Bread was a staple in ancient Egyptian diet. Made from a variety of ingredients, bread loaves of different sizes were made in a variety of shapes, including human figures and animals. They were often elaborately decorated and whole or cracked grain was frequently added, resembling the multi-grain breads baked nowadays. Experiments conducted to solve ‘the mysteries of Egyptian bread pot’ have provided few recipes, and a study carried out by Delwen Samuel has established that ancient Egyptians might have been as good at baking as they were at building pyramids.
Bread and beer were the base of every meal and their combined hieroglyphs were used as the symbol for food. However, their role went far beyond nutrition, as both were very important in Egyptian economy and ritual, and were the first items listed in offerings to the gods. Ancient Egyptian workers were often paid in bread and beer, or in measures of grain.
As was the case with beer, ancient Egyptians also hoped for an abundant supply of bread in the afterlife, what can be seen from numerous artistic representations of baking and the offering loaves of bread, placed in tombs as part of the essential provisions for the afterlife.
Bread preparation was a daily activity and a major focus of daily life. Egyptians left many different records that illustrate making of bread.
Numerous tomb reliefs, paintings, and models show various stages of bread preparation. While the artistic records are most often used to describe baking in ancient Egypt, the scenes depicted can sometimes be obscure, and their order may not always match the actual baking process, while some steps may be excluded altogether. For this reason, the surviving loaves of bread provide the best evidence and most accurate information about ancient Egyptian baking. They are also very frequently in excellent condition, due to aridity of Egyptian climate.
Several hundreds of preserved loaves are now distributed in museum collections throughout the world. Among the earliest are porous fragments from Predynastic graves of the Badarian culture. Only several examples of preserved loaves are known from settlements, and most were recovered from tombs and burial sites.
It is difficult to distinguish the numerous types of bread that were made – at least fourteen types are listed in Old Kingdom documents, and forty breads and cakes in New Kingdom. Although most of their distinguishing features are unknown, research and experimental work has provided some insights into ancient Egyptian baking and the ingredients used.
Ancient loaves
Ancient Egyptians made bread from barley and emmer wheat, though by the New Kingdom emmer appears to be most commonly used in baking. Some of the loaves made from barley include the specimens from Deir el-Medina, currently in Dokki Agricultural Museum. Barley was also identified in some loaves from the XI Dynasty tomb of Mentuhotep.
Bread was made in a variety of shapes and sizes. Perhaps the most traditional was the semi-circular loaf 
, the shape of which was used as a hieroglyph for bread and for sound t ever since writing was invented. Another kind of bread that was used in offerings and had a special significance was the conical white bread called t-ḥd. It is represented by a pointed pyramidal sign 
, but could also be depicted on the palm of a hand 
, meaning ‘to give’. Hexagonal bread loaves were also present, and their preparation is illustrated in the tomb of Ti at Saqqara. It appears they were made by pouring the dough into two trapezoidal moulds that were then placed on top of each other, resulting in hexagonal loaves.
Triangles were very common as well, in addition to round, conical and oval loaves.
Sometimes, loaves were also formed into more elaborate shapes. This was especially the case during New Kingdom, when loaves and cakes were rolled into spirals, similar to Swiss rolls, or shaped like animals (fish, goat, goose, cow, crocodile’s head, etc.) and human figures, either to be used as toy cakes/loaves, or had votive or magic purpose.
For instance, bread in the form of a man is mentioned in a spell from Papyrus Chester Beatty VIII (Rt. 3, 5-5) indicating its role in medicinal or magical rituals. One of the surviving loaves is also made in the shape of Horus (currently at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, acc.29-87-635). This loaf was made of very finely ground flour and has an oily texture.
The dough texture ranged from very fine to mealy. Whole or fragmented grains could be added to the flour to create a richer texture, not unlike today’s multigrain breads. Flavorings were sometimes added as well, such as fruit, spices, seeds and honey. Bread crust was also often decorated with incisions and prick marks, or bands of dough were applied over the surface of the loaf. Some loaves examined by Grüss were sprinkled with flour, or even covered with a layer of fresh dough after being baked and were then baked again for a nice, brown finish.
A list of offerings presented by Rameses III illustrates an amazing array of bread varieties: “1,057 large oblation loaves of fine bread; 1,277 large syd-loaves; 1,277 large bḥ-loaves; 440 ḏdmt-ḥr.t loaves; r-’h wsw-cakes; 62,540 by’.t-loaves; 160,992 prsn-loaves; 13,020 white loaves of fine bread; 6,200 ‘k loaves; 24,800 s‘b–loaves; 17,340 pws’-‘k-loaves; 572,000 white oblation loaves; 46,500 pyramidal loaves; 441,800 kyllestis loaves; 127,400 wdnwnt-loaves; 116,400 white t’-loaves; kwnk bread; 262,000 p’t-loaves of fine bread.” Although their distinctive features are unknown, the number of loaves is staggering.
