#ancient mesopotamia

[vichugos]

FINISHED Ishtar 🙏 beautiful bird lady

[memories-of-ancients]

Shell, limestone, and lapis lazuli game board, city of Ur, Sumer, circa 2450 BC

from The Penn Museum

[along-the-silkroad]

Foundation clay nail of King Gudea dedicated to the god Ningirsu. Walters Art Museum (ID: 48.1457). Gudea was a Sumerian ensi (ruler) of the city-state of Lagash in southern Mesopotamia, governing approximately between 2144 and 2124 BCE. Although he was probably not originally from Lagash, he secured his position within its ruling elite by marrying Ninalla, daughter of the ruler Ur-Baba. His son, Ur-Ningirsu II, later inherited his position. Gudea’s reign coincided with the dominance of the Gutian dynasty over regions such as Mari. Despite this broader political context, Lagash appears to have flourished under his leadership, enjoying a period of prosperity and relative autonomy from the Gutians, a people of uncertain linguistic affiliation who had entered Mesopotamia from the northeastern highlands.

[shamebats]

[chantssecrets]

A 200-gram lapis lazuli sphere (50 mm diameter) from ancient Mesopotamia. The sphere likely rested on a scepter and is engraved with figures, including a winged lion. The sphere served as a seal bead.

[phownizzz]

Ištar sketch; I love and adore her so much.

Hope yall appreciate this personal interpretation of her :3

[diemelusine]

The Fiancée of Belus (1885) by Henri-Paul Motte. Musée d'Orsay.

[intothestacks]

Now We're Cookin'!: The Earliest Surviving Recipes

^ This tablet includes 25 recipes for stews, 21 are meat stews and 4 are vegetable stews. The recipes list the ingredients and the order in which they should be added, but don't give measures or cooking times.

While archeologists have a pretty good idea of what the Egyptian, Hittite, Phoenician, and Hebrew diet consisted of, there isn't much information left behind of how the food was prepared.

There are lots of different dishes one could make with the same ingredients, after all.

That's why three cuneiform tablets in Yale University's collection are so special: they contain 35 recipes in Akkadian.

So, can we make any of them today?

Alas, not quite.

Some of the passages are damaged, and some use obscure colloquial terms in Akkadian that archeologists aren't entirely sure about the meaning of. Then there's the issue that some of the ingredients we do know are no longer used so it'd be hard to source them. There's also the issue that no cooking time or quantity of each ingredient is given, so it'd be hard to recreate the recipe accurately.

But we can still learn much from them!

We know, for example, that around the Old Babylonian time when the recipes were written there was an exciting innovation to the culinary world: cooking ingredients in hot water. Before then, people would cook by putting food in an oven, by using indirect heat in hot ashes, and the good old-fashioned way of direct exposure to flame, as in broiling, grilling, or spit-roasting.