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(Genesis 18:1, 6–8)
According to the biblical account in Genesis, it was out of the southern Mesopotamian city of Ur that Abraham, a pastoral nomad who became the patriarch of the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, was called by God to migrate to the Promised Land in the southern Levant around the start of the second millennium BC. Mesopotamia, comprising the alluvial floodplains formed by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as they flow through Syria and Iraq to the Persian Gulf, is considered the “cradle of civilization,” and the great city of Ur stood at the center of Mesopotamian civilization during the third millennium BC (Chavalas 2005). At its peak, Ur’s population was estimated to range as high as sixty-five thousand, probably making it the world’s largest city of the time. Ur was also a center for cheese and butter making according to detailed accounts compiled by temple scribes on clay cuneiform tablets.
After leaving Ur, Abraham eventually settled in Hebron near the west bank of the Jordan River in the land of Canaan. It was here that the eighteenth chapter of Genesis described a frantic Abraham when he suddenly realized that three newly arrived visitors were in fact the Lord God and two angels. How could he extend an appropriate level of honor and hospitality to such esteemed guests? Keeping his cool under pressure, Abraham hastily arranged a fitting reception that included freshly baked bread, tender veal, curds (or fresh cheese), and milk. The account is intriguing on the one hand because it implies that adult lactose tolerance by this time had become widespread in Abraham’s homeland of Mesopotamia, and that milk had risen to the status of a revered beverage. Consistent with this, archaeological findings from southern Mesopotamia indicate that cow’s, goat’s, and sheep’s milk were all consumed as beverages, primarily by the pastoral nomadic members of Mesopotamian society but also by the royal elite (Bottéro 2004; Limet 1987).
Even more interesting from the standpoint of cheese history is the observation that Abraham saw fit to include curds, or fresh cheese, in this banquet given in honor of the Lord. This was by no means the first recorded occasion on which cheese was offered up in an act of worship. By this time, cheese had been an integral element of religious practice in Abraham’s Mesopotamian homeland for more than a thousand years. Indeed, institutionalized cultic rites that included daily offerings of cheese and butter were commonplace in temples throughout Mesopotamia during the third millennium BC. The system of religious ideology that spawned these rites played a central role in the creation of humankind’s first civilization, which in turn influenced nearly every civilization to follow in the Near East and eventually even Greece and Rome (Kramer 1969). Amazingly, cheese was there at the beginning as an integral element of the religious mythology and cultic expression that helped to initiate a domino-like progression of great civilizations that ultimately shaped western culture.
The Rise of Mesopotamia
By the sixth millennium BC, the southward migration of Neolithic peoples along the Tigris and Euphrates had resulted in the settlement of two societies, the Halaf to the north and the Ubaid to the south (Bogucki 1999). In the highlands to the north there was sufficient rainfall to support agriculture without having to resort to irrigation, and the Halaf founded a network of small farming communities, much as their ancestors had throughout the Neolithic. To the south however, in what is now southern Iraq, Ubaid communities were completely dependent on small systems of irrigation that tapped into the life-giving waters of the Euphrates River, enabling them to grow crops in otherwise desert-like conditions.
For more than fifteen hundred years Ubaid villages grew but slowly and remained small rural communities, yet out of those humble beginnings there arose around the start of the fourth millennium BC a startling new development in the human story that has been termed the “urban revolution” (Chavalas 2005). This was the beginning of Sumerian civilization, the world’s first, which was marked by the abrupt arrival of large complex cities that functioned as independent city-states. These new city-states, among which Uruk was preeminent, were built upon sophisticated and highly centralized systems of governance and administration that created a new order of socioeconomic stratification, along with impressive technological and architectural advances, a revolution in shared religious ideology and communal worship, and a stunning new form of communication: writing.
Sumerian civilization in its various periods would last for nearly two thousand years and would continue to influence subsequent Mesopotamian civilizations (early Babylonian, Assyrian, late Babylonian) as well as Egyptian, Hittite, and ultimately Greek and Roman civilizations (Kramer 1963b, 1969). Why this quantum leap in human society happened first in the inhospitable environment of southern Iraq, ahead of anywhere else in the world, remains “one of the most fascinating unsolved riddles of antiquity” (Foster and Foster 2009). Nevertheless, recent archaeological and anthropological findings have brought this critical period into scholarly focus, and an intriguing story has emerged that directly intersects with our journey through cheese history.
The urban revolution that accompanied the rise of Sumerian civilization was itself a product of another revolution, which has been termed the “secondary products revolution” (Sherratt 1983,1981). This was a period, beginning probably in the fifth and culminating during the fourth millennium BC, when innovative new uses for domestic animals for traction and transport, as well as for intensive wool and milk production, were developed and put into widespread practice, first in Mesopotamia and then spreading rapidly throughout the Near East and eventually Europe. A critical component of the secondary products revolution was the invention of the plow. Cattle thrived in the marshy delta region of southern Mesopotamia where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers empty into the Persian Gulf, and the Ubaid peoples there were apparently the first to harness the powerful traction capacity of the ox via the invention of the plow. The use of the plow in combination with intensive irrigation enabled the Ubaid to greatly increase their cultivation of fertile alluvial lands along the banks of the Euphrates, far beyond what had been previously possible using only the hoe. Consequently, the banks of the Euphrates became intensively cultivated and very productive, which enabled the Ubaid to thrive for more than a millennium and even produce agricultural surpluses, as evidenced by the widespread construction of communal agricultural storage facilities.
