Mesopotamia Archives - Travel To Eat

April 30, 2018 by Kurt Buzard

Chickens and Guineafowl in Africa and Beyond

The Four Great River Civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley and China

In the great river civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and China, pastoralists preceded the true neolithic settlers. The initial domesticated animals included cattle from wild Auroch, sheep and goats from their wild equivalents. Pigs and Fowl followed later and have an intertwined history. As time progressed, irrigation along rivers allowed large scale farming and the establishment of permanent communities. With the advent of these communities came inevitable population increases and increased pressures concerning the utilization of available resources. Fortunately, at first there was plenty for all but climate changes around 2500 BCE contracted the availability of arable land and led to conflict. This whole narrative is nicely summarized in the “Tragedy of the Commons”, an economic theory proposed by William Forster Lloyd in 1833 that is still relevant today. I suggest you read it but for now let us continue with the history of the chicken, a mobile source of protein more suited to mixed farming, unmatched in both the ancient and modern world.
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November 3, 2014 by Max Distro LLC

Hittites. Boğazköy Museum, Turkey

A Three Man Hittite Chariot

The Hittites, one of the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Mideast, are less well known than other great ancient civilizations such as the Greeks, Sumarians, Persians and Egyptians but no less deserving of our attention. For a long time, the Hittites were only known to historians as an obscure tribe mentioned in the Bible. In 1834, when archeologist Charles Texier stumbled upon the ruins of Hattusha (modern-day Boghazkoy/Bogazköy), his discovery went unrecognized. The Hittites were an Anatolian people who established an empire at Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1750 BC. This empire reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Suppiluliuma I, when it encompassed an area that included most of Asia Minor as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. After about 1180 BC, the empire came to an end during the Bronze Age collapse. The two main periods of Hittite history are customarily referred to as the Old Kingdom (1700-1500 BC) and the New Kingdom, or Empire (1400-1180 BC). The less well-documented interlude of about a hundred years is sometimes referred to as the Middle Kingdom. The early Hittites, whose prior whereabouts are thought to be in the southern Ukraine, borrowed heavily from the pre-existing Anatoloian Hattian and Hurrian cultures, and also from that of the Assyrian colonisers—in particular, the cuneiform writing and the use of cylindrical seals. The Boğazköy Museum is located 82 km southwest from Corum, in the district of Bogazkale. The museum, displaying excavation finds from the Hittite capital of Hattusha, opened on September 12 1966 and was completely refurnished in 2011.

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March 10, 2014 by Max Distro LLC

Sumerian Treasures of Ur. British Museum, London

Carnelian, Lapus Lazuli and Gold Beads Body 61 Great Death Pit of Ur. British Museum, London

I have a few more images of the finds of Leonard Woolley at Ur from the British Museum. I thought I would include them in this post. Although the exact belief systems and practices behind the royal burials at Ur are not yet known to us, what is apparent is the high level of technical and artistic sophistication that produced the artifacts that they contain. The array of raw materials from which the objects are made all had to be imported into the resource-poor Mesopotamian floodplain, and their variety attests to the far-flung trading network of which Ur was a part. These materials include gold that must have come from Afghanistan, Iran, Anatolia, Egypt, or Nubia, and etched carnelian beads from the Indus Valley, as well as many stones that perhaps made their way primarily from eastern Iran. With few exceptions, however, these imported materials were worked into final form in southern Mesopotamia by craftsmen who created some of the most spectacular works of art preserved from ancient Sumer. All of these pieces are between 2500-2000 BC.

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December 24, 2013 by Max Distro LLC

Michelangelo’s Shopping List and Origins of Writing

Three Different Lists of Foods Described with Drawings by Michelangelo Buonarroti 1518. Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy

The other day I was searching the web for another purpose and came upon a shopping list by Michelangelo, which was part of an exhibition “Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane, Master Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Spring of 2013. The exhibit included 26 drawings preserved in the artist's family home, the Casa Buonarroti, in Florence. “Because the servant he was sending to market was illiterate”, writes the Oregonian‘s Steve Duin in a review of a Seattle Art Museum show, “Michelangelo illustrated the shopping lists – a herring, tortelli, two fennel soups, four anchovies and ‘a small quarter of a rough wine’ – with rushed (and all the more exquisite for it) caricatures in pen and ink.” As we can see, the true Renaissance Man didn’t just pursue a variety of interests, but applied his mastery equally to tasks exceptional and mundane. Which, of course, renders the mundane exceptional. This scrap of ephemeral paper from the past fascinates me, the detail of the little drawings is astounding. We compose ephemera every day in the form of disposable to-do lists, directions to unvisited destinations, notes to people we know or have never met, and shopping lists of this kind. This kind of writing powers our ordered experiences, as ephemeral texts chart encounters before being rendered useless. Collected, disposable shopping lists create an archive of everyday artifacts that we can peruse for traces of the everyday both past and present. I thought I would present a few more examples and explore the origins of writing such lists.

