Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Foodways, Flora, and Fauna

The familiar sequence runs from farming to surplus, then to bread and beer, and at last to cities. The evidence recovered over the past two decades reverses that sequence at several points. The oldest bread we know of was baked some four thousand years before any cereal was domesticated, and the oldest brewing residues are older still; both are the work of hunter-gatherers. If bread and beer belong to the foundations of settled life, those foundations were laid before the settlement, and the question is best put the other way around: not how farming produced bread and beer, but whether the appetite for them helped to produce farming.

Consider the bread first. It comes from Shubayqa 1, a Natufian site in the basalt desert of northeastern Jordan, where charred crumbs from a hearth dated to about 14,400 BCE proved, under the microscope, to be a flat bread-like product made from wild einkorn, club-rush tubers, and other gathered plants. The people who made it kept no fields and herded no animals. The beer comes from Raqefet Cave on Mount Carmel, a Natufian burial ground whose stone mortars, dated to roughly 13,000 BCE, preserve the pitted and channelled starch granules that mark malting and mashing; the setting is funerary, and the brewing appears to have served a ritual rather than a daily end. In each case the techniques of transformation — grinding, soaking, heating, fermenting — are present before agriculture rather than after it.

The most imposing case stands at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, where from around 9,600 BCE communities that were still largely mobile raised enclosures of carved T-shaped limestone pillars, some weighing many tonnes. Among the finds are stone vats of up to roughly 160 litres, several bearing traces consistent with cereal fermentation. The builders had no pottery, no domesticated grain, and no permanent village in the later sense, yet they coordinated the labour of many hands, and they appear to have sustained that labour in part through communal feasting and, on the chemical evidence, through beer. Göbekli Tepe stands among the strongest challenges to the older model, because it shows monumental cooperation and large-scale feasting before agriculture rather than as its reward.

None of this closes the question. The Shubayqa find is bread-like rather than bread in the modern sense; the Raqefet residues have been disputed; the Göbekli vats may have held more than one kind of liquid. The weight of evidence has shifted nonetheless, and with it the burden of proof. The pre-agricultural Levant emerges not as a world of bare subsistence awaiting the plough but as one already capable of bread, of beer, of monuments, and of the feast — and it is from that world, as much as from the field, that the rest of this story descends.

Around 9,000 BCE, in the Jordan Valley, the upper Euphrates, and the Zagros foothills, emmer wheat, einkorn, and barley took on the morphological changes — a tougher rachis, larger seeds — that mark domestication. They travelled as a set: the cereals with lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch, and flax, and before long with domesticated sheep, goat, cattle, and pig. The coherence of this founder-crop assemblage is part of its historical interest, for it moved as a unit rather than being reinvented at each frontier. Jericho, by around 9,000 BCE, was a walled settlement of perhaps two thousand people sustained by stored grain, and still without pottery. The first Neolithic change, on this evidence, was less a revolution in cooking pots or in cities than a revolution in storage, scheduling, and the binding of a community to a particular worked ground.

At Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, between roughly 7,500 and 5,700 BCE, that change produced something close to a town: a honeycomb of mudbrick houses entered by ladder through the roof, holding between five and ten thousand people who ate wheat, barley, lentils, dairy, and meat, painted their walls, and buried their dead beneath the floors. Çatalhöyük earns its place in a Greek course through its position, on the Anatolian plateau astride the corridor down which the whole farming package would shortly move west.

It reached the Aegean around 7,000 BCE. At Franchthi Cave in the Argolid, occupied since the Palaeolithic, and at Knossos on Crete, domesticated emmer, einkorn, barley, and lentils appear together with sheep, goat, and cattle, arriving as a kit rather than emerging locally. Within a few centuries a dense network of farming villages — Sesklo, Dimini, Nea Nikomedeia — covered Thessaly and Macedonia. The Greek agricultural world thus begins as an Anatolian inheritance, carried by people and by exchange together. And if the cereals and the herding crossed as a package, the knowledge of what to do with surplus grain, the fermenting of it included, is unlikely to have stayed behind.

It is tempting to read the spread of agriculture as steady improvement. The skeletal evidence does not support that reading. Across the whole span these notes cover, from Neolithic Anatolia to classical Greece, life expectancy at birth holds close to twenty-five to thirty-five years, kept down by very high infant and child mortality; an adult who survived childhood might reach the mid-forties or fifties. Farming does not lengthen life. What it produces is not longer or healthier lives but more of them — higher fertility, denser populations, and in time the surplus labour on which complex societies are built.