As the amount of land under Ubaid cultivation increased during the fifth millennium BC, the stubble that remained in the fields after the harvest, along with fallow fields that were withheld from cultivation periodically to replenish their fertility, offered excellent grazing for sheep and goats, which in turn provided a rich source of fertilizer for the fields in the form of manure. Sheep and goat herding had long been practiced nomadically in the marginal lands on the fringes of the Mesopotamian floodplain (Zarins 1990), and especially in the well-watered valleys of the Zagros Mountains to the east (Flannery 1965). During the fifth millennium BC, goat and especially sheep herding began to concentrate heavily along the alluvial plains of the Euphrates River under Ubaid cultivation. This in turn created a heightened need for alternative grazing lands for the livestock during the growing season when the cultivated fields were off-limits. The nomadic herders responded by developing a system of transhumance (the seasonal movement of livestock) that involved the movement of animals to distant grazing sites scattered throughout the surrounding wastelands and the Zagros Mountains, and their return to the alluvial plains after the harvest (Flannery 1965; Pollock 1999).
Transhumance enabled sheep pastoralism to flourish, and this in turn encouraged a new, more intense emphasis on wool production and textiles manufacture, and on milk production and its preservation in the form of cheese and butter or ghee (Sherratt 1981, 1983). Ghee is a purified butter oil with improved keeping qualities, produced by melting butter and removing the water and protein fractions. This was perhaps the first instance of cheese making becoming integrally linked to systematic transhumance, a model that would be repeated often throughout the history of cheese making.
Another striking development of Ubaid culture was the appearance of the village temple, a community building that served as the focal point of shared religious ideology. Religious practice in the Neolithic Near East, though ubiquitous, had hitherto been confined primarily to the family or household shrine. At the Ubaid city of Eridu, a total of eighteen temples were built successively on the same site over a fifteen-hundred-year period beginning around 5000 BC (Dickin 2007). Over time the temples became progressively larger and more elaborate, and by the end of the fifth millennium BC the local temple had taken on a significant economic function by providing communal storage facilities and administrative oversight for the growing surpluses of grain and, eventually, wool textiles that were accruing as the plow and intensive irrigation opened up new land for cultivation and grazing. Wool textiles, in turn, provided Ubaid communities with a precious resource that could be traded with distant communities for raw materials and goods they lacked, such as timber and stone for building projects, and precious stones including obsidian, a glassy volcanic crystal that was highly prized for its use in ornaments and for its ability to maintain sharp cutting surfaces on implements. Hammered and cast copper, the development of which occurred in Anatolia during the sixth millennium BC, was also increasingly sought after for its use in a range of implements. During this same period the wheeled cart coupled to domestic animals such as oxen and donkeys made its debut in southern Mesopotamia, as did the use of domestic animals (donkey, horse) for riding and pack transport (Sherratt 1983). This newfound capacity to transport goods and people encouraged the expansion of Ubaid trading networks.
Thus, by the fourth millennium BC the conjunction of expanding Ubaid populations that employed irrigation and plow agriculture to produce growing surpluses of crops and wool, their newfound capacity to engage in long-distance trade using animal transport, and the flowering of the community temple and shared religious ideology set the stage for a new chapter in the human story that was about to occur in the great city of Uruk. The Uruk period was characterized by a massive increase in the number of settlements on the alluvium of southern Mesopotamia, followed by a demographic implosion as the countryside became relatively depopulated and tens of thousand of people were gathered into Uruk and a handful of other towns that would become major cities (Bogucki 1999; Yoffee 1995). These towns apparently drew in large segments of the population that had been living in the countryside, such that by the second half of the fourth millennium BC five great cities had arisen—Uruk, Eridu, Ur, Nippur, and Kish—of which Uruk was by far the largest. These were mankind’s first true cities, indeed city-states, which heralded the birth of Sumerian civilization.
In stark contrast with Ubaid villages—which had remained small in size (under 2.47 acres, or 1ha) for more than a millennium—Uruk grew rapidly into a massive walled city of about 620 acres (250ha) with a population of up to forty thousand (McMahon 2005). The skyline was dominated by two large temple complexes, one dedicated to An, the sky god, and the other to Inanna, the lady of heaven, that towered over the surrounding landscape and could be seen for miles across the flat plains (Foster and Foster 2009). Uruk had a sophisticated economy, centralized rule and administration, and a stratified social structure all dominated by the secular ruling elite working in close partnership with the temple hierarchy. The power of the ruling elite extended not only throughout the city itself but also to the surrounding countryside, from which heavy tribute was exacted in the form of agricultural produce. Just how the ruling elite and temple priests were able to acquire such far-reaching control over such large populations, both urban and rural, quickly enough to account for the extraordinary growth in the size and sophistication of Uruk is still debated by scholars. However, it is widely accepted that shared religious ideology and monumental temple architecture were important elements that the ruling elite used to win over the hearts and minds of the people and unify them under the control of the city-state (Liverani 2005). The religious mythology, cultic practices, and temple complexes that arose from the Uruk period became powerful underpinnings for centralized rule in Uruk and its sister Sumerian city-states. Those religious underpinnings would subsequently be borrowed and reshaped by other civilizations throughout the Near East.
