Ancient Secrets Unveiled: Bakers Bring 5,300-Year-Old Turkish Bread Back to Life
What’s more, bakers have started recreating this bread, and it’s now selling out by the thousands.
The Stunningly Intact 5,300-Year-Old Bread Found At Küllüoba Mound In Turkey
According to Anadolu Agency, the 5,300-year-old bread was found at Küllüoba Mound in Eskişehir, which contains remains from the Late Chalcolithic Age (3500 to 3200 B.C.E) to the Early Bronze Age (3200 to 1900 B.C.E.).
Küllüoba Excavation DirectorateThe bread, indicated by a black line, as it was discovered beneath the threshold of an ancient house.
Torn and burned to the point of carbonization, the bread was found under the threshold of the back room of an ancient house built circa 3300 B.C.E.
“It is very valuable for us in terms of being an organic substance,” said excavation director Murat Turkteki, an archaeology professor at Bilecik Seyh Edebali University. “What the bread says… is more important to us than its discovery. We are really happy in that respect.”
An analysis of the bread revealed that it was made with emmer wheat (known as gernik or Kavılca) and lentils. Turkteki and his team found that the bread was cooked more on the outside than the inside, and that it was later burned on purpose as part of a ritual. Fortunately for the archaeologists, this helped preserve the bread for thousands of years.
“If it had not been burned,” he said, “it would not have reached us.”
As Turkteki noted, only one other example of ancient bread has been found in Anatolia. Last year, archaeologists found a chunk of 8,600-year-old bread in Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in south-central Turkey. That bread is considered the oldest known bread ever found. However, it was unbaked.
