Delights from the Garden of Eden

Iraqi flat bread khubuz Tannour (baked in the domed clay oven), also called khubuz mei (water bread), because no fat is used in making it, just flour, water, salt and yeast. This is a traditional type of bread, which goes back to ancient Sumerian times. It is still baked the same way in the same good old tannour (in Sumerian it was called tinnuru). I found a way to bake it in my regular oven, with the help of a pizza stone and parchment paper (see Delights from the Garden of Eden, pp. 85-87).

So important was bread in the lives  of the ancient Mesopotamians that they thought of it as the epitome of life, as revealed in this quote from The Epic of Gilgamesh:

Eat bread, Enkido, the glory of life,

Drink wine, Enkido, the custom of the land.

Etymologically, this aspect is best illustrated in the symbols the Akkadians developed for ‘to eat’ and ‘bread’: the first is akâlu, and the second is akalu. 

They Ate a Lot of Bread in

Ancient Mesopotamia

Archaeological records show that the ancient Mesopotamians made more than 300 kinds of bread, both unleavened and leavened. They baked plain and improved breads, which were shaped and spiced differently. The ancient records classify these breads as large and tiny, long and short, fresh and dry, black and white, excellent and ordinary.

Sumerian Diplomacy

The clay oven tinnuru to the Sumerians was indispensable. They had to keep it constantly burning and in tip-top shape. An extinguished tinnuru was a bad omen.

As shown in the following piece of wisdom, the older the oven got, the more care it needed:           

Be gentle to your enemy as to an old oven