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Lover of Cheese
Central to the religious pantheon of Uruk was the goddess Inanna, the Queen of Heaven, who took the form of the morning and evening star (not a true star, but the planet Venus). Inanna was the goddess of fertility and erotic love, and of the seasons and the harvest through her role as guardian of the communal storehouse where agricultural surpluses were held (De Shong Meador 2000; Kramer 1969, 1972). Of all the Sumerian deities she was arguably the most closely involved in the affairs of humankind, because she oversaw the natural cycle of the seasons on which the harvest depended. The unprecedented power wielded by the ruling elite and temple priests of Uruk derived in part from their close relationship to Inanna and their perceived ability to secure her goodwill and protection. The special relationship between the king and Inanna became institutionalized through the Inanna mythology and cultic rites, which probably originated during the Uruk period and then passed down to the Sumerian and Akkadian dynasties that subsequently ruled Mesopotamia during the third millennium BC. Eventually the myths and rites were written down during the Ur III dynasty, around 2300 to 2100 BC, in the form of clay cuneiform tablets, many of which have been recovered and translated (Kramer 1963a).
In the myth of Inanna’s sacred marriage, for example, Inanna is about to choose a human spouse when she finds herself in conflict with her brother, the sun god Utu (Kramer 1969). Utu wants Inanna to marry Dumuzi, the shepherd, but Inanna prefers Enkimdu, a farmer who is able to provide her with grain, over Dumuzi, who offers her milk and cream. Dumuzi then confronts Inanna, demanding to know why she prefers the farmer. He presents an impassioned comparison of the products that the farmer has to offer, such as bread, beans, and dates, with his own products, including rich milk, fermented milk (yogurt), churned milk (butter or ghee), and honey cheese and small cheeses. He ends with a boast that he produces so much cream and milk that his rival the farmer could live off the leftovers (Kramer 1969). Dumuzi’s argument carries the day, and Inanna agrees to marry the shepherd.
In another related myth, Inanna appoints her new husband Dumuzi to the “godship of the land” and Dumuzi becomes king of Uruk. Once the married couple is happily settled, Inanna makes a deal with Dumuzi. She pleads with the new king to supply her with rich fresh milk, cream, and cheese, and in return promises repeatedly to watch over and preserve the king’s storehouse and its prosperity (Kramer 1969).
This was the origin of the Dumuzi-Inanna cult, which in its various forms remained influential in Mesopotamia for more than two thousand years. The cult had as its central rite the sacred marriage ceremony, which was performed annually at the beginning of the new year, when the reigning monarch symbolically married Inanna, probably represented by a surrogate priestess (Kramer 1969). The king of Uruk thus became symbolically identified with Dumuzi, Inanna’s true husband, and was assured of Inanna’s blessing in the coming year, provided of course that he fulfilled Dumuzi’s end of the bargain and continued to keep the queen of heaven well provisioned with cheese and cream, which in practice took the form of butter or ghee. In the eyes of the people, this special relationship between king and goddess, consummated annually with the sacred marriage rite, elevated the king to near-divine status. Keeping Inanna happy and securing her blessing on the harvest was a rallying call that the common people could comprehend and embrace. It made voluntary submission to the will of the king and ruling elite psychologically palatable (Liverani 2005). Thus vested with unprecedented authority and prestige by Inanna herself, the ruling elite of Uruk were empowered to organize a city-state that became the wonder of the world and was soon copied.
Evidently the idea that Inanna’s favor could be won through marriage was so appealing that the sacred marriage rite was adopted by other Sumerian cities such as Nippur, Ur, and Isin, each of which had its own patron god, yet still looked to Inanna for protection and prosperity (De Shong Meador 2000; Kramer 1969; Reisman 1973). Over time the rite also evolved into different forms in different cities and time periods. In one Akkadian variant practiced in the city of Ur around 2300 BC, the sacred marriage rite involved Inanna’s parents Nana and Ningal, the moon god and goddess. The annual marriage of Nana (represented by the king of Ur) and Ningal (represented by the high priestess of Nana’s temple) secured continuing fertility of the land in the coming year (De Shong Meador 2000). Like her daughter Inanna, Ningal demanded daily offerings of cheese and butter. Other known variations on the theme of the sacred marriage rite included the deities Ningirsu and Bab, and Nanse and Nindar (Selz 2008).
Eventually the Dumuzi-Inanna cult became the Tammuz-Ishtar cult, the Semitic-Akkadian counterpart that would persist in Mesopotamia up until the beginning of the Christian era. Ishtar would eventually be renamed Astarte in the Levant and become the infamous goddess of love and fertility who repeatedly seduced the Israelites, and even the great King Solomon in the Old Testament. The Phoenicians also worshipped Astarte and would later introduce her cult to the Greeks, who evidently renamed her Aphrodite and adopted her into their pantheon as the goddess of love and fertility sometime around 900 BC (Sansone 2009). Such was the reach of Inanna across time and space.
