Topic: Egyptian Bread
These articles by Hilary Wilson published in Ancient Egypt Magazine, (like the one on pomegranates) were intended for children but has information interesting to all.
Bread was the most important part of the ancient Egyptian diet. With no rice, maize or potatoes, all introduced into the country thousands of years later, the early Egyptians depended on wheat and barley to provide the carbohydrates they needed for a healthy, energetic lifestyle. Excavations around the Fayum revealed storage pits where the harvested grain was kept. Later, grain was stored in beehive-shaped
silos, or special granaries with bunkers or bins for different types of corn. In the home, wheat and barley were kept in pottery or stone jars, safe from rats and mice. The remains of kitchens and household equipment show that the processes involved in turning grain into bread were time-consuming everyday activities in most homes.

A woman grinding grain. This is a reconstruction of the ancient method and can be seen at Dr. Ragab’s Pharaonic Village in Cairo. Photo: RP.
As there were no supermarkets where you could buy a sliced loaf, or even the ingredients to bake your own bread, the making of bread started with the grinding of the grain into flour. To make this easier, sometimes the grain was parched, which means it was rinsed in water to remove some of the surface dust and dirt, and to soften the outer layer, before being spread on a mat to dry. The parched corn was put in a mortar, a large bowl, usually made of stone and set into the floor, where it was pounded with a heavy wooden pole to start breaking up the hard grains. The cracked wheat was then put onto a quern, a sloping stone with a bowl or trough at the lower end for collecting the flour.
The miller, usually a woman, knelt at the higher end and crushed the grain into flour by rubbing another stone over it, up
and down the quern. This must have been a back-breaking job, even when the quern was raised by being set into a brick-built ‘kitchen unit’. It was also such a necessary part of domestic life that many models of women grinding grain have been found. One, in the Leiden Museum in the Netherlands, is a mechanical toy, operated by pulling a string to make the jointed figure move the rubbing stone backwards and forwards over the quern.
The flour produced in this way was definitely wholewheat. It contained lots of partly-crushed grain, some whole grains and a large amount of contamination in the form of sand and grit from the quern. Some of the sand may have been added deliberately to speed up the grinding process. The finest sieves the Egyptians could make were not good enough to remove all this débris, and even the flour of the highest quality, used for what they called ‘white’ bread, was never the smooth, fine stuff that we recognise. As the Egyptians ate large quantities of bread, every day, it is hardly surprising that they wore away their teeth in chewing it.
The commonest type of bread was made with just flour and water. The mixture was kneaded and made into flat pancakes of dough, which were cooked on a shelf over the fire or by being slapped onto the wall of a clay oven. This is similar to naan bread being cooked in a tandoor except that the Egyptians used the outside wall of the oven. The result was something like a pitta bread. People all over the world have been
making bread like this, with whatever flour they have available, for thousands of years – chapattis in India, tortillas in Mexico.
Barley and wheat were not only used to make bread. A small metal cauldron from the tomb of Kha and Meryt, (Egyptian Museum,
Turin), seems to contain a type of porridge. But the second most important product of grain in ancient Egypt was beer. I will return to this subject in another Per Mesut. Bread and beer were usually made in the same area and the fermentation of the beer provided yeast
for making many more types of bread. This yeast was in the form of a liquid barm and, when mixed with the flour and water, it produced bubbles of gas that caused the bread to rise. This is called leavening.
Leavened dough was formed into loaves of many different shapes. Some were cooked directly on the flat shelf of the domed baking oven, like a modern cob or bloomer loaf. Others were made in clay moulds, the ancient equivalent of baking tins, which could be stacked inside the oven
rather like the pottery in a kiln. Bakeries attached to the biggest temples had rows of ovens, each producing hundreds of loaves at a time. Lists of offerings to the gods include loaves by the thousand. Often the moulds had to be broken to get the bread out, but larger moulds could be reused. At Giza, the bakery providing bread for the pyramid builders produced huge loaves in flowerpot-shaped moulds the size of a garden planter. These were big enough to feed ten men for several days, though the bread was probably not very appetising. It would have been burnt on the outside, stodgy in the middle, very heavy and hard to digest, but it was food and the workmen would have been glad of it.
