Hmm. Then that sounds like large swaths of Africa are not civilizations today. Where might I find someone willing to put that down in a modern archaeological journal? After all, your definition ought to apply across the spectrum, right?

A culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Pottery_culture

A civilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Great_Zimbabwe & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_Empire

That's interesting, because I don't really think of a "culture" as smaller than a "civilization". I think of a culture being a necessary thread that runs through a civilization and without which there are no civilizations.

I'm sure those relatively voiceless cultures will appreciate your minimization of their contribution to the peoples of Africa.

As for mud huts, still commonly used in some places; there’s nothing particularly wrong with mud/earth construction if it works in your local climate.

> The kind of beets used in such an ancient recipe should not be different from the beets we use today, even in name. We read in Dictionary of Assyrian Botany (by Campbell Thompson, 1948) that in the ancient Mesopotamian region it was called ‘shumundar,’ it was as red as blood, and has a spinning-top shape (pp. 49, 51).

On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".

But anyhow, a lot of home cooking and traditional meals actually have a pretty long history.

[0] - https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2000/12/12/hamad-iraqi-b...

Again, trade routes.

Which, in turn, originated in Mexico and didn't make its way to Europe until the 1500s.

And in Turkish maize is called "Mısır", which comes from the country name Egypt (which is also Mısır in Turkish).

When Arabs conquered Egypt, they called it "Mishr" (مصر) which literally translates to "country" or "borderland". Maize was originally imported from the Americas, but because the trade route was through Egypt, Turkish people initially called it Egypt Wheat or Egypt Millet. In time, it is started to be called only Mısır/Egypt.

According to Kagi Translate, a term for maize that's specific to Egypt is "الذرة الشامية" (al-dhura ash-shāmiyyah) which could be directly translated to "Levantine sorghum". Can anyone with actual knowledge of Egytian Arabic confirm?

Also I had the idea that "Maize" might have come from "Mısır", but etymonline claims it comes from the native (Arawakan) name for the plant: mahiz.

One more fun fact is that potato is a direct translation of the French “Pomme de terre” (“sib zamani” or “ground apple”).

Back to the actual topic, this is a recipe that’s definitely worth trying. Persian shallots are actually more garlicky than oniony. A great addition to lamb dishes and yogurt.

A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples or, in GP’s context, stone fruit as “reference” points.

don't know if it makes the point or upends it, but the fruit in the Garden of Eden wasn't specifically an apple.

Melon, watermelon, pomelo, etc. The ancient Greeks themselves started that with the "golden apples of the Hesperides" a.k.a. oranges.

I guess any fruit people didn't know how to call was ... some kind of apple.

For tomatoes, interestingly, it has two common names that follow this pattern: 西紅柿, literally translated as "Western Red Persimmon", and 番茄, literally translated as "Foreign Eggplant".

Other produce examples include 番薯 (Foreign Yam) for sweet potato, 西瓜 (Western Melon) for watermelon, 洋蔥 (Foreign Onion) for bulb onion etc.

Though tomatoes come around long after that period...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup#Etymology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iYwUh1Hdho

For instance, watermelons come from Sudan/Egypt and thus arrived in China from the West long before Europeans visited.

Another example is The Journey to the West (Monkey King) novel which is also about travelling to India.

  > On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".

Surprisingly it was still imported in surprising quantities nearly 1000 years before it started to be cultivated. Not significant enough quantities for it to be a common staple, but still an interesting tidbit

So they set to digging irrigation trenches, and had a go at it, and maybe a couple of shitty harvests later they'd got the trick nailed.

And here we are.

In Sicily and Spain, rice cultivation began because Islamic expansion brought advanced irrigation and cultivation techniques. It's called the "Arab Agricultural Revolution"

This period is early enough that sheep weren't yet sheared.

Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.

No they don't.

In the summer their wool starts to grow out much thinner, like maybe a quarter as thick - it's really noticeable. This gives what's called a "rise", a gap between the sheep's skin and the thicker coarser wool. Once that's high enough to get shears (or these days, machine clippers which are like a big beard trimmer) into you can shear the fleece off.

If there's no rise you haven't a hope in hell of cutting it.

If there's a good rise it practically falls off.

If you leave them long enough or if the rise starts growing in too soon, they'll start "casting" where their wool just falls off in big chunks. This is actually quite dangerous for them because it's itchy and they roll on their backs to scratch, and get stuck upside down with their legs in the air and suffocate.