Inanna’s choice of the shepherd Dumuzi and her call for ewe’s-milk products not only set into motion the daily offering of cheese and butter by the temple elite, but also had important implications for the broader economy of Uruk and other Mesopotamian civilizations to follow. Inanna’s constant demand for cheese and butter meant that the temple needed to control sheep production; in the process the temple gained control of wool production as well (Liverani 2005). Wool-producing sheep were an innovation of breeding that probably occurred between about 4000 and 3500 BC. Before this, sheep were covered with long coarse hair called kemp that could not be woven into textiles (Anthony 2007). The advent of wool-bearing sheep made possible the production of superior woolen textiles, and Uruk was among the first cities, perhaps the first, to capitalize on the tremendous potential of wool. Uruk’s textiles became famous and served as a precious export product that was used to build a far-flung network of trade colonies.
Inanna’s symbol has been found on Uruk seals depicting herds of sheep and various stages in the textile-production process, indicating that the temple had gained control over wool and textile production by the fourth millennium BC (Algaze 2008). The breeding of sheep and goats for the production of wool underwent tremendous increases under temple management during the Uruk period, to the extent that wool textiles employed an estimated five to six thousand workers and generated great wealth for Uruk and her sister city-states (Algaze 2008; Liverani 2005). Thus, it would seem the Inanna mythology provided the ruling elite with a shrewd opportunity to gain control over sheep production, ostensibly to furnish the cheese and butter that Inanna demanded, but also solidifying control over wool production.
Large-scale production of wool textiles continued in Mesopotamia long after the decline of Uruk, eventually encompassing millions of sheep and an estimated fifty to sixty thousand workers employed in massive state-sponsored textile manufacturing facilities (Algaze 2008). Wool textiles were the major economic driver of Sumerian civilization during the fourth and third millennia BC, and it would seem that Inanna unwittingly, or perhaps not so unwittingly, helped to kick-start this economy through her insatiable appetite for sheep’s-milk cheese and butter.
The logistical challenges associated with keeping Inanna adequately provisioned with offerings of cheese, butter, and other agricultural products evidently played an important role in the development of writing. The Uruk temple complex was massively enlarged during the fourth millennium BC as cultic rites expanded in scale and frequency. Daily offerings and special rites demanded a constant stream of agricultural products, including dairy products, which meant that storerooms became larger and administrative oversight more complex. Clay tokens were used initially to keep track of the products used for offerings. The tokens, each of which represented a unit of goods, were placed in a hollow clay ball, which was then closed and stamped with an official seal using a carved stone token. Temple storerooms and vessels used to store goods also were sealed routinely with clay sealings. The wet clay of the sealing was stamped with a carved stone token or rolled with an engraved stone cylinder that left an imprint identifying the contents and ensuring against tampering. Numerous such seals containing Inanna’s symbol have been recovered from the area surrounding Inanna’s temple in Uruk.
As the burden of keeping track of ever larger inventories of agricultural products increased, temple administrators evidently decided that it would be easier to depict the goods and their quantities on a clay tablets rather than with tokens (Dickin 2007). Thus, they developed an accounting system using signs scratched into wet clay tablets. This was a proto-cuneiform form of writing that would evolve into the Sumerian cuneiform language, the world’s first written language (Kramer 1963a). The earliest evidence of proto-cuneiform writing consists of pictographic signs on clay tablets dated from around 3300 BC, which were recovered from the area around Inanna’s temple in Uruk (Bogucki 1999). Around fifty-eight hundred such clay tablets, dating from the end of the fourth millennium BC, have been recovered from the Uruk temple complexes as well as a few other sites (Foster and Foster 2009).
The complexity of the record keeping maintained by the priestly administrators of Inanna’s temple was amazing. Proto-cuneiform clay tablets recovered from Uruk provide annual reports for the herds of sheep, goats, and cows that supplied dairy products to Inanna’s temple (Green 1980). The temple apparently contracted out Inanna’s sacred herds to the care of professional herders, who provided an accounting for all the animals at the end of the year. The tablets record the number of adult male and female animals in the herd, the number of male and female offspring, and the quantities of dairy products that were produced during the year.
The contract hiring of shepherds (and goatherds and cowherds) became a common practice in the ancient Near East in later times. Typically herders were assigned annual quotas of cheese and butter that they were expected to deliver to the temple (Finkelstein 1968; Gelb 1967; Gomi 1980). The vast number of seals and tablets that have been recovered from Inanna’s temple, which undoubtedly represents only a small fraction of the original documents, indicates that keeping Inanna provisioned with cheese and other dairy products had become a big business, and writing was a handy administrative tool for keeping track of the growing priestly empire. Other Sumerian city-states would follow the example of Uruk and keep extensive temple accounting records of sheep’s-, goat’s-, and cow’s milk products (Green 1980; Gomi 1980; Martin et al. 2001).
