Authors: Jackie French
A typical house had two to four rooms, a courtyard or flat roof for cooking, with a dirt floor baked so hard by the sun that it could be swept regularly, and a cellar to store things. Dishes and clothes were usually taken to the river to be cleaned.
Rich people had much bigger houses, but they were still made of mud brick, with rooms arranged around courtyards. The floors in most houses were made of packed earth, though richer houses had tiles.
Even in those days, long before the pyramids, Egyptians were digging great tombs for their dead, with underground rooms furnished with everything the dead person had used when they were alive. People took all their belongings with them into the grave because they expected to be reborn in the Afterlife in exactly the same form as they had during their lifetime. A king would be a king, a priest a priest. Poor labourers might only have a hole in the ground as a tomb, but even they were given a crust of bread to hold in their hand to take into the Afterlife. The classic bandagewrapped mummies were from a much later time, between about 1085 BCE and 945 BCE. But it’s likely that the Egyptians of Narmer’s time also embalmed their dead, covering their bodies in resin before they were buried.
While food and other goods could be bought at markets, for reliable fresh food—and home-grown luxury fruits and vegetables—you needed your own farm. Nearly every house had its own vegetable garden and lily pond. Most houses had an orchard too, with mud walls to keep out floodwaters, and depressions around each tree to hold water, which was usually brought to the tree in a large wooden bucket.
In Narmer’s time most wealthy people owned land and had it farmed for them. Rich households produced most of their own food and other goods. Men grew wheat, barley or millet for grain; the women ground it in stone querns, made it into dough and baked it into bread, and brewed barley into weak beer. Flax plants were grown to be turned into fibre, then spun into thread, then woven on looms into cloth that could be
sewn into clothes. Wool was spun and used for clothes too, and sometimes woven with flax, but knitting wasn’t known. Wealthy estates also produced their own leather for shoes, and kept bees for honey and wax candles.
Clothes were simple—a short kilt for men, and a dress with straps for women. (Clothes became more complicated later.) Children often went naked, and workers in muddy fields were probably naked too—it’s easier to wash skin than clothes when you don’t have a washing machine. We don’t know if they wore underwear. A triangular loincloth found in one tomb may possibly have been a sort of basic pair of underpants.
In Narmer’s time most Egyptians went barefoot. Sandals were for special occasions, or for when the ground was very rough. The king—and possibly members of his family—had their own ‘sandal bearer’, who carried their sandals in case they wanted to put them on.
Everyone mostly ate bread, fish and vegetables. Wealthy people might have a few more luxuries, but they only ate them occasionally. Vegetables were grown all year round—leeks, onions, garlic, chickpeas, broad beans, radishes, cabbages, endives, cucumbers, peas and raphanus, a wild radish tasting like turnip. Fruits grown included dates, date-like balanites, jujubes, carobs, figs, grapes and tiny dry sycamore figs. Other fruits like olives, apples, mulberries and pomegranates were brought to Egypt much later, and fruits like pears, peaches, almonds and cherries didn’t arrive till Roman times, about
three thousand years after this book is set. The Egyptians grew other fruits and vegetables, too, that we can’t identify these days—probably they weren’t very tasty, and so were abandoned when better-tasting crops arrived. People also harvested wild lotus lilies from the River and ate the stems and roots, as well as the tender bases of papyrus. Spices and herbs like cumin, dill, coriander, cinnamon and rosemary were used to flavour food, and honey and syrups made from grape juice, dates, palm sap, figs and carobs were used for sweetening. Food was cooked over wood fires, and sometimes in small clay ovens.
The Egyptians kept cattle, goats and sheep for milk. Their milk was kept in egg-shaped earthenware jars, topped with grass to keep the insects out. It was drunk soon after milking, or kept as sour milk, a sort of yoghurt. In Narmer’s day milk was valuable, and would only have been drunk by the king’s family, or as part of a feast. Meat was a luxury too, and mostly came from wild animals.
In Narmer’s day most people probably ate from shared platters, or big plates or bowls, with everyone sitting on the floor, using bits of flatbread to scoop up the food. Most dishes for everyday use were made of pottery. You had to be rich to afford metal or alabaster or even carved wooden dishes. Plates and spoons were only used for cooking, not eating, as were jugs, ladles and strainers.