And you thought sheep farming was easy and fun ;-)

My friends have goats but they aren't farmers and they haven't got a clue how to care for them. The females sometimes are left with milk in their breasts after their young are weaned and one of my friends will get anxious about that and ask us to help her milk them. It's impossible. You can't milk a goat that doesn't want to be milked. If you push them too hard they lie down so you can't reach their teats and that's that unless you want to have three people lifting the goat up and another one trying to milk her while she squirms and kicks. I don't trust the milk either. Once in a while they succeed in milking a goat and when I tried the milk (after boiling it) it was sort of gritty, like it was mixed with sand. It was not impurities from the environment because I filtered it through a muslin so I think the animal may have had some infection like a mastitis or something that affected the milk's texture.

I bet farmers know exactly what to do about all that or probably they know how to get the animals used to milking when they're still young so that the won't resist it that much. I've watched videos of goats being milked and it looks almost effortless when a pump is used. The goats just line up in their feeding trays and then someone walks up to them from behind, pumps out their tits and moves to the next one, bish bash bosh. My friends don't even have a dedicated structure to feed the goats, we just throw hay for them on the ground so they end up fighting.

My friends really have no idea how to care for the goats, it's rather sad. The owner of the farm has even said he wants to get "wild" goats that don't need to be cared for. By that he means a herd of goats that have gone feral and roam the hills in a village nearby. He thinks because nobody actively cares for them and the herd persists that must mean the goats are somehow self-sufficient. I think that's a big misunderstanding. Domesticated animals need a lot of care one way or another.

I think I'd prefer to have sheep though, if I had animals. Sheep look much nicer than goats.

A neighbour of mine had a goat that we thought had some terrible thing happen because she was choking and gagging and frothing at the mouth like some cartoon rabid animal. Nope, far simpler. She'd eaten a grey lycra-and-elastic sports bra off the washing line, got a bra strap hooked over her tongue, and the rest of the bra down her throat. Hooked the strap with my finger, pulled it out in one quick deft rather unpleasantly squelchy motion, and ten seconds later you'd never have thought there had been anything wrong with her.

The bra went in the bin.

Bloody goats.

Your friends either need to learn how to care for goats - if only there was some world-wide repository of knowledge with books and videos and stuff! - or give them a good home somewhere else. They're probably hard to milk because as you say they're not used to being handled, and it may be too late to do that by now. If that's the case, you may never be able to milk them no matter how you handle them, and maybe you can breed from them, or maybe you can give them a nice new home, cosy and fragrant, along with some onion, garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, and chilli, with a kilo or so of spinach too.

As an aside, you probably want to get yourself a copy of "Self-Sufficiency" by John Seymour, and have a read of that.

XD My friend got her skirt munched. While wearing it.

I totally think it's like you say: the goats have never learned to be milked and now they'll never learned. The new generation might, but who's going to teach them? Not me because I'm only there half the year (when it's hot and I don't want to move).

>> As an aside, you probably want to get yourself a copy of "Self-Sufficiency" by John Seymour, and have a read of that.

Thanks. I'll have a look.

And in nature sheep drop their coats without shearing.

Domesticated sheep that get lost for a while don't magically learn how to shed their coat, yes.

There are some breeds that don't, and obviously due to random genetics you'll get individuals that don't.

Sheep that don't cast their fleeces are damn near impossible to shear and are mostly kept for meat. Likewise, sheep that don't have much of a "rise" (see my other comment) and are difficult to shear quite often, uh, don't have a particularly long career, as it were.

And of course, the only truly stockproof sheep enclosure is a deep freeze.

The strange ingredients are garum [2] and asafoetida [3]. The former is just a fish sauce, so that's not hard to substitute, but you have to find asafoetida on the Internet or at an Indian food store.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asafoetida

(Un)related: onions and garlic are pretty close to each other. Chicago is named after šikaakwa, [2] the native word for the local Allium that's alternately called "wild onion" or "wild garlic" in English [3]. You can hear a similar word for onion in a different Algonquin language, Ojibwe [4].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism#Ahimsa_in_practice:_Ja...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago#Etymology_and_nickname...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_tricoccum

4. https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/main-entry/zhigaagawanzh-na

This guy is a treasure.

the parthian chicken was stupid easy and tasty

I've also made the Babylonian stew from this recipe, and it's rich and hearty. It's easy to see how this would knock the...sandals off of ancient people.