A detailed account of daily offerings from the city of Ur near the end of the third millennium BC was recovered from the temple of the goddess Ningal, the patron goddess of Ur and mother of Inanna (Figulla 1953). A total of sixty-seven clay cuneiform tablets, the surviving remnants of a much larger collection of temple archives, were recovered from the temple and spanned a period of about a hundred years. The tablets contain records of the products received by the priests from the temple storehouses for daily offering to Ningal, Inanna, and other deities. All of the tablets contain the same three basic commodities of butter (or ghee), cheese, and dates, with the occasional inclusion of milk, fine oil, and lubricant oil. The amounts of butter and cheese that were offered daily, always in equal amounts, were remarkably constant over the hundred-year period, ranging from 7.65 gallons (29 liters) to 14.2 gallons (54 liters). These records are also noteworthy because they reveal that other gods and goddesses in addition to Inanna received daily offerings of cheese and butter.
In addition to contracting out herding and cheese making to professional herders, some Sumerian temples also may have become directly engaged in producing and processing milk, as evidenced from a limestone mosaic frieze that was recovered from the temple dedicated to the goddess Ninkhursagin in the city of Al-‘Ubaid and dated to around 2500 BC (Woolley and Moorey 1982). The frieze depicts cows being milked on one side of a doorway in a reed byre, through which two calves are seen entering. On the other side are men whose dress appears to be that of priests, one of whom is seated and may be rocking a large narrow-necked jar while the other two seem to be pouring a liquid through a funnel, possibly a strainer, into a vessel set on the ground. Scholars have interpreted this scene as depicting either cheese making or the making of butter.
According to the latter view, the large rocking vessel served as a churn to transform milk or cream into butter, and the strainer served to separate the churned butter granules from the liquid buttermilk. The large size of the “churn,” however, raises questions as to whether a jar of such great size and weight (being partly filled with cream) could be rocked with enough force to induce churning.
What were the cheeses of Mesopotamia like? During the Ur III dynasty, around 2100 to 2000 BC, lexicons were written that listed Sumerian and Akkadian terms to assist scribes in the translation of Sumerian records and literature into Akkadian, which had become the common language regionwide. One lexicon included a food section that contained about eight hundred entries, including about eighteen or twenty different terms for cheese (Bottéro 1985). Terms that have been translated with reasonable certainty include cheese, fresh cheese, cheese seasoned with gazi, honey cheese, mustard-flavored cheese, rich cheese, sharp cheese, round cheese, small and large cheese, and white cheese (Bottéro 2004; Jacobsen 1983; Limet 1987; Owen and Young 1971). Some of the terms probably refer to a common fresh cheese that was flavored with various condiments such as herbs or honey.
The frequent reference in temple records to both butter and cheese produced in equal or nearly equal proportions (for example, a butter-to-cheese ratio of 2:3) suggests that the two products were usually produced simultaneously from the same batch of milk (Gelb 1967; Gomi 1980). For cow’s milk, the simplest way to accomplish this is to allow the milk to separate into cream, which can then be churned into butter. The skimmed milk along with the buttermilk can then be fermented into an acid-coagulated fresh cheese, much as is done in Turkey today in the making of traditional Çökelek cheese (Kamber 2008a). The scene depicted in the Al-‘Ubaid frieze fits well with this scenario. Alternately, the partly fermented skim milk remaining after cream separation can be heated to boiling to produce an acid/heat coagulated (ricotta-type) cheese, similar to Eridik cheese, which is still produced by traditional methods in Turkey (Kamber and Terzi 2008).
Sheep’s and goat’s milk do not separate to form a cream layer the way cow’s milk does; thus the above approach would not have been used in the making of sheep’s- and goat’s-milk cheese and butter. The most likely method in this case would be similar to that used in the making of Lor, Minzi, and other similar Near Eastern cheeses (Kamber 2008b; Kamber and Terzi 2008). Traditionally these cheeses are made from milk that has been allowed to ferment into yogurt. The yogurt is then churned to produce butter, which is removed by straining, and the remaining liquid (buttermilk) is transferred to a cauldron and heated to the boiling point. This causes the caseins and whey proteins in the buttermilk to undergo acid/heat coagulation to form a delicate ricotta-like curd.
All of these cheese-making technologies had likely been known since Neolithic times and probably passed down from Neolithic to Ubaid to Sumerian culture. Various funnels and perforated ceramic vessels that probably served as sieves, possibly for separating cheese curds from whey (as well as butter granules from buttermilk), have been recovered from a number of sites throughout Mesopotamia (Ellison 1984).
Most temple records quantified cheese and butter in units of sila, which corresponded to the volume of a ceramic bevel-rimmed bowl of about 1-liter capacity that was mass-produced throughout Mesopotamia from the Uruk period onward (Ellison 1981, 1984). It is possible that both cheese and butter were packed in sila bowls and then sealed with clay to preserve them until use. Other cuneiform tablets record temple deliveries of cheese in units of nidu containers, which were probably ceramic pots (Martin et al. 2001). As noted earlier, ceramic pots are still used in traditional practice to package acid-coagulated and acid/heat-coagulated cheeses in Turkey (Kamber 2008a).
