Ancient Secrets Unveiled: Bakers Bring 5,300-Year-Old Turkish Bread Back to Life
Küllüoba ExcavationsKüllüoba Mound in Turkey, where the 5,300-year-old bread was discovered.
“The one in Çatalhöyük is actually an uncooked example,” Turkteki explained. “Ours is the first in Anatolia in terms of its shaping and cooking.”
What’s more, Turkteki suspects that the bread from Küllüoba Mound served a ritualistic purpose for the Neolithic people who buried it.
How This Bread Was Used In An Ancient Ritual — And How It’s Being Recreated Today
Some 5,300 years ago, this bread was torn, burned, and buried. The archaeologists who dug it up at Küllüoba Mound suspect that this was done with a specific, ritual purpose related to abundance and prosperity.
“It may have been part of a ceremony for ritual purposes,” Turkteki remarked. “It may have been related to a structure, abundance, offerings, etc. After this piece was torn off, it was buried in a section close to the threshold of the structure, in the floor. This is how we found the bread.”
Küllüoba Excavation DirectorateA local factory has started producing recreations of the Küllüoba bread, and they’re selling out quickly.
That said, bread like this was of course widely baked and eaten by Neolithic people. But this specific bread was seemingly produced with a ritualistic purpose in mind.
“What we understand is this; of course it was consumed in daily life,” Turkteki said. “This bread was not produced as part of that… it was torn off and burned, buried in the ground, otherwise it would not have reached us. In that sense, it seems to have been produced for a ritual.”
