Experimental Baking IRAWI Publishing
Experimental Baking
Experimental archaeology helps us understand more about how ancient people did things like baking bread, because archaeological remains can never provide us with all the answers.
Archaeologists run experiments based on the evidence from excavations such as the types of grain available in Egypt, the shape of bread moulds, the architecture of bakeries, etc.
The things we do not know—how long it took to bake a loaf, for example—are the things we try to discover using experiments. Often things do not work as expected, but it is these mistakes that help us learn more about each process.
Giza, 1994 | Baking Experimental Loaves
In 1991 Dr. Mark Lehner and his team (Ancient Egypt Research Associates – AERA) discovered archaeological remains of bakeries at the pyramid workers’ town in Giza near the famous pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. The archaeological remains they excavated looked just like the images of bakeries in the ancient Egyptian tombs of the Old Kingdom (the Pyramid Era). Shown here: For a 1994 issue of National Geographic, Mr Ed Wood (baker) and Dr Lehner built a replica of the bakeries to run experiments and try to answer questions about how the ancient Egyptians baked bread.
Tomb Chapel of Raemkai: North WallThe Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bakeries
This is a typical example of an Old Kingdom scene that shows a bakery. You see a row of bent over women (third row from top) grinding grain. Beneath them is a row of bedja moulds—pots that act as ‘mini ovens’ to bake bread.
Similar ones were recovered on the site where the pyramid workers lived. The pots were used so that the bread could be given to the workers as ‘wages’.
In the bottom right corner, the moulds are seen piled together for heating before being filled with dough, which is exactly what the archaeologists tried to recreate. Moulds were recreated in the same style for the bread experiments.
Emmer Wheat GrainsRAWI Publishing
Cereals
Bread in ancient Egypt was made from emmer wheat and barley. We know this because we have considerable archaeobotanical remains of these two cereals from excavations across Egypt. No other types of cereals were cultivated or used in Egypt until thousands of years later.
The Baking Processs
Ancient Egyptian bread was probably a type of sourdough. The experiments recreated show how bread for the pyramid workers was baked in clay pots (bedja moulds). Dough was placed in pots set in hot ash, with heated lids on top, forming individual ‘ovens’ to bake the loaves.
For more on the ancient Egyptian diet, visit this story on feeding the pyramid builders.
Author:
Dr Claire Malleson
Story courtesy of:
AERA: Ancient Egypt Research Associates (http://www.aeraweb.org/)