It’s important to note that Mesopotamian cheese was not only a sacred food for gods and goddesses, but also enjoyed by mere mortals. For example, religious and secular workers in Sumerian cities received food rations, which sometimes included rations of cheese (Ellison 1981). Cheese also was appreciated by the ruling elite, as evidenced by the inclusion among lists of the royal foods of a white cheese, as well as fruit-cakes that contained butter and white cheese as ingredients (Limet 1987). According to Bottéro (2004), acid-coagulated cheeses that were dried and sometimes flavored with herbs were used in cooking applications. Interestingly, little evidence has been found of cheese in the cuneiform commercial records of Mesopotamian merchants, prompting some scholars to conclude that merchants did not deal in dairy products due to their perishability (Gelb 1967). Thus, the consumption of cheese and other dairy products may have been primarily restricted to the ruling elite and privileged temple workers in the cities, as well as to simple pastoralists in the countryside, while not available to the urban population in general.
Most Mesopotamian cuneiform references to cheese probably refer to acid-coagulated or acid/heat-coagulated fresh cheeses (Bottéro 1985; Gelb 1967). But the term white cheese in the Sumerian-Akkadian lexicon raises an important question: Does this refer to a rennet-coagulated cheese? In modern times white cheese is a common name for traditional rennet-coagulated brined cheeses that are produced throughout the Near East and Balkans, and derive their name from their white color. Feta is the most widely known of the traditional white cheeses. Unfortunately, it is impossible to determine whether Sumerian white cheeses were rennet-coagulated and similar to the traditional white brined cheese produced today. They may have been acid-coagulated or acid/heat-coagulated types, both of which also would have been white in color.
Another possible reference to rennet-coagulated cheese making occurs in a Sumerian poem lamenting the death of Dumuzi, Inanna’s husband. In this lament, Dumuzi’s mother memorializes the life of her son as a shepherd (Jacobsen 1983). She recalls how Dumuzi drove his flocks out of Uruk into the desert during the annual transhumant movement of sheep and goats to pasturelands around the desert margins, and she describes Dumuzi’s experience making butter and cheese out in the desert following the spring lambing and kidding season. (You’ll recall that it was Dumuzi’s dairy-processing expertise that won him Inanna’s hand in marriage.)
Interestingly, the poem indicates that Dumuzi produced two different cheeses, described as “small cheeses piled up high in heaps for him” and “large cheeses” that were “laid on the rod for him.” The term rod evidently referred to a unit of length used to quantify the amount the cheese. “Large” and “small” cheeses also were mentioned in the Mesopotamian myth known as “The Marriage of Sud” (Bottéro 2004). The use of the term large implies that the cheese was firm enough and cohesive enough to hold together well, characteristics that are much more readily obtained through rennet-coagulation than through acid or acid/heat coagulation. Under the right conditions rennet-coagulated cheeses can be made with great durability and longevity (not to mention great flavors and textures), and the development of rennet-coagulated cheese-making technology ranks as one of the most important milestones in cheese history.
Did the Sumerians perfect rennet-coagulated cheeses? It’s impossible to say with certainty, though they certainly had access to lambs, kids, and calves, the traditional sources of animal rennet, as well as to fig trees (the source of fig sap rennet), which were widely raised in Mesopotamia (Ellison 1983). The first unequivocal evidence for rennet usage, however, did not emerge until somewhat later—in Hittite Anatolia to the north, where our journey will soon carry us. But before turning to the north, we shall briefly look west to Egypt and the Nile River and then east to the Indus River Valley that separates modern Pakistan from India, where two great civilizations arose soon after Uruk.
Egypt
The great dispersal of Levantine peoples that commenced toward the end of the Neolithic Age eventually progressed south across the forbidding Sinai desert and reached the Nile River Valley around 5500 BC (Bellwood 2005). Presumably, simple cheese-making technology arrived in Egypt at this time. There is also evidence that cattle herding and domestication in the northern Sahara may have preceded the arrival of domesticated livestock from the Levant by as much as three thousand years. During this period the northern Sahara enjoyed a much wetter climate than at present and was suitable for grazing (Barker 2006; Bellwood 2005).
The nomadic herders eventually left behind evidence of their pastoral lifestyle in the Libyan desert in the form of rock art, dated to around 3000 BC. Some of the artwork includes depictions of cattle being milked, and what appears to be bags of milk products (cheese curd?) draining on racks (Barker 2006; Simoons 1971). Thus, we can speculate that nomadic milking and cheese making may already have been in practice in northern Africa at the time of the Neolithic arrival from the Levant.
Mesopotamia clearly influenced the culture, religion, and technology of Egypt (Chadwick 2005), but the extent to which Mesopotamia contributed to the rise of Egyptian civilization at the end of the fourth millennium BC is disputed among scholars (Najovits 2003). Whatever the cause for Egypt’s rise, a turning point occurred around 3000 BC when Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt were united, probably under the reign of Narmer, to form the first true state (Chadwick 2005). In contrast with Mesopotamia, where the Sumerian kings were viewed as divinely sanctioned to rule but were not gods themselves, Egypt developed a mythology, probably borrowed to some extent from Mesopotamia, that elevated the pharaoh to the status of god.
