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The Minoan Palace at Knossos
Model granary from Middle
Kingdon Egypt circa 1938-1759 B.C.
The Empire of Alexander the
Great (click on map for full size)
Alexander's Campaigns (click
on map for full size)
The Empire of Canaan in 1200 B.C.
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THE
DAWN OF HISTORY
(THE
FIRST 2 MILLION YEARS)
2,000,000 TO 12,000 B.C.
(Continued)
Cinnamon and cassia came from Somalia and the Greeks
and later Romans imported pepper, cassia, cinnamon and ginger whilst
growing caraway, cardamom, anise, mustard and fennel. Such was the
mystery surrounding spices and the importance placed upon them that
elaborate stories were made up to disguise their origins, many of
these stories being reported by Herodotus
around 450 B.C.
By 2,000 BC Crete was
the centre of a remarkable civilisation, often called Minoan,
which reached its zenith in 1,600 BC when 80,000 people lived in the
capital, Knossos. Cheese was well known in Egypt by 2,300 BC and by
1200 B.C. 40 kinds of breads and pastries were available to the upper
class. Ice cream was invented in China in around 2,000 BC as a soft
milk and rice concoction.
In India, the
thriving civilisation in the Indus Valley was soon to be destroyed by
floods and tectonic shifts (1750 BC), to be replaced by the Aryans
from Russia and Turkistan, invading over the Hindu Kush. The
main tribe, the Bharatra took 500
years to pass Delhi. But the caste system took hold and meat eating
was gradually given up, due to the value placed on cattle by the
Aryans and to lessons learned in the steaming hot, southern climate.
The Vedas provide most of the information on Indian
history in this time with Rig Veda being written around 1000 B.C.
followed by the Sama, Yajur and Atharva vedas and the medical and
method of living work the Ayurveda,
whose teachings continue today. Such was the influence of Ayurvedic
teaching, which included what, when and how to eat, that the texts
were translated into Greek by Cridos in 300 B.C. and Tibetan and
Chinese by AD 300.
Mahavira
was born in the sixth centry B.C. and became an ascetic at the age of
30 in 510 B.C. to found Jainism, teaching an extreme form of ‘ahimsa’
the non harming of all life. More influencial, however, was the
enlightenment of Siddhartha Gautama
- Buddha whose less radical teachings were adopted by Ashoka
(269-232 B.C.) who became the first Buddhist Emperor in India and
forbad the killing of all animals as a consequence. Eating habits
were not universal throughout the sub-continent, however, as the
Kashmir Brahmins continued to pride themselves on the mutton and
those in Bengal on their fish.
In China around 2,000
BC, there was a very civilised society in the North and Manchuria and
by the Shang Dynasty, (1,776 BC), food preparation and service was
being ritualised and regulated to a complex formula with ale very
important in the process.
At this time, Abraham
lived in Ur on the Tigris and became the founder of Judaism, Islam
and Christianity, as each can trace their origins back to him. By
1,200 BC the Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon had become great traders
and by 1,000 BC had invented the phonetic alphabet. By 1,400 BC the
nomadic Hebrews had split into two factions, with some settling in
Palestine with the Hittites and others settling in Egypt, from where,
1,262 BC, they were eventually repatriated after the Exodus led by Moses,
who was a sanitary expert and chief lawgiver by profession, and who
created most of the Jewish food codes.
From 5000 B.C. onwards the original crops of emmer,
barley and einkorn were being grown in Greece, especially Crete, plus
bread, wheat, lentils and beans plus sheep and goats. Similar
developments occured a little later in the Mediterranean Basin and
from the Middle Danube to the Rhine.
In 1200 B.C. the empire of Crete had broken up and
people wandered around the Eastern Mediterranean and set up cities in
Greece and Asia Minor. One group may have been the Etruscans
who settled in Umbria in Italy from Southern Anatolia. The Romans did
not finally drive them out until 509 B.C., nineteen years before Marathon.
In South America,
pepper, bottle-gourd, pumpkin, common bean(Oaxaca), squash(Tehuaca),
plants indigenous to the area and not introduced from Asia, were
grown. Maize was cultivated in Peru 1900 - 1600 B.C. and had spread
as far as Colorado by 1000 B.C.
The Greeks
The fabled Troy was
founded by Neolithic settlers from Kum Tepe by the Dardanelles in
3600 B.C. The Trojan Wars began in 1250 B.C. and Troy finally fell in
1180 B.C. to the Achaeans, (called
Greeks by the Italians), who were great eaters, tellers of tales and
adventurers. Soon they were replaced by the Dorians from the North,
but soon after the Greek civilisation stretched from Asia Minor to
Crimea and Byzantium. The Greeks brought culinary sophistication to
many regions and even the King of Sidon had a famous Greek cook,
called Cadmos.
The Greeks colonized
Provence in 600 B.C. and Catalonia in 550 B.C. as well as Calabria to
Naples in Italy, as well as parts of Sicily and the Black Sea.
The Greek love of bread dates back to Minoan Crete
3000 - 1100 B.C. and the first usable bread oven was invented at the
time of Pericles in 500 B.C. During the time of Augustus in Rome in
30 B.C. there were as many as 329 bakeries in Rome all run by Greeks.
The bread was originally based on olive oil as butter was considered
the food of barbarians with fat or butter not being added until the
Middle Ages.
The fabulous civilization based around Knossos
declined between 1400 - 1375 B.C. and the Mycenae became the leaders
of the Greeks. Meze was founded by Greeks around 300 B.C. named from
the Turkish or Arab word describing nibbling when talking as was
common amongst politicians.
