HISTORY OF CHEESE IN ANCIENT EGYPT

The great dispersal of Levantine peoples that commenced toward the end of the Neolithic Age eventually progressed south across the forbidding Sinai desert and reached the Nile River Valley around 5500 BC (Bellwood 2005). Presumably, simple cheese-making technology arrived in Egypt at this time. There is also evidence that cattle herding and domestication in the northern Sahara may have preceded the arrival of domesticated livestock from the Levant by as much as three thousand years. During this period the northern Sahara enjoyed a much wetter climate than at present and was suitable for grazing (Barker 2006; Bellwood 2005). The nomadic herders eventually left behind evidence of their pastoral lifestyle in the Libyan desert in the form of rock art, dated to around 3000 BC. Some of the artwork includes depictions of cattle being milked, and what appears to be bags of milk products (cheese curd?) draining on racks (Barker 2006; Simoons 1971). Thus, we can speculate that nomadic milking and cheese making may already have been in practice in northern Africa at the time of the Neolithic arrival from the Levant.

Mesopotamia clearly influenced the culture, religion, and technology of Egypt (Chadwick 2005), but the extent to which Mesopotamia contributed to the rise of Egyptian civilization at the end of the fourth millennium BC is disputed among scholars (Najovits 2003). Whatever the cause for Egypt’s rise, a turning point occurred around 3000 BC when Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt were united, probably under the reign of Narmer, to form the first true state (Chadwick 2005). In contrast with Mesopotamia, where the Sumerian kings were viewed as divinely sanctioned to rule but were not gods themselves, Egypt developed a mythology, probably borrowed to some extent from Mesopotamia, that elevated the pharaoh to the status of god.

Central to Egyptian mythology was the concept of the afterlife and resurrection, which inspired the building of great tombs and eventually pyramids to ensure the well-being of the Egyptian royalty in the afterlife, and of anyone else who could likewise afford to build and provision an appropriate tomb. An intriguing aspect of the early Egyptian tombs was the inclusion of vast quantities of foodstuffs that were meant to provide for the deceased in the afterlife. For most tombs, such foodstuffs were in scattered disarray and beyond analysis by the time of archaeological discovery due to looting and degradation over the centuries. However, two intact tombs dating from the first and second dynasties (circa 3000 BC) have yielded the earliest evidence of cheese in Egypt.

The Saqqara Tomb 3477 was not that of a king or queen but of a wealthy noblewoman. This particular tomb remained remarkably undisturbed until its archaeological discovery in 1937. Even the footprints of the burial party laid down some five thousand years earlier were still discernible in the dust that covered the floor (Emery 1962). Also completely intact was a multicourse precooked meal served in twenty-seven pottery vessels and twenty-one alabaster and diorite bowls and dishes, which were laid out on the floor in front of the sarcophagus. Among the food items were three small ceramic jars, the contents of which were subjected to a battery of chemical analyses and tentatively determined to be cheese. If in fact the jars contained cheese, it is likely that these were fresh cheeses (acid-coagulated or acid/heat-coagulated), similar to those such as Çökelek and Lor that are still produced traditionally in Turkey and stored in clay pots (Kamber 2008a). Unfortunately, very little is known about Egyptian cheeses from ancient written records because Egyptian scribes used papyrus, a fragile paper-like material, for their record keeping rather than the much more durable clay cuneiform tablets used in Mesopotamia, and few papyrus documents have survived intact in the archaeological record.

An even earlier tomb, that of King Hor-Aha of the First Dynasty, also yielded two pottery jars that were determined through chemical analyses to contain cheese (Zaky and Iskander 1942). Given the comparatively crude analytical methods available to these researchers in the 1940s, their results, like those from Saqqara Tomb 3477, must be considered tentative until confirmed using newer, more definitive methodologies such as those described by Evershed et al. (2008). Nevertheless, the evidence that these jars contained cheese is plausible and, indeed, made more so by hieroglyphic inscriptions on the jars from the Hor-Aha tomb, which seem to indicate that one jar contained cheese from Upper Egypt and the other, from Lower Egypt (Zaky and Iskander 1942). Whether the inscriptions had any political significance linked to Egypt’s newly achieved unification of the Upper and Lower kingdoms around 3000 BC is anyone’s guess (Dalby 2009).

Thus, it seems likely that by the start of the third millennium BC cheese making was firmly entrenched in Egypt, just as it was in the great Mesopotamian civilization at the opposite end of the Fertile Crescent. By this time, dairying and possibly cheese making also had penetrated far to the east, to the Indus River Valley that divides modern Pakistan and India, where another civilization was soon to form.

By Paul S. Kindstedt in "Cheese and Culture - A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization", Chelsea Green Publishing, USA, 2012, excerpts chapter 2. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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