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December 13, 2012 by Max Distro LLC

The Incense Road, Saudi Arabia

Four thousand years ago, Arabia Felix was the source of the world’s supply of great riches in the form of spices and incense. The road from Yemen to the Mediterranean was the first great trade route, passing through terrible deserts, lush forests, dangerous bandits and exotic oases with palaces of kings that guarded the way. The Incense Route served as a channel for trading of goods such as South Arabian frankincense and myrrh; Indian spices, precious stones, pearls, ebony, silk and fine textiles, and East African rare woods, feathers, animal skins, and gold.

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October 9, 2012 by Max Distro LLC

Babylonian World Map, British Museum, London

Babylonian World Map or Imago Mundi (BM 92687). British Museum, London

This cuneiform map of the Babylonian world is an archeological treasure on a par with the Rosetta Stone and the code of Hammurabi. The Babylonian World Map, also known as Imago Mundi is usually dated to the 6th century BCE and is the one of the oldest known world maps and certainly the most famous. We saw this when we were at the British Museum for the Olympics and I thought I would do some posts on famous ancient maps. An inscription on the Babylonian World Map indicates that it was a copy of a previous map and the locations featured on the map indicate that the original could not have been created earlier than the 9th century BCE. The back of the tablet is covered with cuneiform mainly describing Seven Islands or regions which are depicted in the form of equal triangles rising beyond the circle of the Earthly Ocean.

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September 7, 2012 by Max Distro LLC

Babylonian Kudurru at the Louvre

Kudurru of Melishihu. Louvre, Paris

Boundary markers for property are a very old concept. They are mentioned in the Bible: Proverbs 22:28 “Do not move an ancient boundary stone set up by your forefathers.” The Residence Act of July 16, 1790, as amended March 3, 1791, authorized President George Washington to select a 100-square-mile site for the national capital on the Potomac River. He selected the site and placed 40 stone markers at one mile intervals, marking the extent of the capital city. The stones are now the oldest federal monuments in the United States.

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July 1, 2012 by Max Distro LLC

Gebel el-Arak Knife, Louvre

The Gebel el-Arak Knife is a 25.50 cm long knife dating from circa 3300 to 3200 BCE, the late pre-dynastic period in Egypt which when it was purchased in Cairo was said to have been found at the site of Gebel el-Arak, south of Abydos.

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July 1, 2012 by Max Distro LLC

Sumerian and Biblical Flood Stories

The Holocene Impact Working Group is a collection of scientists from Australia, France, Ireland, Russia and the US who hypothesize that meteorite impacts on Earth are more common than previously supposed. The group has suggested that the Earth experiences one large global impact every 1,000 years. They claim that the geological formation known as a chevron or a wedge-shaped sediment deposit observed on coastlines, are created by megatsunamis and asteroid impacts. They have gathered some significant results and located major impact zones on Earth. The most important being the Burckle Crater, which is an undersea crater located to the east of Madagascar and west of Western Australia in the southern Indian ocean.

The impact zone is very large and estimated to be about 30 km (18 mi) in diameter. The Burckle Crater has yet to be dated by radiometric analysis, but it is strongly believed that the object impacted Earth between the years 2800-3000 BC, which is only 5,000 years ago. Near the crater, unusual metals have been reported, including carbonate crystals, translucent carbon spherules and fragments of mineral glass.

Numerous cultures make references to an ancient flood during this time in history and a wide range of events point to a disaster on Earth, including the end of the Early Harappan Ravi Phase, the end of the pre-dynastic “antediluvian” rulers of the Sumerian civilization and the start of the First Dynasty of Kish.

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Chickens and Guineafowl in Africa and Beyond

Hittites. Boğazköy Museum, Turkey

Sumerian Treasures of Ur. British Museum, London

Michelangelo’s Shopping List and Origins of Writing

The Incense Road, Saudi Arabia

Babylonian World Map, British Museum, London

Babylonian Kudurru at the Louvre

Gebel el-Arak Knife, Louvre

Sumerian and Biblical Flood Stories

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