Wheat in ancient world

The ancient wheats have been recognized as a primary component of the human diet in the Old World during the Bronze and Neolithic ages. Wheat is thought to have originated in southwestern Asia, it has been consumed as a food for more than 12,000 years. Archeological findings show that wheat first occurred in parts of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, the Levant, Israel, Egypt and Ethiopia.

Cultivation of wheat began to spread beyond the Fertile Crescent after about 8000 BC. Wild grasses resembling wheat in various degrees have been found in many parts of the world. On southwestern Europe and in Asia Minor grows Triticum aegilopoides, a wild grass which might be a parent of one species of wheat, einkorn.

Einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) was one of the first crops domesticated approximately 12,000 years ago in the Near East, alongside emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum). Typically, einkorn was cultivated on marginal agricultural land, being able to survive in harsh environments and poor soils where other species of wheat could not survive.

Wheat was the cereal of choice for its bread making properties. Varieties of bread wheat became more common, and overtime bread became commercially available. There is evidence in Athens from the fourth century BC, in Rome from the second. Bread was normally made at home.

The early Egyptians were developers of bread and with the use of oven technology, developed baking into one of the first large-scale food production industries. By 3000 BC, wheat had reached England, and Scandinavia.

Wheat played an important role of religious significance and was part of the sacred rituals of many cultures. Greek, Roman, Sumerian and Finnish mythology had gods and goddesses of wheat. This exceptionally nutritious grain is still considered to be sacred in some areas of China.

The important of cereal in the diet throughout the Roman is confirmed by the Prices Edict (issued by Roman Emperor Diocletian in year 301 AD), which gives first place to wheat, followed by other crops. Wheat was not native to the Western Hemisphere and was only introduced here in the late 15th century when Columbus came to the New World.

Ancient wheats have lower yields and are more difficult to process than common wheat, which is why they gradually disappeared or were preserved only in small areas in Poland and Europe.
Wheat in ancient world

Milling in ancient Egypt

Neolithic Egyptians developed bread from emmer, barky, and even a type of millet. The grain was stored in beehive-shape silos until needed and they ground the grain on flat stones called querns and then baked in and oven or in heated clay bread molds.

Both men and women assisted in making bread, with men performing many of the tasks. Women generally were the millers. Figures of women milling grain have been found in the tombs of the later Old Kingdom (c.2575-2510 BC) to early Middle Kingdom (c.2030-1640 BC).

Milling itself was a tedious process and the cause of many injuries. Several handfuls were place on a stone quern with a gently curve surface for milling. The upper surface is not perfectly smooth, but is kept somewhat roughed. A stone shaped like rolling pin with a curve to match the curvature of the grinding surface was rolled back and forth, grinding the grain into flour, which was caught in a container at one end of the quern.

The miller kneeled over on the ground, grinding on the wide saddle quern; then in the Middle Kingdom, the milling process was performed on workbenches. The rotary quern was not invented until about the fifth to third centuries BC, somewhere in the western Mediterranean.
Milling in ancient Egypt

Ancient history of barley

Archeological evidence indicates that the wild barley was growing in the ancient past in Fertile Crescent 35,000 – 40,000 years ago.

About 9000 BC, the Natufians, who had a Mesolithic culture, gathered and used wild grains.

The Egyptians have a tradition that barley was the first of the cereal mad use by a man and trace its introduction to their goddess Isis.

Sumerian clay tablets described and recommended cultural practices for raising barley around 1700 BC. Barley was an important crop throughout the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age.

It is one of ancient crops in India. It was widely consumed as human food and horse feed in early time, particularly by Aryans.

According to experts, six rowed barley which was being grown in the Indus Valley at Mahenjo-daro and Harappa by about 2500 BC, was almost certainly introduced for Mesopotamia.

In Europe, as early as 3000 BC, barley was a stable food utilized in various types of breads and cakes throughout Europe, especially in the British Isles and Scandinavian.

Barley remained a stable ingredient in porridges along with peas and oats in the British Isles but often was the only cereal ingredient in Scandinavian porridge and stew recipes up until early in the twentieth century. 

Barley was first grown in North America in 1492 by a colony founded by Columbus. Spaniards introduced barley into Mexico during the conquest, and from there it was introduced by missionaries into California.
Ancient history of barley

Bread during ancient Egypt

In ancient Egypt, bread was made as flat cakes from toasted grains of barley, whet or millet. Before the discovery of yeast all breads were unleavened. This was a type for bread which dates back to Neolithic times, which began in approximately 8000 to 10000 BC.

Ancient Egypt is where bread really began to take shape as the yeasty food people enjoy today.

