Ancient bread rises again as Turkiye unearths, then recreates 5,000-year-old loaf
ESKISEHIR, TURKIYE (AFP)In the early Bronze Age, a piece of bread was buried beneath the threshold of a newly built house in central Turkiye.Now, more than 5,000 years later, archaeologists have unearthed it, and helped a local bakery to recreate the recipe -- with customers lining up to buy it.Round and flat like a pancake, 12 centimetres in diameter, the bread was discovered during excavations at Kulluoba, a site near the central Anatolian city of Eskisehir."This is the oldest baked bread to have come to light during an excavation, and it has largely been able to preserve its shape," said Murat Turkteki, archaeologist and director of the excavation."Bread is a rare find during an excavation. Usually, you only find crumbs," he told AFP."But here, it was preserved because it had been burnt and buried," he said.The bread was charred and buried under the entrance of a dwelling built around 3,300 BC.A piece had been torn off, before the bread was burnt, then buried when the house was built.Unearthed in September 2024, the charred bread has been on display at the Eskisehir Archaeological Museum since Wednesday."We were very moved by this discovery. Talking to our excavation director, I wondered if we could reproduce this bread," said the city's mayor, Ayse Unluce.Analyses showed that the bread was made with coarsely ground emmer flour, an ancient variety of wheat, and lentil seeds, with the leaf of an as yet undetermined plant used as yeast.Ancient emmer seeds no longer exist in Turkiye.To get as close as possible to the original recipe, the municipality, after analysing the ancient bread, decided to use Kavilca wheat, a variety that is close to ancient emmer, as well as bulgur and lentils.
At the Halk Ekmek bakery, promoted by the municipality to offer low-cost bread, employees have been shaping 300 loaves of Kulluoba by hand every day.
"The combination of ancestral wheat flour, lentils and bulgur results in a rich, satiating, low-gluten, preservative-free bread," said Serap Guler, the bakery's manager.The first Kulluoba loaves, marketed as 300-gramme cakes that cost around $1.28, sold out within hours.
The rediscovery of the bread has sparked interest in the cultivation of ancient wheats better adapted to drought. The mayor wants to revive the cultivation of Kavilca wheat in the region, which is resistant to drought and disease.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Etihad
4 days ago
- Al Etihad
AI helps Latin scholars decipher ancient Roman texts
24 July 2025 00:05 PARIS (AFP)Around 1,500 Latin inscriptions are discovered every year, offering an invaluable view into the daily life of ancient Romans, and posing a daunting challenge for the historians tasked with interpreting a new artificial intelligence tool, partly developed by Google researchers, can now help Latin scholars piece together these puzzles from the past, according to a study published on in Latin were commonplace across the Roman world, from laying out the decrees of emperors to graffiti on the city streets. One mosaic outside a home in the ancient city of Pompeii even warns: "Beware of the dog".These inscriptions are "so precious to historians because they offer first-hand evidence of ancient thought, language, society and history", said study co-author Yannis Assael, a researcher at Google's AI lab DeepMind."What makes them unique is that they are written by the ancient people themselves across all social classes on any subject. It's not just history written by the elite," Assael, who co-designed the AI model, told a press these texts have often been damaged over the millennia."We usually don't know where and when they were written," Assael the researchers created a generative neural network, which is an AI tool that can be trained to identify complex relationships between types of named their model Aeneas, after the Trojan was trained on data about the dates, locations and meanings of Latin transcriptions from an empire that spanned five million square kilometres over two Sommerschield, an epigrapher at the University of Nottingham who co-designed the AI model, said that "studying history through inscriptions is like solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle"."You can't solve the puzzle with a single isolated piece, even though you know information like its colour or its shape," she explained."To solve the puzzle, you need to use that information to find the pieces that connect to it." Tested on Augustus This can be a huge job. Latin scholars have to compare inscriptions against "potentially hundreds of parallels", a task which "demands extraordinary erudition" and "laborious manual searches" through massive library and museum collections, the study in the journal Nature researchers trained their model on 176,861 inscriptions -- worth up to 16 million characters -- five percent of which contained can now estimate the location of an inscription among the 62 Roman provinces, offer a decade when it was produced and even guess what missing sections might have contained, they test their model, the team asked Aeneas to analyse a famous inscription called "Res Gestae Divi Augusti", in which Rome's first emperor Augustus detailed his still rages between historians about when exactly the text was the text is riddled with exaggerations, irrelevant dates and erroneous geographical references, the researchers said that Aeneas was able to use subtle clues such as archaic spelling to land on two possible dates -- the two being debated between than 20 historians who tried out the model found it provided a useful starting point in 90 percent of cases, according to best results came when historians used the AI model together with their skills as researchers, rather than relying solely on one or the other, the study said."Since their breakthrough, generative neural networks have seemed at odds with educational goals, with fears that relying on AI hinders critical thinking rather than enhances knowledge," said study co-author Robbe Wulgaert, a Belgian AI researcher. "By developing Aeneas, we demonstrate how this technology can meaningfully support the humanities by addressing concrete challenges historians face."