In several measurable respects the first farmers were worse off than the foragers from whom they descended. Bioarchaeological data from across the Near East and the Aegean point the same way: reduced stature, more dental caries on cereal-heavy diets, iron-deficiency anaemia legible in cranial bone, more infectious disease from close living among animals and waste, and the marks of heavy, repetitive labour begun in childhood. The Greek Neolithic villagers of Thessaly fit the pattern, shorter than their Mesolithic predecessors and carrying the bony signatures of toil. Marshall Sahlins’ phrase “the original affluent society” was a provocation, but the skeletal record broadly bears it out.

The deeper consequence is social. A storable, scalable, and compellable food supply makes new kinds of inequality not only possible but likely, and the bodies record the result. The gold death masks of the shaft graves at Mycenae lie close, in time and in space, to rural skeletons that record stunted growth and chronic hunger; the biological evidence makes Greek inequality legible where the literary record passes over it. Because intensive cereal farming is demanding, repetitive, and scalable, its labour can be compelled, and unfree labour becomes a rational extraction: the earliest cuneiform already names categories of slave, and Sumerian temple estates ran on documented slave labour by the middle of the third millennium. The palace archives whose grain tablets these notes admire are also slave archives, and the dependence reaches down to classical Athens, whose democracy rested on perhaps eighty to a hundred thousand chattel slaves working the fields, the households, and the silver mines at Laurion. Ancient observers, Aristotle among them, recognised the connection.

The cultivated triad is one part of the story. The people of the ancient Mediterranean shared their landscape with animals they hunted, animals that hunted them, and one animal that had joined them long before any cereal was sown; they lived within a climate that set the outer bounds of what farming could do; and they depended on fuel whose supply shaped where their economies could grow. This section steps outside the field to take in that wider world, and to show how each of its elements bears on the argument the rest of the document makes.

The dog came earliest of all. It is the only animal domesticated by hunter-gatherers and the oldest domesticate of any kind, which places its story in the same late-glacial world that produced the oldest bread and beer. The securely dated burial at Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, around 14,000 BCE, holds a young dog interred with two people; the animal had survived a serious bout of distemper as a puppy, a recovery it could not have made in the wild without human care, so the bones carry evidence of attachment as well as of domestication. At the Natufian site of Ain Mallaha in the Levant a person was buried with a hand resting on a puppy. From the first the dog worked as a partner in the hunt — holding the wild boar, aurochs, and deer discussed below — and as herding developed it became central to the management of sheep and goats. The animal that would later guard the Greek farmstead had entered human society before the first field was cleared.

The lion was a neighbour, not a motif borrowed from abroad. For most of the twentieth century the lions of Mycenaean seals and of the Lion Gate were taken to be images imported from Egypt and the Near East, decorative rather than documentary. The faunal record has changed that reading. More than a hundred Panthera leo bones have been recovered from some thirty-eight sites across Greece and southeastern Europe, spanning the Neolithic to the Iron Age; at Tiryns lion bones run through three Late Helladic levels (c. 1700–1200 BCE), and at Kastanas in Macedonia through five (c. 1200–700 BCE), with further finds at Aigeira, Pylos, Kalapodi, Aegina, Kea, and Thessaloniki. Several carry cut-marks from skinning and butchery. The conclusion follows from the evidence: lions lived in Bronze Age Greece, in the same landscapes where Greek art and myth would place them, and the Mycenaean lion was drawn from a living animal rather than copied from a foreign model. The first labour of Herakles, the slaying of the Nemean Lion in the Argolid, sits on ground where the bones confirm lions were present.

The wild herd both fed and threatened the villages. Wild boar, the pig’s ancestor, was hunted from Natufian times into the palace hunt scenes; the aurochs, the wild ox that stood two metres at the shoulder, ranged across the Near East, Anatolia, and early Bronze Age Greece; and red deer was the leading game animal at Greek Bronze Age sites. At Kastanas the deer bones appear across several levels alongside the lion remains — a single landscape shared by predator, prey, and the people competing with both. In the Near East the lion was at once a real predator and the supreme symbol of kingship: the lion-hunt reliefs of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, around 650 BCE, serve as royal propaganda and zoological record together, and the lion stalks the Epic of Gilgamesh as it stalked the plain. In North Africa lions survived into the Roman period, when the arena consumed them in large numbers.

