Although eaten often, not everyone knows the origin of the bread

Although eaten regularly, few people know the exact origin of the bread. So where did the 'ancestors' of modern bread come from?

Modern bread is an ancient dish that originated at least over 22,000 years ago. It was not until very recently that 1930, in particular, that bread was cut into slices and sold as a pillow that was invented and created a unique direction for traditional bread.

In 2004, at an excavation site called Ohalo II in present-day Israel, scientists found 22,000-year-old barley grains in layers of grinding stones. This is the earliest evidence that humans have been using grains for cooking.

“But these dishes don't look like the soft, fluffy bread we eat today, it's more like the original grains laid on hot rock or burned in a fire,” culinary historian and professor at Lipscomb University, Nashville, Tennessee, said.

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The first grains to be grown and harvested for food use began in the Natufian culture. The Mesolithic tribe specializes in hunting wild animals living in today's Middle East's Jordan valley, and did this about 12,500 years ago.

"The Natufians are believed to be the first to make the transition from raw, naturally harvested grain to edible food. The Natufians also applied a controlled food regime to foods made from whole grains, showing that they play an important role in everyday life, ”said William Rubel, culinary historian and author of the book. "Bread: Development History" published in 2011, said.

A stele on the Itjer tomb in Giza dating back to about 2,500 BC. The figure engraved on this stele shows the person sitting with slices of bread lying along the table. Photo: Ian Alexander.

The Natufian culture had one of the world's earliest established agricultural societies, who knew how to process raw produce into small non-fermented bread and burned directly through the fire.

In the thousands of years that followed, agriculture developed throughout the Middle East and grain cultivation expanded to southwestern Asia through tribal trade in the Nile valley, the Mesopotamia River and to the east. Indus valley.

“Bread is a huge driver of the formation of state regimes and administrative decentralization. Bread can be stored in large quantities, so villages that produce a lot of bread will eventually become cities, ”Rubel added.

More than 5,000 years after the Natufians made flat bread, there were three civilizations that flourished and expanded their influence to the maximum in the Bronze Age, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians. Iraq today) and the Harappans (living in the Indus Valley, now in Pakistan). These three cultures, considered the largest in the ancient world, flourished due to their great dependence on bread.

“Bread is a high calorie food. Bread when entering the body can help keep it full and through which people can do more work. From here on out, we have workers working all day, which wouldn't happen if we didn't have bread, ”said Rubel.

The first fermented bread made from semi-natural fermented yeast circa 1,000 BC in Egypt. However, scholars are still debating the accuracy of this hypothesis, as there is plenty of evidence that the Mesopotamians also produced fermented bread during that time.

As far as we know, the production of fermented bread was an accident. A 1994 study found that ancient Egyptians used barley and wheat to brew sour beer from sour bread. They baked oatmeal into loaves of bread and mixed with water to form beer.

Beer is liquid bread. They have the same ingredients including water, grain and yeast, differ only in different proportions of the constituent ingredients. From what promotes civilizations, to what is widely available in every store, bread is a dish that has been associated with the development of human society, we have eaten it for thousands of years. by.