The first Olympiad
was held in 776 BC at the height of Greek civilisation, but the seeds
of the successor were already being sown,. At this time olive oil was
the source of artificial light, having been passed on to the Greeks
by the Phoenicians. Olive oil was supposed to have been discovered by
Isis, the wife of Osiris, who was said to have taught the Egyptians
how to cultivate the trees and produce the oil.
By 600 BC civilisation in China
had reached an advanced level. Fire, building, farming, medicine and
script had supposedly been discovered during the reign of The Three
Sovereigns in around 2,850 BC, but now the Chinese had cotton, silk,
beans, square buckets, hatchets and coloured robes. Normal meals were
millet or rice plus cucumber, pumpkins, peaches, apricots, cherries,
chestnuts and plums flavoured by onions, mustard and other herbs.
By 500 B.C. in the time of Pericles, Aeschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides, Athens was the centre of learning with
cooking schools and dining clubs. When the great library of
Alexandria was burned by Caliph Omar I destroying 700,000 scrolls,
several were valuable ancient Greek cookery books.
Eating in Greece reached great heights during this
period and around 500 BC one of the world’s first cook books was
written by Hesiod of the Epicureans
and Life of Luxury by Archestrateus
in 400 B.C.. Breakfast tended to be bread and wine, followed by a
light lunch and an evening meal of eggs, fish, cheese, vegetables
and,, very occasionally, meat, with garlic and onion., olive oil and
honey. Fruit was always eaten at the end of meals, along with rich
wines diluted with water. Athens at the time was excellent for olives
and vines. Marseilles and Southern Italy were known as Great Greece
at this time.
The
Persians and Macedonians
Cyrus of Persia
conquered Lydia in 546 BC, only to be beaten back at Marathon. Xerxes
tried again in 480BC, only to be beaten back by the Greek army under
Sparta. By 467 BC, all the Aegean was controlled by the Greek
Confederacy. Athens tried for the Nile Delta in 448 BC, then Sicily
and Great Greece in 415 BC, only to be beaten at Syracuse.
All this campaigning meant that the core Greek cuisine
was being influenced by Persia, Egypt and other parts of Europe and
was influencing them in turn. In 400 BC Hippocrates,
the father of modern medicine, expounded his theory, ‘Let
food be your medicine and medicine your food.’
In 359 BC, Philip
became king of Macedonia. He had been educated in Greece and
gradually controlled the Northern Aegean. Before he could invade
Persia he was murdered and the next world force, his son, Alexander
the Great, came to power in 336 BC.
Alexander quickly
subdued Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt,
then routed the last of the Persians near Nineveh in 333BC. He went
on to conquer Bactria, Turkistan and the Punjab between 330-324 BC
and, at the height of his glory, died in 323 BC, having influenced
much of the known world.
Elsewhere in the world two deaths had great influence
on the development of civilization in those areas and beyond ; Buddha
in 489 B.C. and Confucius in 479 B.C.
Rice was introduced to Japan from China in 300 B.C. to
be used as a form of tribute and taxation, uses which were maintained
until the early twentieth century.
The
Romans
The vacuum was filled by the growth of Rome, which had
been founded in 700-800 BC. Rome was founded by Romulus, a descendant
of the Trojan Aeneas in 753 B.C. according to legend (probably even
earlier) but was taken over by the Etruscans in 616 B.C.. After the
Romans recaptured the city in 509 B.C. they had continual battles
with the Etruscans until 390 B.C. and then with the Gallic forces
attacking from the Milan area. A period of internal expansion then
took place and by 326 B.C. they had captured Naples.
Conquests were started in 264 BC and they eventually
defeated Hannibal of Carthage, a
formidable foe, in 202 BC, then Spain, Sicily, North Africa, Greece,
Macedonia, and all of the Mediterranean. Corinth was sacked by Rome
in 146 B.C. and Greece became the Eastern Roman Empire then the
Byzantine Empire until 395 A.D. The greatest Greek influence in the
kitchen was when they were brought back home to Rome as house slaves.
For the first time, the mistress of the house deserted her kitchen
and gave it over to a Greek slave-chef who was well-versed in all
Greek and Sicilian cookery. Dining refinement continued and most
meals, by now, were served on pottery. Food was equally important in
China, where it was central to family events and social transactions
and no business deal was complete without a meal.
Despite battle reversals, Greece continued to refine
its cultural activities. Euthydemus
wrote his, ‘On Vegetables’ in 150BC, but when the
Romans sacked Corinth in 146 BC, and went on to control Greece until
395 AD, the influence of the Greek kitchen spread far and wide. Greek
cooks were mainly responsible for introducing a diversity of breads
to Rome. Plato wrote with disgust about the gluttony of the Sicilian
Greeks and Petronius described huge, lavish, Roman feasts.
And so, the main planks of modern culinary activity
were laid even before Jesus Christ had appeared, to become such an
influence on the world stage. Religion had always had some influence
on food usage, with ceremonial and dietary requirements, but with
little overall effect. Even the reverence of all animal life by
Hindus, Buddhists and Jains only underlined a trend recognised by the
invading Aryans centuries before.
Islam was soon to
follow the Jews in banning pork and shellfish, for very sound reasons
and, more recently, Seventh Day Adventists banned the eating of meat.
Although neither created any of the world’s great
cuisines or supplies of food produce, the two great influences of
pre-history in terms of the spread of food information and products
were firstly the Phoenicians and then Alexander the Great.
The Greeks supplied
the great melting pot where many roads from around the world met and
they in turn greatly influenced the Romans
who were destined to conquer much of the world. It was Rome and later
the Crusades that provided the
greatest influences on the cuisines of the world in the early
centuries of the last two millennia.
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