Food, Drink and Meals in Sumerian Communities

In southern Mesopotamia, now Iraq, barley supplied much of the food and drink consumed during the third millennium BCE. Households and institutions processed grain, while gardens, herds and marshes added vegetables, dairy foods, meat and fish. Written instructions describe work on fields and grain; a newly excavated Early Dynastic kitchen at Lagash preserves the equipment and layout of a shared eating place.

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From barley harvest to flour

The early second-millennium composition The Farmer’s Instructions assigns harvest work among three people: one cuts the barley, another ties the sheaves, and a third apportions them. After threshing, two workers move the grain during winnowing, which separates lighter chaff from kernels. The text also names threshing sledges, oxen, measuring tools and grain carriers. Its harvest sequence proceeds from cutting and tying to threshing, winnowing and measuring.

Grinding turned grain into flour for breads and other preparations. A hymn to Ninkasi, copied in Old Babylonian tablets around 1800 BCE, describes beerbread mixed with aromatics and baked in a large oven before the brewing stages. The hymn praises the beer goddess rather than giving a household recipe, but it names the work and vessels involved.

Cooking and food storage at Lagash

Excavations at al-Hiba, ancient Lagash, exposed an Early Dynastic I eating complex from the early third millennium BCE, with a courtyard and adjoining kitchen. Its main cooking space contained a circular mudbrick oven almost four metres across. The oven floor was raised above a small gap and pierced with holes to admit air; perforated platforms sat inside it for cooking vessels. Excavators suggest fuel was first lit at the more heavily burned rear of the oven, then moved around the platforms. Food was probably heated in pots. A large jar was set upside down, partly buried in a niche between courtyard and kitchen. Its base had been removed to form an opening, allowing the vessel to hold stored food or drink and keep it cool. The layout joins the preparation of food with places for storage and communal eating.

Brewing and drinking

The Ninkasi hymn describes malt, grain allowed to sprout and then dried, being moistened and soaked in a jar. Cooked mash, the thick grain mixture, is spread on broad reed mats to cool; the following sweet liquid, or wort, is described in a damaged passage whose action toward the vessel is unclear. A separate line places the fermentation vat above a collecting vessel, and the final lines describe filtered beer being poured. The hymn preserves distinct brewing stages, though not every action is legible.

The Standard of Ur, an Early Dynastic object dated about 2550–2400 BCE and made from shell, lapis lazuli and red limestone, depicts seated banquet guests raising cups while a musician plays a lyre, a stringed instrument. The scene presents ceremonial drinking; administrative tablets show that beer was also issued with food to people traveling or working.

Dairy, gardens and marsh foods

Herds supplied milk and dairy products as well as meat. Robert Englund’s study of late Uruk, in the late fourth millennium BCE, cattle accounts distinguishes containers for dairy fat; later records from Lagash and Ur III list products such as milk fat and cheese among herd deliveries. These accounts treat dairy as a measured institutional product, alongside crops and animal stocks.

Date palms supplied fruit and shade for garden crops; pulses and vegetables supplemented grain. Sheep supplied wool and meat, goats and cattle supplied milk, and oxen could pull ploughs and vehicles. The waterways and marshes around Lagash also provided fish and other wetland resources. Boats carried foods and materials between fields, marshes and urban settlements.

Rations and access to food

A barley-ration tablet from Girsu, dated to the fourth year of Lagash’s ruler Uruinimgina around 2350 BCE, records a distribution by the temple of Bau to about two hundred workers and their children. Adults received thirty or forty sila, a grain-volume measure, each month; children received twenty. The tablet shows how one institution differentiated barley allocations by age.

A separate tablet from Umma, dated to the first year of Ibbi-Sin around 2028 BCE, records beer, bread, oil and onions issued to messengers on the twentieth day of the second month. It shows a more varied ration assembled for people on the move, rather than a complete menu for every Sumerian household.