Other ingredients
Figs
The surviving loaves and baking representations indicate that ingredients other than cereal grain were occasionally added to bread.
For instance, a cone-shaped bread, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is made mostly or entirely of figs (Ficus carica L.). The figs seem to have been cooked before being made into a loaf and there’s no evidence that grain or flour was added. A number of loaves from Deir el-Medina (now in the Dokki Museum, Cairo) were also made with figs but the main ingredient of these loaves was probably cereal grain.
A cake-like bread from the British Museum (EA5384) contains sycamore fig seeds (Ficus sycomorus), in addition to nabk fruits (Christ’s thorn) and barley grains. However, it hasn’t been determined whether the fig seeds found in those bread loaves are from fresh or dried figs. Fig cakes are still made in Egypt, although without flour. A similar method using dried figs without flour is seen in recipes for pan de higo (Spanish fig cake).
Dates
One bread loaf from the British Museum (EA5346) might had been made with dates and cereals, as suggested by Samuel. Date fruits could not be clearly identified but large fragments of non-cereal ingredient were found inside the loaf, which was also decorated with two date stones and a date calyx. Another specimen from the British Museum (EA5353), a biscuit-like bread, has impressions of date palm leaf (Phoenix dactylifera) matting on the bread surface, but the loaf contained no fragments of date fruits.
Coriander seeds
Some semicircular loaves from the tomb of Tutankhamun (now in the Cairo Museum; CG644-5) were made with crushed coriander seeds. The main ingredient of those loaves was cereal flour (the type has not been determined) but shreds of an unidentified ingredient which is not a cereal were also found.
Christ’s thorn, sidder, nabk (Ziziphus spina-christi)
A number of loaves from the British Museum (EA5347, EA5352, EA5353, EA5360, EA5384, EA15744), which are described as bread, biscuit-like bread and cake-like bread, contain the pulp of nabk fruits within the dough mixture. These fruits have a rather astringent taste but are rich in carbohydrates, protein and vitamins, and are still eaten in Egypt today, either fresh or dried. One of the loaves, EA5360, is leaf-shaped but it also brings to mind the tree shown on the head of tree goddesses. Kamal also pointed out that some of the ancient funerary loaves were made with fruits of the Christ’s thorn (nabk in Arabic) and provided ethnographic details of nabk bread preparation.
Lotus seeds
One of the more unusual items on ancient Egyptian dining table was the lotus bread. Theophrastus (IV.8.II) describes how white lotus flowers were left to decay, to be later washed in the Nile river, with the millet-resembling fruit extracted and left to dry. The dried fruit was then pounded and turned into flour, which was, according to Pliny, kneaded into bread with milk and water. Resulting loaves were light and easily digestible when hot.
In Greco-Roman times, even a wider variety of ingredients was used and other dishes made from cereals were popular as well. The groats made from ‘cracked’ wheat were supposedly held in very high esteem and, according to Athenaeus, served at Greek weddings.
From grain to flour
The wheat that was used in ancient Egyptian baking, emmer, differs in some properties from most wheats grown today. It does not separate easily into chaff and grain when threshed, but breaks into packets called spikelets. Before winnowing and sieving, intensive processing is needed to break the chaff apart while keeping the grain undamaged.
Archaeological, experimental, and ethnographic research has provided information on how ancient Egyptians processed emmer. The chaff was removed by moistening the spikelets with a small amount of water and pounding them with wooden pestles in wooden or limestone mortars. They used small mortars, so several batches of spikelets had to be processed to get enough freed grain to make bread for a family. The resulting moist mixture of grain kernels and chaff was probably spread to dry in the sun, followed by a series of winnowing and sieving while the final fragments of chaff were picked out by hand.
Similar processes can still be found in some parts of the world. The same method of stripping bran from sorghum is used in Sudan, while similar tools are used for processing emmer in Ethiopia and other countries where emmer is grown.
Myriad collection of baking related structures and artefacts have been discovered during excavations of temples, tombs and settlements, including mortars, quern emplacements, and entire bakeries, as well as smaller objects such as rubbing stones and bread moulds.
Milling
Once the grain was cleaned from chaff, it was milled into flour using a flat grinding stone called saddle quern.
Grain was laboriously ground by rubbing back and forth across the quern with a smaller hand stone. Saddle quern was used until Ptolemaic and Roman periods when it was replaced by the more efficient rotary quern. During this time, emmer was also replaced by free-threshing wheat.
From the Neolithic times saddle querns were placed on the floor, and by Middle Kingdom they were raised onto platforms, making them easier and more comfortable to use. The experimental work conducted by Samuel has shown that ‘no grit was needed to aid the milling process’ as has been suggested, and that miller was able to control the texture of the flour.
