Ancient civilizations are those up to and including the classical cultures of Greece and Rome. Cheese was already an important food in the early civilizations of western Asia and southern Europe, known from archaeology and frequently mentioned in literature, although no specialist writings on cheese survive from this early period. Unluckily, older texts give minimal detail on specific types of cheese. The challenge for the food historian is to reimagine the flavor of ancient cheeses on the basis of tantalizingly incomplete information.
Cheese was already valued at the dawn of civilization, in early Egypt and Sumer, although the evidence takes entirely different forms in the two cases. In Sumer we find cheese as a central feature in mythology and in the urban economy. In Egypt, thanks to the remarkable possibilities for the preservation of archaeological remains offered by the Egyptian climate, we find cheese itself, five thousand years old.
Archaic Egypt, ca. 3100 to 2900 b.c.e.
One archaeological find of ancient cheese was made by W. B. Emery in 1937 in one of the second dynasty tombs (soon after 3000 b.c.e.) in the necropolis of Saqqāra near the ancient Egyptian capital city, Memphis. This tomb, fortunately undisturbed by grave robbers, contained the body of an unnamed woman in her sixties and the goods buried with her for her use in the next life, including, astonishingly, a generous meal of fourteen dishes, neatly set out in plates and bowls, and so well preserved that all the main ingredients could be identified.
Alongside soup, meat, fish, fowl, cakes, and cooked fruit—all accompanied by a large jar of wine—there was a loaf of emmer bread and three small pots containing what were soon identified as little cheeses. Examination of the woman’s remains showed that in real life she would not have been able to enjoy much of this food: in her youth she had suffered some serious trauma that had almost destroyed the left side of her mouth. Soup, soft cheese, and cooked fruit, therefore, might well have represented her usual daily fare. Her mourners, confident that in the afterlife she would be healed, had provided much more.
Another comparable find is of slightly earlier date. In a tomb connected with the pharaoh Hor-Aha, usually listed as the second king of the First Dynasty (about 3100 b.c.e.), were two jars containing a fatty substance that the first excavators could not identify, with inscriptions that were read as “rwt of the north” and “rwt of the south.” Soon afterward scientists set to work on it and pronounced it to be cheese.
The monarchs of the First Dynasty, and Hor-Aha in particular, are credited with having united Egypt (the “two lands,” as the country was called for some time afterward). Presenting cheese from both north and south to a deceased dignitary of this exact period would make perfect political sense. Setting the political history aside, we have a hint that there were at least two kinds of cheese worth distinguishing by their geographical origin in Egypt in 3100 b.c.e. We have not only the earliest surviving cheese, but also, perhaps, the earliest recorded appellations.
The practice of cattle herding may perhaps have reached Egypt from the west, from the Sahara, which had until about this time been much less arid than it later became. Rock paintings of the central Sahara, two thousand years earlier than the Egyptian First Dynasty, already depict cattle keeping and milking, but in these paintings there is no sign of cheese-making.
Identifying these objects as cheeses was all the more difficult because “rwt” is a doubtful reading; in any case it is an unknown word, the ancient Egyptian term for cheese being otherwise unrecorded. It is quite different with the Sumerian civilization, which flourished in southern Iraq during the third millennium b.c.e. Sumerian literature, written in a language unrelated to any modern tongue, has been gradually deciphered in recent years with the help of bilingual texts and glossaries in Akkadian, the Semitic language spoken at a later period in northern and central Iraq. The Sumerian word for cheese, ga-har, is found in literature from the late third millennium b.c.e.
Sumer, ca. 3000 to 2500 b.c.e.
In Sumer, cheese from cow’s, goat’s, and sheep’s milk was known. A distinction, important to shepherds ever since, was already being made between small cheeses, likely to be eaten when fresh; and large cheeses carefully made for longer maturing. Sumerian-Akkadian glossaries contain lists of foods, including “white cheese,” “fresh cheese,” “rich cheese,” “sharp cheese,” and various flavors making up a total of twenty distinct cheeses, which presumably had a real identity in the food supply of Sumerian cities in the late third millennium.
Cheese is especially linked with the love goddess Inanna in Sumerian records because cheese was received as tribute and was redistributed by Inanna’s great temple in Uruk. However, we find cheese in varied contexts in Sumerian literature. Milk and cheese were the produce of the shepherd god Dumuzi. He was to be Inanna’s consort, but even in his boyhood he had been a shepherd and cheesemaker, according to the mythological poem translated by Thorkild Jacobsen under the title “Lad in the Desert.”
