A new batch of cuneiform cookies!
Two years ago, I made a set of cuneiform cookie tablets, using an American gingerbread recipe and the text of the Babylonian text Enuma Elish.
The results were tasty, but the dough puffed a little during baking, losing some of the writing details.  For this year’s New Year’s Eve, I made a new batch: different recipe, different text.
As the recipe, I chose these Gingerbread Thins from the BBC. (Fellow British Baking Show fans may recognize it as Candace’s gingerbread house furniture.) I picked it because most American recipes fall into one of two categories: either they’re designed for eating and contain eggs and baking soda, which cause the leavening that makes the dough puff up, or they’re designed for construction and have a fairly bland flavor.
The results did indeed retain the impressions much more clearly, and the flavor was wonderful — more ginger-forward than spice-forward, but that’s not a bad thing. The texture was quite hard, though, due to the lack of leavening, and I recommend rolling them quite thin to maintain a crispy texture.
As the text, I used excerpts from the Ugaritic text KTU 1.23, Šaḥru-wa-Šalimu (sometimes called “The Goodly/Gracious/Good Gods”). I’ll soon be posting my translation and discussion of the text, which is a fascinating combination of myth and ritual, but the top lines contain the following section:
The Death-Lord is seated:
    in his hand, a staff of sterility;
    in his hand, a staff of widowhood.
The vine-pruner prunes it;
    the vine-tier ties it;
    like a vine, he drops it on his death-field.
This enigmatic passage has been interpreted in many ways, but many scholars use it to judge the time of year when the ritual may have taken place. Â To me, this is a clear depiction of wintertime: a barren absence of fertility, accompanied by the pruning of grapevines, which takes place in midwinter in the Mediterranean. Â Thus, the text seemed like a relatively seasonal choice.
In addition to some large slabs of writing, I also cut cookies with individual signs on them and their English counterpart. Ugaritic is written in cuneiform (i.e. wedges pressed into clay), but it’s not the complex system of syllabograms and ideograms used by Akkadian. It’s actually an abjad (a vowelless alphabet) very similar to other Northwest Semitic languages like Hebrew and Phoenician; A and B are the first two letters. This means that if you want to write English messages in cuneiform, the Ugaritic alphabet is a good choice.Â
Happy new year, everyone! May 2018 bring us all new beginnings.
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