No recipes survive from Narmer’s Egypt. But the two that follow may be something like the foods that the first Pharaoh ate.
Date bread:
Flatbreads—wheat or other grains and seeds mixed with water and baked into a thin, flat cake—have been around almost as long as humans have been eating grains, at least fourteen thousand years. The Egyptians probably ate the first risen bread; they were among the first beer drinkers too, so they had yeast, and they grew a sort of wheat that would rise when yeast was added to it. (Most flours don’t rise when yeast is added. The flour needs to contain gluten for bread to rise; the yeast produces carbondioxide gas and the gluten forms little bubbles around the gas. The more bubbles there are, the lighter your bread is.)
But that early risen bread still wasn’t much like the bread we know today. If you look at the skulls of middle-aged ancient Egyptians their teeth are worn right down, so the bread probably included lots of bran and bits of stalk and maybe even splinters of stone from when the wheat was ground.
In Narmer’s time flour was made from barley or emmer wheat or durah, a kind of millet. Women spent many hours a day grinding the grain, singing or chanting or gossiping to pass the time. The bread was baked in closed ovens. These were probably small, not big baker’s ovens that could cook many loaves of bread, which came later. These ovens were basically big hard mud or clay holes. Wood was shoved in and burnt to heat the oven, then the ashes were raked and the bread put in on top, to bake before the oven cooled. Flatbread could be baked on the hot sand, as it is in this book.
Bread was also flavoured with eggs, oil, sesame seed, herbs and fruit. To make date bread, you will need:
1
/
2
cup of fresh or dried dates, chopped1 cup of water
1 teaspoon of fresh or dried yeast (Egyptian yeast first came from beer, which they brewed from dates, barley or palm sap. Bakers would either keep some of their last lot of bread dough to add to the new lot, or mix in yeasty beer.)
6 cups of wholemeal flour (or for a really authentic taste, 5
1
/
2
cups of flour and
1
/
2
cup of grit—but don’t try it, it’s
very
bad for your teeth!)
Boil the dates in the water till soft. Add more water if it boils away too quickly. Mash the dates, then when the date mash is warm—not hot—add the yeast. When the mixture is bubbling well, add the flour, and more water if needed. Knead it (pinch and roll it) well.
Flatten the mixture till it’s about as thick as your hand. Leave it till it doubles in size—which will take an hour or two in a warm place. (Most bread in Narmer’s day was flatbread, which cooks fast, not high loaves.) Place it on a greased tray in a very hot oven—as hot as you can make it—and bake it for about fifteen minutes, until it’s brown on top. Eat it hot or cold, or use it like the ancient Egyptians did, to scoop up other foods instead of using spoons or forks.
Baked beans with honey:
to make these you will need:
3 cups of dried broad beans (other bean varieties wouldn’t be brought from South America for another four thousand years)
4 onions, chopped
10 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon of honey
1 tablespoon of ground cumin
water, to cover
Place all the ingredients in a pot. The mixture should be well covered with water. Put the lid on then bake in a very, very slow oven for at least six hours—the slower the better. If the beans are very old they may be very tough, and will need to be cooked for a whole day, or even left overnight and given more cooking the next day. But usually six hours is enough. Check every hour or so to see if you need to add more water, as the beans will absorb a lot. The beans are ready when they are soft enough to scoop up with a bit of bread, and all the liquid has been absorbed.
You can also use fresh (or even frozen) broad beans. They will only need cooking for an hour or two. They’re best with the loose skins rubbed off before cooking.
9000 BCE
Hunter–gatherers in the Middle East and north Africa are collecting wild grains; herders in what will be called the Zagros Mountains around the modern Iran–Iraq border begin to herd flocks of wild goats and sheep.
8000 BCE
Barley and wheat varieties are domesticated—farmed—in the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. The first towns grow up around the grain fields.
7000 BCE
Flax is grown and spun to make linen cloth; pigs, sheep and goats are domesticated.
