Mini-Seminar: A culinary riddle of chalcolithic Iraq revisited: Interweaving ancient textual and archaeological evidence with ethno-culinary insights to understand bevel-rim bowls

Abstract

A distinctive crude clay bowl is today taken as an important marker of the so-called “Uruk” cultural phenomenon which spread across Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey in the Late Chalcolithic period (c. 4500–2900 BC). This so-called bevel-rim bowl was also depicted in an iconic glyph in the earliest cuneiform writing, where it was clearly associated with barley products. In excavations, the bowls are often found in large numbers, sometimes neatly stacked in rows. Numerous different interpretations of their use and significance have been made by specialists drawing variously on archaeological context, formal ceramic analysis, iconography, cuneiform text evidence, and more recently, residue analysis.

This talk takes a fresh approach to the understudied early cuneiform evidence where the bowl is often mentioned. Informed by cross-cultural culinary traditions involving barley, I explore a new possibility for the culinary traditions represented by the bowls, one which may fit the textual and archaeological evidence combined.

Seminar speaker: Kathryn Kelley, an associate senior lecturer/assistant professor at the Department of Archaeology, Ancient History and Conservation; Assyriology. She focuses on Assyriology, economic history, Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, early writing, and Near Eastern archaeology.

Featured photo: Uruk-period bevelled rim bowl, c. 3400–3200 BCE, from Habuba Kabira South in Syria. Institute for Ancient Studies, University of Mainz, Germany (By Schauschgamuwa – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59380019)