Mesopotamia was an ancient region in the Near East, which corresponds roughly to present-day Iraq. Widely regarded as the "cradle of civilization," Mesopotamia should be more properly understood as a region that produced multiple empires and civilization rather than any single civilization. Iraqi cuisine, like its art and culture, is the sum of its varied and rich past.
For a long time archeologists thought a majority of Mesopotamians ate a form of gruel as the main part of their diet-a mess of pottage, probably made of lentils or chickpeas mixed with grains. It was thought ancient Mesopotamians ate this pottage at every meal along with barley bread and beer. Recently, however, a French archeologists deciphered cracked clay Akkadian cuneiform tablets dating from 1900 BC. These tablets contain a Sumerian-Akkadian dictionary that list words for over 800 different food items, including 20 different cheeses, 100 kinds of soup and 300 different breads.
The Mesopotamians consumed barley bread, onions, fruit, fish, lamb, fowls, honey, ghee and milk. Sometimes the best cuts of meat were given to the gods. The Bible refers to people in Abraham's time eating pottage made from red lentils. Major crops included barley, dates, wheat, lentils, peas, olives, pomegranates, grapes, vegetables. Chickpeas originated from southeastern Turkey near Mesopotamia along with lentils and peas, and wheat, and several other wild crop progenitors. Pistachios were grown in royal gardens in Babylonia.
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| LAMB STEW |
The oldest known recipe dates back to 2200 BC. It called for snake skin, beer and dried plums to be mixed and cooked. Another tablet from the same period has the oldest recipe for beer. Babylonian tablets now housed at Yale University also listed recipes. One of the two dozen recipes, written in a language only deciphered in the last century, described making a stew of kid (young goat) with garlic, onions and sour milk. Other stew were made from pigeon, mutton and spleen.
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| TOASTED BARLEY WITH HERBS |
The Mesopotamians ate ghee and meat from goats, sheep, gazelles, ducks and other wild game. Around 30% of bones excavated in Tell Asmar belonged to pigs. Pork was eaten in Ur in pre-Dynastic times. After 2400 BC, it had become taboo.
Other archaeological evidence suggests that a complete shopping list of available Mesopotamian foodstuffs would be at least twice as long: A stone bas-relief discovered at Nineveh, for example, shows servants carrying choice delicacies-among them grasshoppers and brochette-to the royal tablet, while a satirical text about meat-filled intestine casings indicates that the Mesopotamians made, and presumably ate, the world's first known sausage.
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| ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIAN COOKBOOK |
Comparing the Babylonian recipes to what we know of medieval cuisine and present-day culinary practices suggests that the stews represent an early stage of a long tradition that is still dominant in Iraqi cuisine. Today's staple of the region is stew, aromatic and flavorful, cooked with different cuts of lamb, often slightly thickened, enhanced with rendered sheep's tail fat, and flavored with a combination of spices and herbs and members of the Allium family, such as onion, garlic, and leek. These seem to be direct descendants of the Babylonian versions found on the culinary tablet with stew recipes.
