How Women Cooked 5,000 Years Ago

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 992, 7 June 1930, Page 20

How Women Cooked 5,000 Years Ago

OTHING pleases our Arab workmen more tlian when, after weeks of di Sging down through 30 frATauKd *- ee< * anc * more °£ earth. | we bring to light some object which they can recognise as familiar to themselves (writes Katherine ’Woolley, wife of the archaeologist who has returned to Ur of the Chal-

dees to excavate on behalf of the British Museum).

Gold vessels and strange works of art mean more baksheesh for them, but a copper cooking pots such as they still use themselves, or an oven like their own primitive ones, is greeted with shouts of joy.

Just outside a little temple, whose ruins lie some four miles from Ur. we found a kitchen which must have been run to serve the needs of pilgrims visiting the shrine.

There were two fireplaces, exactly of the type which one can see any day if one passes through the bazaar's of Baghdad or Aleppo and looks into the native cookshops. An oblong

block of bricks and mud in the fiat 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 long-tailed sheep, roasting it slowly above the glowing embers. Just as today, so five thousand years ago the cook must have plied his trade, and the pans which he uses now, straight-sided copper things with outurned rims and open spouts, are almost identical with those which we find set beside the dead in the early tombs.

Fifteen hundred years later, in Abraham’s time, the same sort of range was still being used in private houses. The square of brickwork 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 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 find other relics of the cook’s business, the stone grinders for milling corn, the oblong stones, hollow in the