Complex Numbers

Sumer in the City

Thank Atlas Obscura for this one, which, again, I'm sharing mostly for the hell of it. Because it talks about two of my favorite things. No, not science and math; beer and food.

    Ordering Off a 5,000-Year-Old Mesopotamian Menu  
A community effort brings ancient flavors to modern Texas.

Texas has forfeited any claim to being "modern," but whatever.

Among the campus buildings at Rice University in Houston, Texas, one curious structure stands out... It’s called a mudhif, and for Iraq’s Marsh Arab ethnic minority, it’s a traditional village meetinghouse where disputes are settled and important gatherings are held.

What Marsh Arabs are doing in Houston is explained in the article.

Alrawi describes the dinner as a way “to complete the setting” of the mudhif by paying homage to the structure’s ancient origins. Rather than modern Iraqi food, the dinner menu is based on recent archaeological discoveries from Lagash. Located in modern-day southern Iraq, Lagash was a major Sumerian city home to some 100,000 people in the third millennium BC.

While that might not seem like a huge city by today's standards, I think it was quite a lot of people for 5,000 years ago. The far better known Babylon, in the same general area, might have reached 200,000, but that was several centuries later.

...the central grain was barley, used to make both bread and another Mesopotamian staple that the team in Houston set their sights on recreating: beer.

And now they're speaking my language.

Though the beer of ancient Mesopotamia bore little resemblance to the delicious magical concoctions of today, it was fermentation of malted barley. The article goes into some of the process.

“Whenever you put an archaeologist together with a chef or a brewer,” says Lao, “they feed on each other.” Recreating the Mesopotamian meal has been a team effort.

Now, that's an image I might have done without.

Also, as the article points out, it's probably impossible to faithfully recreate all of the recipes. Moreover, we're talking about working-class food, the ancient equivalent to street tacos, hot dogs, and the like. Food availability and price keeps changing; a commonly-touted example is that lobster used to be considered trash that only poor people ate, while now it's treated as a luxury item (I don't know how true that is). So do you recreate the food, or the experience? Lots of cultures have come up with their own working-class food, but the commonality there (pun intended, as always) is that it's all based on what's abundant and cheaply available.

At least until it becomes widely known as delicious, at which point it ceases to be working-class food. Like how you might pay $10 for a stadium hot dog, or how I pay $30 for a pizza.

But I feel like it brings history to life if they try to recreate the recipes with the foods then involved. Few people love memorizing the facts, dates, and minutiae of history, but get people together for a meal, and stuff will stick in their memories.

That said, I have little interest in trying original Sumerian beer. It's enough for me to know how the beverage got its start.