Climate set the outer bounds without dictating the outcome. Palaeoclimate work drawing on pollen, lake cores, speleothems, and tree-rings sketches a long arc for the Aegean: driest around the early third millennium, dry again through the mid-first millennium, then notably wetter from roughly the sixth century BCE to the first century CE, a wetter interval that coincides with a peak in settlement. At the human scale the constraint could be sharp. Athens sat in one of the drier pockets of Greece — about 395 mm of rain a year against a Greek average nearer 620 — so that perhaps a fifth of years fell below the threshold for a viable wheat harvest, and two failures in succession could exhaust both the stored grain and the social credit on which households relied. The olive and the vine carry weight here beyond their symbolism: drought-tolerant and suited to the thin upland soils that grain cannot use, both belonged to the same risk-spreading logic as storage and herding, which is why a dry city built its strategy on the olive and on imported Black Sea grain. The methodological lesson the course returns to is that the useful question is not whether climate caused an outcome but what range of responses lay open, and which one a given community took.

The first cities rose in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BCE, and they ran on grain. Uruk, with a population that may have approached eighty thousand, was sustained by cereal surpluses gathered, stored, and redistributed as bread and beer through a temple-managed economy. Moving food on that scale called for a means of account, and among the earliest writing we possess — a clay tablet from Uruk around 3,300 BCE — is a ration record: a head bent to a bowl beside a conical beer vessel, with notches for quantity. Writing was developed, in part, to count beer, and the ledger and the loaf appear in the record together.

Beer in Mesopotamia was a caloric staple, a wage, and a sacrament rather than a recreational drink: thick, nutritious, low in alcohol, and taken through reed straws from shared jars that filtered out the husks — the gesture preserved on the cylinder seal of Queen Puabi’s circle at Ur, where drinkers share a single vessel through straws of gold and lapis. The brewers were largely women. The tavern-keeper was a female figure in Mesopotamia as in Egypt, and the patron of brewing was the goddess Ninkasi, whose hymn (discussed below) preserves the oldest surviving beer recipe. Brewing stood as a women’s craft at the centre of the urban economy — a position easily lost from view in the later, male world of the Greek symposium.

The other members of the future triad were entering the Aegean record during the same centuries, and the evidence is chemical as much as botanical. At Dikili Tash in northern Greece, pressed grapes and tartaric-acid biomarkers carry the earliest wine in Europe back to about 4,300 BCE, well before the vine was domesticated. The beer of Godin Tepe in western Iran, identified from calcium-oxalate “beerstone” in grooved jars at a Sumerian trading post, shows the same period turning iconographic inference into chemical confirmation. And olive stones begin to appear across southern Greece and the islands around 3,500 BCE, the opening of the olive’s long passage from wild fruit to civic emblem.

By the third and second millennia BCE the redistribution model first visible at Uruk had become the common administrative logic of the eastern Mediterranean, and the case for that common logic can be built site by site. The clearest illustration stands at Giza, where the workers’ settlement that raised the pyramids ran bakeries and breweries at an industrial scale, issuing daily rations — on the order of ten loaves and several litres of beer to each worker — to a workforce numbering in the thousands. The Great Pyramid stands, among other things, as a monument to the distribution of bread and beer.

At Babylon, around 1,754 BCE, the Code of Hammurabi gives roughly ten of its 282 laws to beer and taverns, setting prices in grain and regulating an economy of professional brewers and retail houses with a precision the Greek world would not match for over a millennium. In Egypt the Ebers Papyrus, around 1,550 BCE, uses beer as a pharmaceutical vehicle in more than a hundred prescriptions; Greek medicine would later assign that role to wine, and the substitution of vine for grain marked a cultural boundary as much as a medical one.

In Greece, the Mycenaean palaces of Pylos, Knossos, and Mycenae built the first Greek food bureaucracy. Their Linear B tablets record grain, oil, and wine taxed and redistributed; women workers drew monthly rations of wheat and barley; and perfumed olive oil travelled to Egypt in stirrup jars whose residues survive in Egyptian contexts. The administrative logic is that of Uruk, a thousand kilometres west and some centuries later. One detail repays attention. Demeter, whom Greeks of the classical age would treat as grain itself, is essentially absent from the Linear B deity lists, which suggests that the religious meaning of grain in Greece was not yet fixed in the Bronze Age. It would be assembled afterward, and in part from materials inherited from the east.