Central to Egyptian mythology was the concept of the afterlife and resurrection, which inspired the building of great tombs and eventually pyramids to ensure the well-being of the Egyptian royalty in the afterlife, and of anyone else who could likewise afford to build and provision an appropriate tomb. An intriguing aspect of the early Egyptian tombs was the inclusion of vast quantities of foodstuffs that were meant to provide for the deceased in the afterlife. For most tombs, such foodstuffs were in scattered disarray and beyond analysis by the time of archaeological discovery due to looting and degradation over the centuries. However, two intact tombs dating from the first and second dynasties (circa 3000 BC) have yielded the earliest evidence of cheese in Egypt.
The Saqqara Tomb 3477 was not that of a king or queen but of a wealthy noblewoman. This particular tomb remained remarkably undisturbed until its archaeological discovery in 1937. Even the footprints of the burial party laid down some five thousand years earlier were still discernible in the dust that covered the floor (Emery 1962). Also completely intact was a multicourse precooked meal served in twenty-seven pottery vessels and twenty-one alabaster and diorite bowls and dishes, which were laid out on the floor in front of the sarcophagus. Among the food items were three small ceramic jars, the contents of which were subjected to a battery of chemical analyses and tentatively determined to be cheese. If in fact the jars contained cheese, it is likely that these were fresh cheeses (acid-coagulated or acid/heat-coagulated), similar to those such as Çökelek and Lor that are still produced traditionally in Turkey and stored in clay pots (Kamber 2008a). Unfortunately, very little is known about Egyptian cheeses from ancient written records because Egyptian scribes used papyrus, a fragile paper-like material, for their record keeping rather than the much more durable clay cuneiform tablets used in Mesopotamia, and few papyrus documents have survived intact in the archaeological record.
An even earlier tomb, that of King Hor-Aha of the First Dynasty, also yielded two pottery jars that were determined through chemical analyses to contain cheese (Zaky and Iskander 1942). Given the comparatively crude analytical methods available to these researchers in the 1940s, their results, like those from Saqqara Tomb 3477, must be considered tentative until confirmed using newer, more definitive methodologies such as those described by Evershed et al. (2008). Nevertheless, the evidence that these jars contained cheese is plausible and, indeed, made more so by hieroglyphic inscriptions on the jars from the Hor-Aha tomb, which seem to indicate that one jar contained cheese from Upper Egypt and the other, from Lower Egypt (Zaky and Iskander 1942). Whether the inscriptions had any political significance linked to Egypt’s newly achieved unification of the Upper and Lower kingdoms around 3000 BC is anyone’s guess (Dalby 2009).
Thus, it seems likely that by the start of the third millennium BC cheese making was firmly entrenched in Egypt, just as it was in the great Mesopotamian civilization at the opposite end of the Fertile Crescent. By this time, dairying and possibly cheese making also had penetrated far to the east, to the Indus River Valley that divides modern Pakistan and India, where another civilization was soon to form.
The Indian Subcontinent and China
The migration of Neolithic peoples and their agropastoral economy from the Fertile Crescent progressed rapidly eastward during the waning years of the Neolithic Age, reaching the Indus River Valley, the western gateway to the Indian subcontinent, by the seventh millennium BC (Bellwood 2005). Following this initial influx from the west, there apparently were no significant new migrations into the Indus region during the next few millennia, and the region underwent a gradual transition to pottery usage, the mastery of copper and later bronze, and a growing reliance on animal domestication and agriculture, much as occurred contemporaneously and independently back in southwest Asia (Singh 2008). However, toward the middle of the third millennium BC, numerous settlements sprang up over a vast area that shared a high degree of cultural uniformity (Sharma 2005). Many of the settlements rapidly grew into cities, the largest of which rivaled the cities of Mesopotamia in size and population (Singh 2008). This remarkable regionwide blossoming of urban growth and cultural unity over an area the size of Pakistan is known as the Indus civilization, or the Harappan civilization, named for Harappa, one of the largest cities.
A striking difference between the Mesopotamian and Harappan civilizations was the absence of monumental temples in the latter. Evidently, Harappan religious practice was much less institutionalized and less influential in government functions and the economic and agricultural systems of the region than was the case in Mesopotamia (Sharma 2005). Indeed, the basic structural principles of Indus civilization were completely different from those of Mesopotamia or Egypt, and Indus political and social organization remains shrouded in mystery (Bogucki 1999).
Cattle and buffalo, which were used for milk, meat, and traction, had become the most important domesticated animals by this time, but sheep and goats also were raised. Unfortunately, Harappan written script has never been deciphered; the nearly four thousand specimens of Harappan writing that have been recovered on stone seals and other objects have failed to yield up their secrets (Sharma 2005). It is known that the Harappan traded extensively, their reach extending to Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula (Sharma 2005), and it has been suggested that the Harappan may have shipped dried cheese to the Arabian peninsula in ceramic jars (Potts 1993). However, apart from perforated ceramic jars that have been recovered from the archaeological strata of this period (which may have been used to separate curds from whey or butter granules from buttermilk), little evidence has been recovered that speaks to the possibility of Harappan cheese making.
