Category: A to Z Challenge

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D is for Dish

Japanese “deep bowls” @11,000 ya, Tokyo National Museum, photo by Ismoon.

While I waxed lyrical about Bread a couple days ago, I must confess that, in comparison, ancient Pottery has seemed a little underwhelming. It’s been the part of the museum I slog through, wedged between those fascinating replicas of the Gate of Ishtar and the Egyptian mummies. Oh, look yet another brown glaze!

Yet if there ever was a thing that humans invented and re-invented, in one culture after another, it is cookware. Archaeologists can find buried treasure, in fact, treasure troves just by spotting an ancient “shard” in the trash heaps, among the cigarette butts and plastic bags. Dating the shards can be tricky, but technology has improved its precision. It was once thought that dishes to hold food were created after the invention of organized farming (@10,000 ya), but recent finds on digs have unearthed pots far earlier.

Personally, I can’t tell quartz from limestone, but I’ll bet Paleolithic and Neolithic people could look at the dirt in my neighborhood and explain it to me. Certainly, it makes sense that Stone Age people would have been experts in geology. If they could find the right kind of rocks to hone the points of other rocks and create sparks for fire, then they could make their own rocks, which is why today’s post is all about Dishes. Let’s explore three topics:

  1. A core definition of the “thing”
  2. Where and when it happened first “around the world”
  3. How it influenced human development
1790 fine bone china tea service, photo courtesy of the Met.
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C is for Calendar

Was it a calendar? photo by Kajmeister.

(May) maybe if I ask your dad and mom
(June) they’ll let me take you to the Junior Prom
(July) like a firecracker all aglow
(August) when you’re on the beach you steal the show
Yeah, yeah, my heart’s in a whirl
I love, I love, I love my little calendar girl

Neil Sedaka, “I Love My Calendar Girl”

We take the division of time for granted. How many minutes left on the test? What time do I get off? Is the next holiday on Monday, so I can have a three-day weekend? Some people even wear wrist devices which describe those divisions, linked to their health data, like their heart rate and whether they sleep. However did we manage before a wristwatch could describe our sleep?

The ancient people had to invent all those divisions from scratch. They did it repeatedly, across multiple cultures, using varying tracking systems. Their lives depended on observations–the rise of the river waters, the start of the dry season, the first bite of frost. I was well into middle age before I noticed how far north the sun set in the west in the summer vs. the winter. I think it was because I’d finally lived in one place for more than a decade. I bet even the Neanderthals figured that out before I did, since their lives depended on such things.

Today’s topic is the Calendar. How could they mark time, before writing was even invented? How did different societies integrate math with time? Were there different versions of calendars? Where did they stand on ending Daylight Savings Time?

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B is for Bread

2200BCE, Egypt, figurine of woman kneading bread. Statue in the Louvre.

It’s not the barley or the wheat
It’s not the oven or the heat
That makes this bread so good to eat
It’s the kneading and the sharing that makes the meal complete

Johnny Cash, “Breakin’ Bread”

I have a confession to make; I sometimes eat bread for dessert. Put a fresh-baked rustic French baguette in front of me with some aged cheddar, and I’d give you the keys to my house. And I’m not persnickety. I’ll take brioche, English muffins, black bread, rye, bagels, challah, biscuits, ciabatta, or foccaccia. It doesn’t even need yeast. I can eat naan, tortillas, lavash, or pita with the best of ’em. Not super-fond of those corn tortillas unless they’re fried with meat, but wasn’t that the point? Wonder bread is probably the only kind I don’t like and never did, otherwise, pretzels count, crackers–hey, don’t get me started on dumplings.

Humans have been making forms of bread for about 30,000 years +/-. They needed fire, but they didn’t need yeast or even organized farming. How yeast got there is its own story, and something of a controversy. They’ve been arguing for the past fifty years, about whether beer came before bread or vice versa. Let’s start without yeast and work our way forward. As with each of my A to Z ancient invention posts, the story of Bread will cover the basics:

  1. A core definition of the “thing”
  2. Where and when it happened first “around the world”
  3. How it influenced human development

As this is only my second “ancient invention” post, it’s worth noting that there is kind of a dividing line when it comes to such inventions. What we know is based on trace evidence, so if the invention depends on something organic, we may only know about it from ancient documentation. If people painted it on the walls or wrote about it stone tablets that can be read, that sets a date, even if it’s not the earliest date. We know about bread from Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but what kind of evidence would predate recorded history? You can’t exactly see bread, thousands of years later, can you?

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