Advanced Civilization: Cooking Becomes Cuisine
An advanced civilization has all the elements that our civilizations have
now: cities with thousands of people doing specialized labor, advanced
technology, structure and institutions like government, and a way to
keep records. These advanced civilizations were possible because there
was a surplus of food, so not everyone had to farm all the time. Specialized labor became possible—like artisans, priests, warriors, chefs,
teachers, and government officials to keep records of the population so
they could collect taxes and raise an army. Advanced civilizations are
where cooking for survival changes to cuisine—cooking with awareness,
for a purpose other than just to make food edible.
Some historians think that cities were started for the purpose of worship. Could one feeble voice raised in prayer reach the gods? Thousands
would have a better chance of being heard. For whatever reason they
began, cities became centers of trade.
Humans need fresh water to survive, so it is not surprising that the
earliest civilizations began around rivers: the Tigris and Euphrates in
southwest Asia, the Nile in Egypt, the Yellow (Huang He) in China, and
the Indus in India.
The Fertile Crescent is an area of land that runs from the Mediterranean
Sea on its western end, then curves around in a crescent shape to the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq, down to the Persian Gulf. It
was in this part of the world, the land called Mesopotamia, which means
“between the rivers,” that scientists believe an advanced civilization began approximately 5,000 years ago—around 3000 B.C.
The cities in Mesopotamia were surrounded by walls for defense, and
inside the walled city was another walled mini-city, the temple. Inside the
temple was the most important building, the granary, where the city stored
its food. Priests and priestesses honored the gods full time by preparing
food for them and celebrating with feasts on their special days. So, from
the earliest civilizations, food, religion, and government were connected.
As thousands of unrelated humans came to live together in cities,
they needed organization. A leader named Hammurabi became known
as “the law giver.” The Code of Hammurabi consisted of laws governing
every aspect of life in Mesopotamia: the management of the irrigation
canals; marriage, divorce, adoption; and construction. The punishment
in many cases was literally “an eye for an eye” or a broken bone for a
broken bone. Punishments were worse for committing crimes against the
state than against other citizens. For example, the fine for stealing a sheep,
pig, or ox from a temple was triple the fine for stealing from another citizen. The Code also governed the wine trade and taverns. Tavern owners, usually women, had to report any talk they heard about plots to
overthrow the government. And they were warned about serving
watered-down wine. The punishment fit the crime—death by drowning.29
We know this because writing was invented in Mesopotamia, too. It
was called cuneiform, which means “wedge-shaped,” after the symbols that
were pressed onto blocks of wet clay with an instrument called a stylus.
After the clay hardened, the symbols became permanent records. Writing
gives historians more information than just corpses, middens, and coprolites. Some of the written sources for information about food are recipes,
correspondence, songs, poems and other literature, laws, business records,
and household lists from temples, palaces, and the homes of the wealthy.
Cuneiform went out of use in the first century B.C., and over the next
several hundred years the tablets disappeared. In the 1840s, British archaeologists discovered 30,000 tablets and pieces of tablets.30 Among
them they discovered the world’s first recipe for ale.31 Sumerians brewed
“eight barley beers, eight emmer beers, and three mixed beers.”32 Hops
were not added until almost 4,000 years later in the Middle Ages in Europe. Today in the Sudan, a beer called buza is still brewed in this ancient way without hops