Milk and cheese were his wealth, with which he defeated his rival, the farmer god Enkimdu. Milk, cream, and cheese are metaphors for sexual pleasures in the erotic poetry that describes the lovemaking of Dumuzi and Inanna. Cheese is the rich food that the sick Lugalbanda is too weak to digest in the “Epic of Lugalbanda.”
Later Near Eastern Civilizations, ca. 2500 to 1250 b.c.e.
Sumerian culture is the basis of much that is written in Akkadian, the language of Babylon and Assyria. In Akkadian the basic word for cheese was eqīdum, and there were several more names for cheeses in addition to the eighteen or twenty identified from the Sumerian glossary; some of the names were borrowed from neighboring languages both west and east.
Nagahu was maybe the name for a smelly cheese, because the word was also used as an insult; kabu, literally “dung,” when used as a cheese name might (like French crottin) allude to the shape rather than the smell. It appears from glossaries that there were cheeses flavored with wine, dates, and various herbs: how the flavor was added is not known. A few cookery recipes survive in Akkadian, and they confirm that cheese was used as a culinary ingredient. We even know the Akkadian word for rennet, emsu.
In Hittite writings, from central Anatolia in the mid-second millennium b.c.e., we find that a cheese could be large or small; it could be huelpi (fresh), damaššanzi (pressed), paršān (broken, crumbled), iškallan (torn), hašhaššan (perhaps “scraped”). It could be “dry” and “old”; it could be “incised” (perhaps marked to show its origin); there was even “aged soldier cheese,” which might or might not have been better than it sounds. See military rationing. Such adjectives are interesting less for what they say than for the oppositions they imply: cheese was, by this time, evaluated on several scales. It was doled out in purpurruš (balls) or in “loaves” (presumably a difference between small and large whole cheeses) that might be broken into paršulli (chunks) like those from a wheel of Parmesan. A fight with cheeses formed part of the dramatic or athletic entertainment at a certain Hittite religious festival.
As H. A. Hoffner writes, “since the cheeses could hardly be the opponents, we must understand that [they] were wielded like weapons.” Finally, the records of the Hittite empire’s Mediterranean emporium, Ugarit, tell us that cheese, among other supplies, was exported southward from there to the Canaanite city of Ashdod: the first historical record of long distance trade in cheese.
Westward, beyond Hittite borders, the Minoan civilization was flourishing in Crete and the Greek islands. In the 1860s a French geologist, Ferdinand Fouqué, while investigating the Santorini volcano, happened on the remains of two ancient Minoan settlements buried under ash by the catastrophic eruption of 1627 b.c.e.: one at Akrotiri, now famous; the other on the tiny island of Therasia, now forgotten. Among the stored foods buried when this little town was overwhelmed, Fouqué’s helpers found in a storage jar “une matière pâteuse” (a paste-like substance), which they decided must have been cheese. Not far away were the skeletons of three goats, trapped in their shed by the volcanic ash.
Weakened by this and other disasters, Minoan civilization gave way to Mycenaean, based on the Greek mainland. Although there is no known Mycenaean literature, an ancient form of Greek was employed in Linear B cuneiform tablets to record food and other stores in the Mycenaean palaces at Knossos and elsewhere. In these laconic accounts cheese is measured in units—whole cheeses—and the standard Mycenaean cheese was not so very small if we reflect that on one such tablet, a list of requisites for feasting from “Nestor’s palace” at Pylos, in southeastern Greece, ten cheeses are listed alongside an amount calculated at 23 gallons (86 liters) of wine.
Classical Greece and Rome, ca. 750 b.c.e. to 450 c.e.
From Greek and Roman sources we have plentiful and varied information on the place of cheese among foods. Cheese with bread and green vegetables, alongside wine or water, constituted an adequate simple meal for poorer people, travelers, and huntsmen. Cheese on its own was a snack—and cheese and nuts were served by winemakers at tastings to mask the poor quality of their wine. In more elaborate meals cheese could be a dessert, to be eaten with honey and bread while one was drinking wine after dinner. One might guess that the most suitable to eat with honey would be a fresh cheese, though any cheese kept in brine (as ancient cheeses often were), and washed before serving, is likely to be good with honey.
At some meals goat’s milk or sheep’s milk cheese was fried in slices to be served as a starter. Cheese was sometimes added to bread dough before baking. It was also a culinary ingredient. Ancient chefs disputed whether cheese should or should not be used as a topping when grilling fish; the answer, predictably, was that it depended on the fish, but cheese is certainly included in the very oldest surviving Greek recipe, dated to ca. 400 b.c.e., for preparing the ribbon-like fish cépole, and was specially recommended with ray or skate. Cheese is listed as a constituent of some famous ancient dishes, such as kandaulos, typical of the rich cuisine of ancient Lydia in western Asia Minor (Turkey), and tyrotarichus, a Roman specialty with a Greek name.