In temple and palace kitchens, cooks made a wide range of baked goods. The Egyptian language included about forty words for different breads, cakes and pastries. Some of these may refer to shape; round, rectangular, oval, triangular and pear-shaped loaves are shown in tomb
offerings. Other names may indicate the method of cooking or added ingredients. Dough was sweetened with dried fruit or honey, flavoured with herbs and spices, or enriched with oil or milk. Fancy shapes were made for special occasions, like the corn sheaf loaf made for the Christian Harvest Festival. Loaves and pastries were handed out as gifts at religious celebrations. As part of their pay, people who worked for the government, including soldiers, might receive tokens, which they exchanged for ready-made loaves. One workman at Deir el-Medina left a
receipt for his purchase of sweet pastries from a temple bakery. Unfortunately, no Egyptian cookery books have survived, so we can only guess at the recipes. I will give you some suggestions about Egyptian-style cooking in the next Per Mesut, so start grinding
that grain now!
Original article:
ancient egypt magazine on line has articles from past issues if you are interested.
By Hilary Wilson
June 2007
Hilary Wilson is the author of Egyptian Food and Drink, part of the Shire Egyptology series. published in 1988.
I was very pleased to find this web-site.I wanted to thanks for your time for this wonderful read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you blog post.
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“The flour produced in this way was definitely wholewheat. ”
Even though it was barley or corn?
It was definitely whole grain.
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First, the Ancient Egyptians did not have corn ( Maze) even though they collectively called all their grains ” corn”. They had a grain god called Nepri in Early egypt( later incorporated with Osiris).Second, they did for the most part produce what we today would call wholewheat or whole grain flour for breads, but the upper classes prized above all, white bread so while the common man ate whole wheat, they ate bread that was more refined, ( sifted milled etc).
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do you know around what year it was introduced in ancient Egypt
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Ok thanks for the question. what are you referring to, bread, grain or what?
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Thank you, this website has helped me very much with my homework. Much appreciated. Not boring either!
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Cool, I’m glad you found my post a help, thanks for letting me know!
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Great post and most informative !!! Loved all those ancient details and connections !!!
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Looking for information on corn in Ancient Egypt. What is the evidence that corn did NOT exist in Ancient Egypt? Is there some sort of chronological dilemma that would have NOT made it possible for them to have had corn in Ancient Egypt? What about the so called images of corn in ancient wall murals and on ceramics as suggested by Gunnar Thompson? Thanks!!
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Thanks for the comment.
First let me quote from the post where you left your inquiry, that article was a copy of one by Hilary Wilson
” Bread was the most important part of the ancient Egyptian diet. With no rice, maize or potatoes, all introduced into the country thousands of years later, the early Egyptians depended on wheat and barley to provide the carbohydrates they needed for a healthy, energetic lifestyle. Excavations around the Fayum revealed storage pits where the harvested grain was kept. Later, grain was stored in beehive-shaped.”
Now a quote from the definitive source in these matters,” Food, The Gift of Osiris , by William Darby:
” A word that caused the deepest misunderstanding, both in antiquity and nowadays is “corn”. Today in the United States, this word denotes Zea mays, maize; in England it means wheat, an in Scotland, oats ( Browning 1960 ).
” Corn, in antiquity and in the Biblical sense, was the English translation of grain, mostly wheat; but definitely not the American maize that the Spaniards learned from Meso-Americia Indians only in the fifteenth century AD and introduced into Europe, from which it was imported indo a Egypt via Syria or Morea dome time during the eighteenth century aAD.”
I hope explain that a little. What we call corn is more properly called maize. The ancient Egyptians did not have maze. Now as to the picture or picture, first a vast majority of the depictions on tomb walls no longer are in color leaving that open to interpretation. What I could find looks to my eye ( I have given this much study and have consulted with my husband, an Egyptologist ) we think these are other plants such as wheat or even lettuce. The ” artist” just got the color wrong.
