one day a mixture of flour meal
and water was left longer than usual on a
warm day to be fermented through the
presence of the yeasts that occur naturaly
in the flour, in milk that may sometime be
added as a flavourthen left to rise and
leven up through fermention before
baking in ovens, the resulting bread are
usually lighter and more tasty than the
normal flat, hard bread loafs.
Bread preparation and baking is
associated with ancient Egyptian women
in their family houses.
Tomb model showing a women grinding grains Courtesy of
Manchester Museum
2017 Page 2
Bread in Ancient Egypt Venice Ibrahim Attia

The best known process of baking are

well illustrated in various artistic depicted
scenes such as the depictions on a relief
in the tomb of Ti at Saqqara dated back
to the 5th Dynasty, also statuettes and
models from the tomb of Meketra from
Middle Kingdom illustrating baking
procedures and its details from the Old
Kingdom and, also several tombs at Beni
Hasan contain bread-making scenes, and
another depiction is found on the wall
paintings of Nebamun's tomb dated to
the New Kingdom located in the West
Bank of Thebes (modern Luxor).

Model Granary from the Tomb of Meketre Middle KingdomThe

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wooden statue of a man grinding grain. From the mastaba of the

official Ti in Saqqara
Different kinds of ancient egyptian mortars displayed in the
Museum of Agriculture, Cairo

Model showing brewing, baking and butchery From the tomb of

Sebekhetepi at Beni Hasan, Egypt Middle Kingdom, British
museum.

Also there is a discovered bakery at Giza

area dating to the Old Kingdom with

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Bread in Ancient Egypt Venice Ibrahim Attia

evidences that bread molds made of fruits such as dates, figs. The moderate
pottery were set in rows on a sheet of climate of Egypt is responsible for
embers prepared to bake the dough preserving a lot of organic materials,
placed within them, with an evolution including bread loaves, hundreds of
during the Middle Kingdom developing specimens survived, mostly from funerary
into square hearths, and the pottery offerings and are kept in various
molds altered into tall cylindrical cones, museums in the world, these even include
new ovens were developed with a large bread fragments from predynastic graves
open-clay cylinder encased in thick mud of the Badarian culture bread loaves
bricks and mortar and afterwards by the survived over five thousand years
New Kingdom the flat disks of dough reaching our hands today.
were leavened and slapped on to a pre
heated inner oven wall, peeled off when
baked, before falling into the embers.
There are variety of bread loaves found in
tombs from the New Kingdom, having
different shapes, sizes, and even
decorations some having simple shapes
such as disks and fans and others formed
in recognizable shapes of a fish and
Ancient Egyptian bread loafs
human figures.

Bread Basket, Museum of Agriculture, Cairo

A painting detail in the tomb of Senet showing bread making.

They also added flavorings to their bread

such as herbs, coriander seeds, eggs,
butter and sometimes they used to
sweeten their bread with honey or dried Tomb figure is carrying a tray of bread

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Bread in Ancient Egypt Venice Ibrahim Attia

Bread shapes, Museum of Agriculture, Cairo

The illustration above is an etching from the tomb of Ramesses III,

1186 BC - 1155 BC. It depicts the process of making bread at the
References:
royal bakery, the bread has many shapes, including the shapes of
animals, at the top left two workers with poles which were used as -Leek F F. Teeth and bread in ancient
pestles to pound the grains and remove the chaff, the top right,
illustrates two methods of baking, there is an oven with supporting
Egypt. J Egypt Archaeol 1972; 58: 126
legs and a lid, and there is a brick oven into which a worker is 132.
sticking his hand, thus the open-top oven is quite similar to what is
called today the tandoor clay ovens which are used today to bake
- Leek F F. Further studies concerning
breads like lavash and naan. ancient Egyptian bread. J Egypt
Archaeol1972; 59: 199204.
-"Bread in Ancient Egypt" by Jane
Howard
-"Ancient Grains", by Delwen Samuel
-Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, Ian Shaw
and Paul Nicholson.
- Ibrahim M A. A study of dental attrition
A cylindrical oven from the Amarna Workmen's village;
and diet in some ancient Egyptian
Samuel D., "Bread Making and Social Interactions at the Amarna
Workmen's Village, Egypt", World Archaeology 31 (1), p. 133. populations. Doctoral thesis: Durham
University, 1987.
- Strouhal E. Life of the ancient Egyptians.
Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1992.
- Michael Chazan, Mark Lehner:, An
Ancient Analogy : Pot Baked Bread in
Bread holes, Museum of Agriculture ,Cairo Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
- Delwan Samuel:,A new look atold
bread:ancient Egyptian baking
- Erman A., Life in Ancient Egypt, New
York, 1971, p. 166.
- Pyke G., "An Enigmatic Bird from
HK25", Nekhen News 18, p. 6.
Disk shaped bread loaf 9th dynasty, Ashmolean museum
- Ibid. I, p. 160.

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