6500 BCE
What may be the world’s first city Jericho, is built in the Jordan valley, with a population of about 2500 people. (Outside the Middle East, rice is farmed in the Yangtze River valley in China.)
6000 BCE
Cattle are domesticated and farmers are irrigating their land along the Tigris and Euphrates. Copper is being mined and smelted at Catal Huyuk, in what will become Turkey. (Outside the Middle East, farming begins in India and Pakistan.)
4500 BCE
Potter’s wheels, sails and ploughs are invented along the Tigris and Euphrates; the small villages of this region are growing into cities.
4000 BCE
Outside the Middle East, horses are domesticated in what is now the Ukraine.
3800 BCE
In Mespotamia copper is mixed with arsenic, and later tin, to make the harder metal bronze.
3600 BCE
Wheeled carts are being used along the Tigris and Euphrates.
3500 BCE
Pictographs—symbols that represent words—are being used in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. The grasslands of north Africa are drying up, the Sahara Desert is growing larger. More nomads are moving to the fertile land along the Nile.
3100 BCE
Narmer unites northern and southern Egypt into one country. The Sumerians develop cuneiform, a six-hundred sign alphabet, which they use as well as pictograms. (Outside the Middle East, cotton is being made into cloth in the Indus valley, modern-day India and Pakistan; copper is being smelted and potter’s wheels are being used in China; and potatoes are being grown and llamas domesticated in South America.)
2630 BCE
Djoser becomes pharaoh; the first pyramid is built by the architect Imhotep.
2600–2500 BCE
Rich burials take place in Ur.
2528 BCE
The pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) is buried in the first and largest of the Great Pyramids at Giza.
2520 BCE
Khafre (Cherphren) becomes pharaoh and builds the second of the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx.
2300–2100 BCE
Sargon, King of Akkad, conquers Sumer
and the rest of Mesopotamia; his successors will rule for one hundred and fifty years.
2134 BCE
Central rule fails in Egypt. Local rulers struggle for power.
2112–2100 BCE
King Ur-Nammu starts the Third Dynasty of Ur in Sumer; the first ziggurats—giant stepped temples—are built at Ur. Ur-Nammu’s code of laws is probably the first in the world.
2040 BCE
Pharaoh Mentuhotep rules all Egypt.
1900 BCE
Crop yields are so low in southern Mesopotamia that they can no longer support the big cities.
1792 BCE
King Hammurabi unites all Mesopotamia: the beginning of the Babylonian Empire
1640 BCE
Hyksos tribes from modern Syria and Palestine conquer Egypt.
1595 BCE
Hittites from what is now Turkey conquer Babylon.
1550 BCE
Ahmose becomes pharaoh, driving out the Hyksos.
1353 BCE
Amenhotep IV takes the name Akhenaten and with his wife Nefertiti introduces monotheism to Egypt, worshipping the sun god Aten.
1333 BCE
Nine-year-old Tutankhamen becomes pharaoh, and Egypt returns to the worship of Amun.
1270 BCE
Rameses II is pharaoh, building massive monuments. It may be during his reign that the Israelites flee Egypt, settling in Canaan about 1200 BCE.
600s BCE
Mesopotamia becomes part of the Persian Empire.
500 BCE
Ur is abandoned, but people may have continued to bury their dead there.
334–323 BCE
Alexander the Great of Macedon conquers Egypt, Persia, Samarkand and Babylon. After Alexander’s death his general Ptolemy seizes power in Egypt. Mesopotamia, too, stays under Greek rule for another two centuries.
51 BCE
Cleopatra, a descendent of Ptolemy, becomes Queen of Egypt.
30 BCE
Cleopatra dies; Egypt becomes a province of the Roman Empire.
600s CE (AD)
Arab Muslims conquer Egypt and Mesopotamia.
1500s
Egypt and Mesopotamia become part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
1798
The French briefly conquer Egypt, then it is ruled by the Albanian Muhammad Ali and his descendants.
1882
The British invade Egypt.
1917
British forces capture Baghdad during World War I.
1920
The country of Iraq is proclaimed under British mandate.
1922
Egypt is given independence but British troops remain.
1927
Huge oilfields are discovered in Iraq.