Saddle querns are still widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. Different grades of flour texture can be produced depending on the coarseness of the quern and by using different hand stones, while finest flour is made by adding water to the grain on the quern.
The surviving ancient loaves often contain rough fragments of grain, which has led some scholars to suggest that ancient Egyptian milling technology was crude and incapable of producing fine flour. However, finely ground flour in other loaves indicates that the coarsely ground grain was added intentionally, much like in today’s multi-grain bread. In addition, whole and fragmented grain appear to had been pre-cooked or at least well soaked in water before being added to the flour. Loaves recovered from tombs could be different from those made for daily consumption, and made with less care, but the quality of bread almost certainly varied from baker to baker, according to skill, experience and purpose.
As Samuel notes, it is difficult to imagine that the people capable of building the pyramids, a feat ancient Egyptians are perhaps most known for, subsisted on coarse, chaffy and gritty bread. However, it is often claimed that teeth of ancient Egyptians were frequently worn down from eating gritty bread containing sand and other inorganic ingredients. Nevertheless, very few quartz sand fragments were observed in the specimens studied.
Some of the loaves examined by Samuel were made from finely ground flour and had no trace of husk material. Other contained few chaff fragments, generally very small, that could have landed there unintentionally. The extremely chaffy loaves, on the other hand, were probably beer residues or crop-processing waste. Perhaps the chaffy bread was placed in the tombs in the years of poor harvest, when the Nile did not flood, as famine occasionally raged through Egypt.
Several loaves from the British Museum contain grains with fragments of cereal stems or leaves both on the surface of the loaves and in the crumb matrix. Many of those remaining fragments exhibit phytoliths (plant silica bodies), and if such loaves are representative of daily fare, the silica from phytolits could have affected the teeth of people eating the bread.
One interesting feature was observed by Philippa Ryan, during her fieldwork in Sudan, where the local village bread (beledi) was made with a surface dusting of chaff debris in order to prevent the bread from burning in the oven. Though this may not explain the presence of chaff in ancient Egyptian bread, it is certainly worth mentioning.
Fine texture and chaff-free loaves found indicate that ancient Egyptians were capable of making fine bread, though until more loaves are recovered from settlements it is difficult to speak about the quality of daily bread.
Leavening and kneading
The emmer wheat and barley available to ancient Egyptians contained very little gluten, the protein that gives modern breads their spongy texture. Microscopic studies carried out on some bread samples have established that Egyptian bread was leavened with yeast, and while the absence of evidence for yeast or lactic acid bacteria in other loaves cannot necessarily mean that they were not leavened, some types of ancient Egyptian bread were probably not fermented at all.
One Predynastic loaf of bread currently in the Dokki Museum, Cairo, has an extremely open and airy texture. While this is a very unusual example, as most other loaves are much denser, with very small air pockets, it might be representative of Predynastic bread. The porosity of bread fragments found at the Neolithic site of El- Badari by Brunton and Caton-Thompson indicate that bread was leavened even in this period.
Leavening agents give the bread their light and airy structure and add flavor to the dough. The yeast and lactic acid bacteria may have increased the volume and enhanced the taste of ancient Egyptian loaves not dissimilar to sourdough wheat bread today.
Many of the circular or ovoid loaves recovered from tombs had slashes, which were likely made to allow the gas formed during fermentation and baking to escape.
It is possible that ancient Egyptians also used yeast from fermenting beer or lichen to leaven their bread. A variety of lichen similar to the ones used to increase porosity of the cakes has been found at few ancient Egyptian sites. Lichen is used today in bread-making in Egypt and it has been suggested that it was used in the ancient times as well. The plant does not grow in Egypt, but it could have been imported (there is some evidence to suggest trading of amethyst with Crete for lichen and other goods from at least Middle Kingdom onwards). According to Leek, some varieties of lichen are difficult to detect, so this theory is difficult to prove. However, if lichen was used in baking, it must have been a rare addition as the plant had to be imported and would not have been readily available.
Herodototus wrote that Egyptians ate kyllestis, the record of which goes as far back as Rameses III. According to Athenaeus, kyllestis was sourish and it was made of barley. By Pliny’s time, few leavening methods were known, and his description of the process might bear some similarity with Egyptian practice. Based on his writing, leaven was made from browned barley cakes closed in containers until they went sour, or from wheat dough kept from the previous day. Leaven was also made from millet or bran after being steeped in unfermented wine.
Kneading is often depicted in tomb scenes, though as emmer and barley contain little or no gluten there would be no point in kneading dough for long, as kneading alone would not help make bread airy and light. The flour was kneaded with salt and water or milk.
Baking
Baking changed with time in ancient Egypt. The simplest method is depicted in the Old Kingdom tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep at Saqqara.