Al Etihad
6 days ago
- Al Etihad
Humans beat AI gold-level score at top maths contest
22 July 2025 13:28 Sydney (AFP)Humans beat generative AI models made by Google and OpenAI at a top international mathematics competition, despite the programmes reaching gold-level scores for the first model scored full marks -- unlike five young people at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a prestigious annual competition where participants must be under 20 years said on Monday that an advanced version of its Gemini chatbot had solved five out of the six maths problems set at the IMO, held in Australia's Queensland this month."We can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much-desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points -- a gold medal score," the US tech giant cited IMO president Gregor Dolinar as saying."Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise and most of them easy to follow."Around 10% of human contestants won gold-level medals, and five received perfect scores of 42 ChatGPT maker OpenAI said that its experimental reasoning model had scored a gold-level 35 points on the result "achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI" at "the world's most prestigious math competition", OpenAI researcher Alexander Wei wrote on social media."We evaluated our models on the 2025 IMO problems under the same rules as human contestants," he said."For each problem, three former IMO medalists independently graded the model's submitted proof."Google achieved a silver-medal score at last year's IMO in the British city of Bath, solving four of the six took two to three days of computation -- far longer than this year, when its Gemini model solved the problems within the 4.5-hour time limit, it IMO said tech companies had "privately tested closed-source AI models on this year's problems", the same ones faced by 641 competing students from 112 countries."It is very exciting to see progress in the mathematical capabilities of AI models," said IMO president Dolinar. Contest organisers could not verify how much computing power had been used by the AI models or whether there had been human involvement, he cautioned.
The National
18-07-2025
- The National
Plant-based foods were all the rage in the ancient eastern Gulf, researchers reveal
Diets thousands of years ago were more varied than the archaeological record suggests, with new research finding people consumed numerous plant-based foods. Chemical analysis of pottery from south-east Arabia in the Bronze Age used cutting-edge techniques to cast new light on an ancient peoples previously thought to have had a diet based almost entirely on meat and dairy. Investigations had found animal-based products on such pottery, leading to the previous conclusion about diet, but a new inquiry has changed that perspective after it found evidence of plant-based products. In the study published in PLOS One, researchers analysed the lipid fat, oil and wax content of 179 pottery items from eight inland and coastal sites in the UAE and Oman. Among these were Hili 8 and Hili North Tomb A, part of a complex of Bronze Age sites in Al Ain. What does the study show? The first author of the new study, Dr Akshyeta Suryanarayan of the University of Cambridge, said one the most widely accepted components of Middle East culture 4,000 years ago was the growth of oasis agriculture and more sedentary lifestyles. 'Lipid residue analysis of early locally made pottery consistently shows fats derived from animal-based products, such as the meat of goats, sheep, cattle or wild deer and camels – and dairy products,' she told The National. 'This indicates that animal husbandry and pastoral practices formed a major part of everyday subsistence, even while agriculture was being adopted in the region.' The study indicates that the consumption of animal products was far from the full story, however, as it suggests communities relied on a wide range of plants, too. Plant-derived residues were found in fewer vessels but their presence is significant, according to Dr Suryanarayan. 'Due to their lower lipid content and the inherent difficulty in detecting such compounds using current analytical techniques, the recovery of plant markers – alongside those from cereals and date palm products – suggests a broader spectrum of plant use than previously assumed,' she said. 'This hints at more varied and complex dietary practices than are typically visible in the archaeological record.' Changing perspectives In the paper, the researchers suggested their lipid analysis indicates Bronze Age communities in the region were using types of plants that did not show up in the 'macrobotanical record', meaning they left no visible trace. As a result, the work highlights the use of a wider range of plants than archaeologists would otherwise detect. 'It is plausible that the gathering of fruits, seeds, shoots, leaves and tubers from numerous wild species along with cereal consumption would have been a part of food practices,' the researchers wrote. Previous work has shown that cereals, legumes and date palms were consumed in Middle Eastern settlements in the early Bronze Age. Fats from cereals are rarely preserved and the researchers said they could not be confident of either their presence or absence from the vessels looked at in the current study. The researchers said it was difficult to know if the pottery vessels were used as containers for substances traded with other societies, but their work does suggest the pottery may have been reused over extended periods. Dr Suryanarayan said the study reaffirmed that pottery vessels 'were fundamentally culinary tools and containers' used to store, transport, alter and prolong the life of perishable produce. She added that archaeologists had been analysing lipid residues since the 1990s but this approach became more widely used in the past decade. 'Recent methodological advancements have significantly enhanced the ability to extract and identify highly degraded biomolecules from archaeological ceramics,' she said. 'These innovations now permit the successful analysis of residues even in regions with poor organic preservation due to harsh environmental conditions.' Pottery production is first documented in the UAE and Oman from the early third millennium BCE. The latest study looked at locally made and imported pottery, including fine red Omani vessels and black-slipped jars – tall, pear-shaped vessels with a black coating – from the Indus Civilisation. Titled Identifying pastoral and plant products in local and imported pottery in Early Bronze Age south-eastern Arabia, the paper was published last month and was co-written by researchers in the UAE, Oman, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France and Poland. Thanks to funding from the Zayed National Museum, the research will continue, with the next phase set to look at material on pottery from coastal sites.