The wheat produced in abundance in Egypt was the staple food for most people. Bakers and servants turned ground wheat into 40 different types of bread, cakes, roils and pastries.

The dough was left overnight to sour and then baked into round, triangular, oval and other shapes. Some loaves were cone-shaped, made of slices placed vertically and used for presenting to the dead. Bread was considered an essential item to be buried with deceased for the afterlife.

Bread was also baked in clay pots or molds, some of which were greased and reused, whole others were crudely modeled around conical wooden forms and broken to free the loaf after baking.

Bread was consumed in great quantities throughout the country, from the lowest worker who might be paid in bread, to the pharaoh and his family.
Bread during ancient Egypt

Corn during ancient Mesoamerican

The word maiz is thought to be derived from mahiz, which may be the Taino word for corn, or Aztec word for ‘our life’.

Corn (Zea mays L.) is native to the Americas and is their most important cereal crop. Corn originated in Mexico, evolving form the wild grass Teosinte (Zea mays sp. mexicana).

The domestication of several agricultural plants began before 6500 BC and was flourishing by 2000 BC in numerous areas within and beyond the Basin of Mexico.

The first people to grow corn were Native Americans living in Mexico’s valley of Tehuacan about 6,000 years ago before spread southward throughout Mesoamerica and the South American continent. The early wild corn found in the Tehuacan is chapalote.

They held elaborate ceremonies when planting and harvesting corn and used corn patterns to decorate pottery, sculpture, and other art.

When the first wild maize plants cross-pollinated with another wild grass, they had only small heads of grain. Over time, wild maize became cross pollinated with another kind of grass.  When the American Indians first began to cultivate corn, perhaps it was a already a hybrid.

For the Maya, maize was the foundation of their existence and the maize god was the father of world creation. For them, life was not possible without maize.

Maize was the nutritional foundation of their diet. The Aztec nobility ate corn as round flat breads know as tlaxcalli, which varied in size, color and thickness. The tlaxcalli was steamed under cloth or on a hot surface and served open or folded.

Maize was unknown in Europe prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1492. By that time, Native Amerindians cultivated maize over much of the tropical and temperate portions of the western hemisphere from southern Canada to south central Chile.
Corn during ancient Mesoamerican

Oats during ancient times

Oat seed have been found on 4000 year old remains in Egypt, but these were probably from weeds and not from cultivated.

Oats were first cultivated in Switzerland and to a slight extent in Denmark. The oldest known cultivated oat remains were found in caves in Switzerland that date back to around 1000 BC.

Oats was known in the Bronze Age in Europe and Romans writers like Cato, Ovid and Cicero often refer to it. Marcus Tullius Cicero suggested its used for medicinal purpose.

Oats became important only during the Roman Iron Age. It was increasingly to the fore from the first century AD onward.

In ancient times, both Greeks and the Romans spurned oats in favor of wheat. During that times oat seeds often contaminated wheat and as the soil became exhausted the wheat grew less successfully and the oat became dominant since it required less fertile soil.

The Greeks and Romans also know how to appreciate oatmeal. They used to make a kind gruel which a thinner version of porridge tatty may be often drunk than eaten.

Pliny the Romans author said that Germans grow oats and that a ‘porridge’ made from oats is their staple diet.

Englishman once thought oats were fit only for horse feed, while Scottish have long favored oats as a sustaining cereal.

Scottish favorite an old fashioned breakfast of porridge oats. They shared their oatmeal with their border collies, collies and sheep dogs.

When oats arrived in the New World, Americans grew its primarily as horse feed – that is until two temperature developed a machine that could be easily cut it groats, or whole oats, into a steel-cut oatmeal for a palatable cereal.
Oats during ancient times

History of Rye

History of Rye
Rye is the fifth cereal in importance in the world and in the United States. It is exceeded in the world by corn, wheat, oats and rice.

Even though the grain was domesticated later than wheat, barley and its, there is more uncertainty about the history of rye than there is about some of the other cereal grains.

Some authorities believe it developed from Secale montanum Gus., a perennial weed that grows wild southern Europe and Central Asia.

It was probably was first grown as a separate crop (i.e., not in mix plantings) in southwestern Asia sometime around 1,000 BC.

It was never an important grain in this area in ancient times, but first appeared as a significant food crop in northern Europe. From there, cultivation of the grain spread southward throughout the continent and, after about the 16th century, across the southern part of Russia into Siberia.

During the Middle Ages, the poorer people of England ate bread made from rye, or from a mixture of rye and wheat, known as maslin.

It was unknown in the western hemisphere until it was brought to North America and to western South America by European settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries, and thence to the rest of South America, Australia, and South Africa.
History of Rye