Around 1,200 BCE the Late Bronze Age system came apart: Levantine and Anatolian networks were disrupted, Ugarit burned, the Hittite kingdom dissolved, and the Mycenaean palaces fell. The collapse was in part a collapse of the tribute-and-labour systems described above, for when the central stores and their scribes disappeared the redistribution economy went with them. Food cultures proved more durable than the bureaucracies that taxed them. In Egypt and Mesopotamia beer and bread continued with little interruption, too deeply set in subsistence to fall with a palace. The Neo-Assyrian empire rebuilt the grain machine on a large scale, paying soldiers and dependants in beer and bread on principles unchanged since 3,300 BCE; the Achaemenid Persians extended the same logic from the Indus to Egypt.

Greece took the collapse hardest. Linear B writing disappeared, the olive-oil export trade lapsed, and diet narrowed to local subsistence as settlements shrank. When literature returned, the Greek relation to its own food past had been rearranged. Hesiod’s Works and Days, around 700 BCE, presents the farming year as a moral order governed by grain and wine, with the olive present but muted and beer absent altogether. The Bronze Age evidence shows that Greeks had brewed beer; their later literary culture nonetheless treated it as a barbarian drink, the habit of Thracians and Egyptians, and that judgement misled scholarship about Greek brewing for a long time. The historical question is therefore not what Greeks drank but how they chose to describe it — a distance between practice and self-image that stands as a fact to be explained.

The Mesopotamian comparison sharpens the point. Where Greek literature set beer aside, Sumerian literature had sung it: the Hymn to Ninkasi, addressed to the goddess of brewing, works as a devotional poem and a brewing recipe at once, and the debate-poem The Debate between Sheep and Grain stages the field and the herd arguing their worth before the gods. Greece inherited the practices of this world; what it did with their meanings — which it kept, which it recast, which it denied — stands among the central questions of the course.

By the classical period the triad had hardened into an identity. Wine, not beer, was the civilised drink, and above all wine taken in the symposium — the male, aristocratic drinking party in which wine was mixed with water and framed by poetry, politics, and measured intoxication. The opposition carried weight at every level: wine against beer, Greek against barbarian, the disciplined symposium against the older world’s subsistence, female-brewed beer. When Greeks and Macedonians later carried wine into the beer-drinking society of Egypt, the encounter dramatised a contrast the Greeks had spent centuries constructing.

The olive completed the picture, and its place rests on the argument made earlier about climate. Attic amphorae carried olive oil across the Mediterranean; the revenue helped fund the fleet and the building programme on the Acropolis; the gymnasium made oil a civic necessity. Drought-tolerant where grain was precarious, the olive answered the dry setting that left Athens dependent on imported grain, which is why Sparta’s destruction of the Attic olive groves during the Peloponnesian War carried an economic weight close to existential.

Fish belongs here too, and it ties these notes to the Geography companion. In classical Athens fish became a morally charged luxury: the compulsive fish-eater, the opsophagos, drew suspicion, his ungoverned appetite read as a threat to the self-command expected of a citizen. The reason was structural. Sacrificial meat was shared out equally among citizens as an act of common participation, whereas fish was bought in the market for whatever a man could pay, and so registered private appetite where meat could not. The sea that supplied it was, in the Greek conception, koinē — common, unenclosed, beyond the reach of the polis — so fish was governed less by law at its source than by ideology at the table.

The classical table is defined by its absences as much as by its contents, and the absences make the case that the “timeless Mediterranean diet” is a later construction. There were no tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, or maize, all of them American and two millennia in the future; no citrus or spinach, which arrive later still; no rice as a staple; and, by choice, no beer, though Greeks knew it and drank it on occasion. The diet was a particular and historically contingent selection rather than a natural inheritance. When Alexander’s conquests dissolved the wall between Greek wine culture and Near Eastern beer culture, the Hellenistic courts took up both, and the Ptolemies taxed Egyptian beer through the same kind of administration that had counted it at Uruk three thousand years before. The story that opened in a Natufian hearth closes with Greek officials administering the oldest beer cultures on earth.