As shown in the relief, dough is mixed in a bowl and then kneaded or shaped and baked directly on hot ashes. Quick and simple, this was probably the way peasants working in the fields baked bread throughout different periods, and is still a common way of making Bedouin bread.
During the Old Kingdom bread was also baked in flower pot shaped moulds called bedja. These moulds were first stacked upside down over a fire to be heated, and after dough was poured into the moulds, they were covered with preheated lids of similar shape.
Tomb scenes often show bakers poking sticks into these moulds to check if the bread was done. It has been suggested that fat or oil were used to coat bread moulds to prevent dough from sticking to the sides, though no analysis has been done to prove this hypothesis.
Another type of baking is shown in the tomb of Pepiankh. The oven represented is also known from tomb models and consisted of three round or square stone slabs propped up against each other with horizontal slab laid over them. This formed a small enclosed oven that could be used for baking flat loaves of bread or griddle cakes on its top. Wild suggested that bread could be also baked directly on cinders and that this type of oven appeared towards the end of the Sixth Dynasty.
The shape of the moulds changed during the Middle Kingdom. Bread was baked in narrow, tall, almost cylindrical cones, which were stacked lengthwise inside the oven.
At least during the Middle Kingdom bread was also baked on low hearths or griddles. Representations at Beni Hasan (tomb of Amenemhat BH2, tomb of Khnumhotep III, BH3) and in the tomb of Antefoqer show a low hearth being covered with a lid and, in the Beni Hasan representation, a loaf placed on top of it.
By the New Kingdom time, a cylindrical oven made from a thick shell of mud brick and plaster was introduced. The interior was lined with a clay cylinder, about 3cm thick. These ovens were usually placed in the corner of a room. Bread was baked by placing loaves on the pre-heated inner oven wall. When baked, flat loaves could simply be peeled off from the wall.
These ovens very much resemble the modern tannour, which is widely used in the Middle East and parts of North Africa, excluding Egypt.
A number of ancient round loaves are curved in a similar way as the flat loaves baked in tannour. Baking in this type of oven is represented in the tomb of Ramesses III, but it is also indicated in scenes from tombs of Kenamun and Nebamun, where a baker is shown reaching inside the oven with a loaf in his other hand.
However, larger and thicker loaves were probably too heavy to be baked directly on internal oven walls. The largest loaves are over 20cm in length, 17cm in width, and 10cm high. On the opposite end of spectrum is the smallest flat bun loaf from Deir el-Bahari, roughly round, and approximately 0.5cm in diameter, and 0.2cm thick. This miniature loaf is deep reddish brown color, so it is possible that a red dye was added to the dough as well.
The large and thick loaves had to be placed on some sort of horizontal support inserted into the oven, or ceramic bread platters could have been used. Remains of these platters occur throughout ancient Egypt, well into the Greco-Roman times, with little change in design except that from New Kingdom onwards they gradually got larger. A representation of baking with what could be a platter can be found in the tomb of Antefoqer at Thebes.
These platters are associated with baking mainly because similar vessels are used for making ‘aish shamsi, or sun bread in contemporary Egypt. However, according to Samuel, this link is a bit tenuous, and the platters could have also been used for cereal processing or food preparation.
While the surviving ancient Egyptian bread loaves offer a wealth of information regarding ancient Egyptian baking techniques, few experiments have actually been made to recreate the bread itself.
Mark Lehner and a National Geographic team built a replica of a Pyramid Age bakery in 1993, and with help of Ed Wood, attempted to make bread following ancient Egyptian techniques. They used emmer and barley flour, leavened with local wild yeasts from Giza captured by Ed. The yeast captured can now actually be obtained (the Giza culture by Sourdough International) and instructions for its use are also published in Ed’s book Classic sourdough revisited. Apparently dough made with this culture rises very well and is moderately sour. Ed experimented with different combinations of emmer and barley, described in his book World Sourdough Breads from Antiquity.
In addition, Samuel, whose study is focused mainly on New Kingdom practices, made few experiments with replicated tools, installations and ingredients, following each step from pounding the spikelets, to milling and baking. As had been established, emmer has a high water absorption capacity. In order to make the dough, 82% water was used in relation to emmer flour, compared to 69.2% for bread wheat flour. Some of the loaves examined by Samuel were made from malt although it was not possible to determine whether these loaves were made entirely from malt or from the mixture of malt and unsprouted grain. She tried few combinations of barley and wheat, but the bread baked with sprouted emmer wheat resulted in a microstructure which most closely resembled that of the ancient loaves.
Hopefully, more recipes from Egyptian bread pots will be recovered and allow us a taste of ancient baking wisdom. Meanwhile, popular pita bread with nut flavored dukkah and olive oil is worth a try!
Thanks to Delwen Samuel for helpful suggestions
Bibliography
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