Other ancient recipes...let's just say that humans have very much not held the same tastes over the eons. Some recipes were incongruent or sweet and savory in a strange way, or simply a flex about how many spices you had access to and cold throw in a dish, not about what it really tasted like. YMMV.

The book, btw, is kind of breezy in style and 'he of many LLs in his name' (Lālu-mullālu in Akkadian as suggested by my friendly AI) uses a lot of contemporary pop (nerdy) references to carry the narrative, yet very engaging and am learning a lot about this fabled city (and civilization).

It sets certain records straight ...

I’m not sure there’s anywhere in Europe where it would be as unusual as it is in the US (where it definitely does seem to be seen as kinda vaguely exotic.)

But, honestly, nothing beats a nice pilafi with lamb, with garlic wedges and slowly cooked until the meat falls off the bone.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopota...

> "Like most premodern cooking manuals, the Babylonian recipes rarely list the quantities of each ingredient, and so basic experimentation is needed to determine viable proportions for the assembly of a dough or the salting of a stew. The “experimental” approach likewise offers answers to questions that can only be addressed through trial and error. For example, many of the identifications of herbs proposed by modern scholars are based mainly on medical compendia, and some of the plants thus identified can produce an extremely bitter or perhaps pungent taste when used in food."

Here's the recipes as literally translated (I used tesseract to OCR):

> "Unwinding. Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat. (You add) kurrat, cilantro, salt as desired, leek, garlic. You pound up dried sourdough, you sift (it) and you scatter (it) over the pot before removing it."

> "Stew of lamb. Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. [You crush] (and add) leek and garlic."

> "Elamite broth. Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat. Dill, kurrat, cilantro, leek, and garlic bound with blood, a corresponding amount of sour milk, and (more) garlic. The (original) name (of this dish) is Zukanda."

> "Tuh’u. Leg meat is used. You prepare water. You add fat. You sear. You fold in salt, beer, onion, arugula, cilantro, Persian shallot, cumin, and red’ beet, and [you crush] leek and garlic. You sprinkle coriander on top. [You add] kurrat and fresh cilantro."

So the quantity of salt is not specified in the original recipe, therefore it could be the same as any present cook would choose.

It's quite expensive though, but it does look amazing.

He basically covers a different historic dish every week ranging from the oldest recorded dishes to cafeteria food from 1990; or what they served on the Titanic, etc.

It's a great channel, and covers history well.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopota...

PS don’t jump into the whole animal cruelty spiel. I’m aware and I agree, it’s just that I don’t care. Vegetarian food, aside from maybe the narrow slice with how the Indians prepare it, is completely unsatisfying and I’m OK with animals suffering as long as I can continue to have meat because it’s just so delicious. That being said, I would eagerly switch to lab grown meat if they can do it correctly.

Vegan food on the other hand is brain dead food. I mean that literally and metaphorically. Anecdotally every vegan I’ve met seems nutritionally deficient and slow. They also go out of their way to eat food aping meat and that stuff turns out to be the most chemically processed and unhealthy stuff you could possibly imagine.

Even people who like steak grind some plant on it to make it taste good (pepper). Basically all interesting flavours come from plants. Meat just tastes of meat.

By the way, I’m sorry if this is all coming off pretty sharp, but I have what I think is a legitimate hate of veganism. I think it’s on par with the “health at every size” nonsense that people are trying to do where they are trying to normalize obesity. At least with them with GLP-1 they have found they don’t need to carry on with their delusion anymore, but vegans are still going strong.

> I’ll eat vegetables all day but they are not nutritious enough and “satisfying” enough to complete the meal.

You have some weird obsession with meat. I'm not vegan nor vegetarian but eat at least half my meals without meat. There are plenty of other sources of proteins and flavour comes from all over. Vegetables absolutely are the bigger source of flavour. Onions, hot peppers, various dried spices, garlics. Food would be bland as shit without vegetables.

And all of the plants are native to that area, or close enough that people who had been farming for a few thousand years at that point would have brought them from neighboring lands to use.

While some have to be cultivated, a lot these herbs just grow as weeds in the Mediterranean area.

When I read that on his wikipedia page I thought "is that all?" I know I'm probably missing a bunch of other considerations, but geez, the 500th spot on the 2024 Forbes World's Billionaires list was shared by multiple individuals worth approximately $5.8B.