This 5-inch round loaf was made from emmer wheat and quickly baked at 300 degrees Fahrenheit, giving it a crispy crust and soft texture. Bakers have now created thousands of edible versions of this centuries-old bread.
Küllüoba Excavation Office. The bread marked with a black line was found under the threshold of an ancient house.
Torn and carbonized bread was found under the threshold of a back room of an ancient building built around 3300 BC.
“It is very valuable for us in terms of organic material,” said excavation director Murat Türkteki, a professor of archaeology at Bilecik University Seyh Edebali. “The words of bread… are more important to us than the discovery itself. In this regard, we are really happy.”
An examination of the bread revealed that it was made from emmer wheat (known as gernik or kavilca) and lentils. Turkteki and his team found that the bread was cooked more on the outside than on the inside, and that it was later intentionally burned as part of a ritual. Luckily for archaeologists, this helped preserve the bread for thousands of years.
“If it had not been burned,” he said, “it would not have reached our time.”
As Turkteki noted, only one other example of ancient bread has been found in Anatolia. Last year, archaeologists discovered a piece of 8,600-year-old bread in Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic site in south-central Turkey. The bread is believed to be the oldest known bread ever found. However, it was unbaked.
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