Lettuce in ancient Egypt would be a good guess as what looks like kernels might just be depictions of the white sap which runs out of that ancient variety.
There is so much here to read but if you look I posted in2009 when I started this blog about the wild grass that is the precursor of maize as we know it today.
Thank you
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Hello. The “Warrior Pharaohs” episode of PBS’s “Egypt’s Golden Empires” (in the US) clearly shows a reenactment of ancient Egyptians raking through a corn harvest. The show has interviews with top scholars. Did their producers get it wrong, or has thought on this changed since 2001 (when the show was produced)?
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first, thank you for your interest. I watched the episodes you talked about but the reinactment showed wheat not corn. Now I did see another program, Ancient Egypt life and death in the Valley of the Kings part 1 that somewhere toward the end the show has what looks like a corn field but that is in modern Egypt. Take a look at the episode because it features British archaeologist Dr. Joann Fletcher. She gives a good account.
Look up the entomology of the term corn and you will see it is a indo-europian term for wheat, barley , and type of grain. Maze( corn) is from the new world and only found east after Columbus. The ancient Egyptians grew Emmer as their main crop along with Barley. Bon Appetite has an interesting account on the etymology of the word.
I hope this helps.
Thank you.
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I just read that the word Aish means “life” in the ancient Egyptian dialect, and then found a recipe called Aish Ba’ladi, a certain kind of local or whole wheat and barley country bread. Can you tell me if you think that there is any correlation between the word Aish (“life”) and the Hebrew word Aish (meaning “fire”)? Does this word Aish have another meaning in Egypt that also means “fire” in some way?
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Thanks for the question. I’m going to have to get back to you on this one. My husband is the resident expert on such matters. He will need to consult text first so I’ll let you know as soon as I’m able.
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Para mi, este es muy interesante. La comida es una cosa que la gente tienen en común por todo del tiempo, entonces civilizaciones diferentes han tenido crear dietas diferentes, dependiendo en cual comidas que tenían acceso a. En este lugar, Egypt, el pan fue muy importante porque la tierra era muy fértil y había agua en el río que pudimos usar. Porque no había supermercados, el proceso de cocinando el pan fue increíble. Para mi, es muy interesante que la gente puede hacer cuando necesita comer y beber. También, los hornos fueron muy increíblemente hermosos. Eso es un ejemplo de personas que tenían mucho orgullo en su oficio. Finalmente, me gusta mucho que había métodos de cocinado diferentes dependiente en el lugar. Por ejemplo, en Giza, necesitamos mucho pan porque había muchos hombres que fueron trabajando en los pirámides todos los días. El método aquí fue producir tanto pan como fue posible. muchas personas en lugares como Egypt tenían trabajos muy específicos en el mundo de pan, y comida que fue muy importante.
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Thank you for the inside and comment.
I had to translate your text, so it took me awhile.
I think I have my love of bread from the ancients including Egypt where it was and is so important .
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This really helped me out thanks. 🙂
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Glad it helped. Thanks
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Very informative, and yet reading some of the comments disappointing It seems beyond some people’s imagination that everything we have NOW wasn’t in play in the ancient past,,,IE such as mass commerce of good globally, the assumption that “everything grows everywhere”. There seems to be a disconnect in common sense that scares me. I thank you for taking a calm hand to patiently hold their hands and walk them through the slow process of learning. Kudos to you and please continue your work and research, it was very eye opening..
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Thank you for your support…I do indeed know of which you speak.
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I am doing a project on ancient Egyptian foods and this was one of the foods I researched and this really helped!
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[…] day. The same baking practices, for example, that we find evidence of 3000 years ago still occur in modern Cairo if you look hard […]
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I am so grateful for your blog.Really thank you! Really Great.
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Thank you for the praise. I’m so glad you like it.
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