The first unequivocal evidence of cheese and other dairy products in the Indian subcontinent occurs in the sacred Hindu Vedic texts, written after the collapse of the Harappan civilization, which occurred suddenly around 1900 BC for reasons that are not well understood. The Vedas were compiled over many centuries, beginning perhaps around 1500 BC by a people who called themselves arya (Singh 2008). Various linguistic and other lines of evidence suggest that the Aryans migrated from Iran and south-central Asia to the Indus River Valley in multiple waves between 1500 and 1200 BC (Sharma 2005). The Vedic Aryans were a pastoral people who brought with them a strong emphasis on cattle rearing. Eventually the Aryans expanded eastward across northern India to the basin of the upper Ganges River, where the later Vedic texts were written. The Vedic texts reveal the pivotal role that the Aryans played in elevating the importance of dairy foods to a revered status in ancient India. Numerous references to milk, ghee, and curds (or fresh cheese) are found throughout the Vedas, highlighting both their importance in the diet and their role as offerings to the gods in religious observances (Prakash 1961).
The Vedas describe a process of curdling milk by mixing with it a portion of soured milk (Prakash 1961), which is the ancient equivalent of adding starter culture in the making of acid-coagulated fresh cheeses. The Vedas also speak of milk curdled through the addition of several plant substances, including the bark of the palash tree, the fruit of the kuvala (jujube), and putika, a plant that is usually identified as a creeper or jujube but could also be a mushroom (Achaya 1994; Kramrisch 1975; Prakash 1961). These plant substances may have contained rennet-like enzymes, in which case the Vedas may include some of the earliest known references to rennet-coagulated (enzymatic) cheeses. The Vedas mention two varieties of a food called dadhanvat, one with holes or pores, the other without, that are thought to be cheeses (Prakash 1961). Another passage describes the preparation of curds from boiled milk, possibly a reference to acid/heat coagulation, which is used in the making of paneer and related cheeses. Paneer is enormously popular in India today and is virtually the only cheese produced in India that is indigenous to the Indian subcontinent.
Buddhist and Jainist texts, written centuries after the Vedas, reiterate the importance of curds or fresh cheese in the Indian diet, and indeed medical and literary works written much later, up to A D 1200, continued to emphasize curds in the Indian diet (Prakash 1961). Yet despite India’s long love affair with curds and fresh cheeses such as paneer, the development of ripened or aged (rennet-coagulated) cheese varieties seems to have been strikingly absent in India from ancient times to the present.
Why did one of the largest milk-producing regions in the world with one of the longest histories in dairying and cheese making fail to develop aged cheeses? There is no single answer, but clearly the cultural environment of the Indian subcontinent did not encourage the type of trial-and-error experimentation that would have been necessary for the development of indigenous aged cheeses. For one thing, the revered status of the cow as an animal not to be killed, which was first mentioned in the Vedic literature and eventually became incorporated into Hinduism, discouraged the development of animal rennet. Furthermore, Buddhist and Jainist teachings, while upholding the value of curds or fresh cheese in the diet, expressed strong attitudes against the slaughter of animals and eventually made broad inroads in India toward vegetarianism (Prakash 1961), further discouraging the use of animal rennet as a curdling agent.
However, even plant-derived rennet-like coagulants apparently never gained a foothold in India as a starting point for aged cheese development. It seems that the very concept of cheese ripening, a process that essentially amounts to controlled rotting, violated the deeply ingrained Indian concepts of food purity that stretch back to the Vedas. The idea that purity of thought depends on purity of food gave rise to hygienic practices associated with food preparation and dining that became (and remain) central tenets of Indian culture (Prakash 1961).
For example, perishable foods that were allowed to stand overnight, those that developed off-flavors, or those that were cooked twice were considered unfit for eating, according to the Vedas. So, too, was food that contained a hair or an insect, or had been touched by a foot, the hem of a garment, or a dog. It is hard to envision how many of the moldy, stinky, maggoty, mite-infected cheeses so beloved in Europe could have arisen within a cultural context where such emphasis was placed on food purity. Add to this the technical challenges of controlling the cheese “rotting” process (that is, the cheese ripening) in the subtropical heat that envelops much of India much of the year combined with the humid monsoon-soaked wet seasons, and the lack of aged cheeses in India is perhaps not surprising.
Farther to the east in China, cheese making in particular, and indeed dairying in general, never gained a lasting foothold. Agriculture developed early in China in the region between the Yangzi and Yellow Rivers, with cultivation of rice and millet occurring there by the seventh millennium BC (Bellwood 2005). This expansive, fertile, well-watered region was able to support vigorous population growth and a thriving Chinese food culture that was well established by the time that dairying spread from India to various parts of southeast Asia along with Hinduism and Buddhism during the first millennium BC. However, though there was apparently some acceptance of the ritual use of dairy products in China, milk and dairy products did not become a major element of Chinese cuisine, evidently because of a strong cultural conservatism that rejected foreign practices considered strange and unappealing (Simoons 1991). At various points in Chinese history, Tibet and especially Mongolia—neighbors with strong dairying traditions—also influenced China culturally in ways that encouraged dairy products, particularly during the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century A D (Simoons 1991). However, acceptance of dairy foods was limited primarily to fermented milks and perhaps butter, cheese being all but absent. Thus, our attention must now return to the west, where the story of cheese would soon blossom and diversify.
By Paul S. Kindstedt in "Cheese and Culture", Chelsea Green Publishing, USA, 2012, chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
Interesting how much we can learn about culture and history just be studying cheese!
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