Yale professor discusses cuisine in ancient Egypt

Salima Ikram, a visiting professor of Egyptology from Yale University, held a talk on Egyptian food and drink in Mudd Hall on Tuesday. Ikram studied Egyptology and Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College and earned her Master’s and Ph.D. from Cambridge University.

Her first book, Choice Cuts: Meat Production in Ancient Egypt, was about food in ancient Egypt, and she continues to specialize in that topic. At the talk, Ikram not only discussed what foods the Egyptians ate but also examined the behavior and culture of people around food.

Betsy Bryan, professor of Egyptian art and archaeology in the Near Eastern Studies Department, introduced Ikram.

Ikram said that food played a key role in Egyptian culture, just like it does in cultures today. According to Ikram, food can inform archaeologists about the lives of ordinary citizens of ancient Egyptian civilization.

“Everyone knows that the most important thing in the world apart from air to breathe is something to eat, otherwise you would have made your way to the afterlife at great speed,” she said. “To the ancient Egyptians, food was very important to mark any important event, whether it was your death, your birth, a God’s feast day or anything else for that matter.”

Information about ancient Egyptian food comes from a combination of artwork, animal remains and the vessels and tools used to prepare and store food. Ikram said that food is an interesting way to delve into one’s psyche.

“Although we may be happily multicultural by now, sometimes even now our comfort foods come from our childhood and upbringing,” she said.

Researchers also use artifacts to learn more about the Egyptians’ food choices.

“You have some textual evidence in the form of offering lists, sometimes in shopping lists, and these are sometimes telling you the ideal story. So we don’t know if it’s true, but we know what people would have liked to have eaten had they had the chance,” Ikram said.

Information can also be gained from human bodies and food remains themselves.

“By looking at physical anthropology on the body, one can learn a great deal about people’s diets as well as their origins,” she said. “We also have a lot of examples of ideal food in terms of mummified food offerings.”

She said that they often placed food in tombs to travel with the deceased to the afterlife, explaining that the quality and cuts of meat, especially from cows, were a signal of social status. They prized fat for its high energy content.

The Egyptian elite added sheep and goat to their meat diet. Since there was no refrigeration technology, large cows were slaughtered and eaten quickly by a group of people or were salted and preserved in jars.

Ikram said that Egyptians forbade eating pig at certain times of the year since pigs were a potential source of disease. Meanwhile, fishing was restricted at times so that the supply could be naturally replenished.

“People who were looking at this material found that there are images of pigs,” she said. “Certainly, pigs were eaten by the ancient Egyptians, and we do have that in the archaeological background.”

Peasants ate fuul, chick peas, lentil, mulukhiya and dates, stewed with spices and flavored with fat. Milk, butter and cheese were produced. Delicacies included hedgehog, the ancient equivalent of foie gras and blood pudding.

Nobles also hunted for wild animals. She said it gave them status to kill and eat a normally violent animal such as a hyena.

“Egyptians captured animals, and these would be fattened up like other domestic animals. They would be tended, force fed, even hyenas. They would go into hyena dens, corral the pups, rear them and eat them,” she said.

James Duguid, a graduate student in the Egyptian department at Catholic University, enjoyed hearing the speaker’s wide range of knowledge. Although he does not study Egyptian food, he says the talk gave him insight into ancient Egyptian culture.

“Food is a very integral part of culture, you can’t understand a culture without understanding the food. I don’t study food in particular, but she covered a wide range of information from Egypt. A lot of it was new to me,” he said.