5000 YEARS AGO

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 134, 3 December 1929, Page 4

5000 YEARS AGO

HOW WOMEN COOKED

AGES-OLD CUSTOMS

Xothiii^ pleases our Arab workmen more than when, after weeks of digging thirty i'ect and more of earth, we bring to light some object which they can recognise as familiar to themselves, writes a correspondent in the "Daily Mail."

Gold vessels and strange works of art mean more baksheesh for them, but ;i copper cooking pot such as they still use themselves, or an oven like their owu primitive ones, is greeted with shouts of ,"joy. Just outside a little temple, whoso ruins lie some four miles from Ur, we found a kitchen which must have been run to serve the needs of pilgrims visiting tha shrine. There weX two fireplaces, exactly of the type wl\h- one can see any day if one passes through the bazaars of Bagdad or Aleppo and looks into the native cookshops. An oblong block of bricks and mud in the flat top of which are long deep channels is the simple cooking-range. In each trough the cook lights a little heap of charcoal and across the top of it balances his copper pans or twirls his skewer on which are threaded lumps of stringy mutton interspersed with other lumps of yellow fat from the tail of the longtailed sheep, roasting it slowly abovo the glowing embers. POTS AND PANS THE SAME.

•Just as to-day, so five thousand years ago the cook must have plied his trade, and the pans which he uses now, straight-sided copper tilings with outtnrned rims and open spouts, are almost identical with those which we find set beside the dead in the early tombs.-.-:

I'ifteen hundred years later, in Abraham's time, the same sort of range was still being used in private houses. The square of brick work is always placed at one side of the room and on the face of the wall above it we have | found in almost every case the soot from the smoky fire—and to see with | one's own eyes and to brush off with I a finger a -substance as ephemeral as soot four "thousand years old is a very strange experience, proving again the permanence of unsubstantial things. '. On the floor of the kitchens we findother relics of the cook's business, the stone grinders for milling corn, the oblong stones, hollow in the middle, which we call "saddle qucms," and the smaller, thicker lumps well worn by use which "the woman grinding at the mill" worked backwards r.nd forwards as she squatted at,her task. In a house of the better class tho actual ■-'cooking pots .were generally of copper, and only poorer folk were content with saucepans of fireclay, but for other purposes clay was commonly employed.

The water carried in from the public well was stored in great jars of porous clay, whose sweating sides would by evaporation keep the contents cool"; and jars just like these are used by all our Arabs to-day. We ourselves find them the best vessels for holding our water, and one always stands by the door of the expedition house.

TYPES OF ; OVENS. - One thing would not be done in the kitchen, and that was the breadWaking; for this hoi and smoky business a special oven was needed, and would be placed apart, generally in the open air. For tho thin "flap-jack," which is the normal bread of to-day, I there might be out in the courtyard a Wide-mouthed jar of very thick clay set. in the- ground; in thisis lit a fire of brushwood and dung cakes, and, as it dies down, the flat rounds of dough are plastered against the glowing inner aides of the pot, to be cooked in the space of a few minutes.

Another type of oven for making regular loaves of bread was found in the domestic quarter of the great Moongoddess 's temple: it is a brick-built, beehive-shaped structure about six feet across and as much high, and it is obviously more suited to a professional bakery than to a private house, .In the Moon-goddess's kitchen there was a proper range built of bricks and fireclay with a double furnace, circular flues, and rings of small holes in its flat top where the cauldrons might bo put with tho heat coming into direct contact, with them; and here, too, we found, what wo find in private houses also, that the "wood fires for boiling water were outside in the open court, not in the roofed kitchen.

So to-day tho Arab woman cooks her bread outside the- shelter of reed mats and mud which is her "house" and boils her water over a fire lit in a hole which she scoops out in front of tho door. The continuity in the essentials of life is unbroken; we know that as she cooks now, so did her forbears cook three thousand and five thousand years ago, and in all likelihood when this autumn we come to dig the pro-Flood levels we shall fiud that the same customs and the same devices go back even farther into the past.