In ancient Greece (ca. 750–150 b.c.e.) goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses were best known: Greece was poor cattle-raising country and the few cattle that were kept were mostly working animals. However, Greek scientists such as Aristotle knew that cheese could be made from the milk of other animals including cows, mares, and donkeys. Pyetia (animal rennet) was commonly used to curdle the milk; the best variety was thought to come from the stomach of a young deer. Alternatively opos, the milky sap of the fig tree, was used as a vegetable rennet. “The fig sap is first squeezed out into wool,” Aristotle explains. “The wool is rinsed, and the rinsing is put into a little milk. This, mixed with other milk, curdles it” (Aristotle, 'History of Animals' 522b3-5). Young cheeses were placed in a talaros or cheese basket to allow the whey to run off.
Cheese is likely to have been a major food for country people, including the nomadic shepherds who kept goats in the mountain pastures of northern Greece, but most of the evidence for classical Greek life comes from city contexts. In classical Athens there was a cheese fair on the last day of every lunar month, called simply “the Green Cheese.” We know this because in a recorded legal case a speaker observes that an inhabitant of the hill town of Plataiai, north of Athens, was sure to be found at this fair. Other producers named in surviving texts are the cities of Tromileia (in the Peloponnesos, southern Greece), Chersonesos (now in European Turkey), and the Aegean island of Kythnos, whose fine sheep’s milk cheeses, called trophalis, fetched a high price.
Sicily, partly settled by Greeks at this period, was famous as the source of fine cheese made from a mixture of sheep’s and goat’s milk. This fame can be traced back to the early Greek epic, the Odyssey, in which the gigantic one-eyed Cyclops (fated to be blinded by Odysseus) is described as a keeper of sheep and a maker of cheese; later readers believed that this evocative scene was set in Sicily, though the island is not named in the poem.
Turning to classical Rome and its empire (ca. 150 b.c.e. to 450 c.e.) instructions for cheesemaking are given by the farming author Columella, a native of Spain. Cow’s milk cheese was familiar to classical Romans but goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses were more common. The poet Virgil describes how a mountain shepherd would make cheese, from morning and evening milkings, and sell it himself at the nearest market (Virgil, 'Georgics', book 3, lines 400–403). Cheeses might be shaped in a mold, Latin forma (this word is the origin of French fromage). Salt and brine assisted in the making of cheese for long distance trade. Rome was perhaps the first culture to develop smoked cheese, using the smoke from apple wood: the best smoked cheese was matured in the Velabrum district of the city of Rome. Other flavorings, including pine nuts, thyme, and black pepper, were used in specialized cheeses.
Some cheeses became famous, including the meta (pyramid) of Sassina in northern Umbria and the smooth, round, white cheeses of Mount Sila, southeast of Naples. The cheese of Luna, in northwestern Tuscany, was stamped with a crescent moon (“luna”) as an easily read designation of origin. Excellent mountain cheeses were brought to Rome from the nearby territory of the Vestini.
As Roman power spread around the Mediterranean, cheeses from distant provinces became known in Roman Italy. Among these were the quadra of Toulouse and the Vatusicus cheese from the same Alpine valley in which modern Reblochon is made. Apuleius, in the fictional Metamorphoses, depicts an agent traveling through northern Greece to buy cheese and honey. There were also cheeses from Crete.
Cheese played a special role in the literary ideal of traditional Italian farm produce. Cheese is a principal ingredient in the peasant farmer’s midday meal described in the poem “Moretum.” Fine fresh local cheeses, drying on rush mats, are among the delicacies offered at an imaginary country tavern in “Copa.” Both these poems have sometimes been attributed to Virgil but they are probably by contemporary poets of the first century b.c.e.
Compiled during the fifth century c.e., the farming manual by Palladius gives brief instructions for the cheesemaker. Lamb’s or goat’s rennet may be used, or the flowers of wild thistle or fig sap. As the milk curdles it is gradually pressed to expel the whey. The solidifying cheese is placed in a dark, cool room, pressed again using weights, and sprinkled with salt.
After several days the firm fresh cheeses are placed on reed mats to mature in a draught-free room. Some makers combine fresh pine nuts, or chopped thyme, with the cheese as it begins to solidify; the cheese may be rolled in black pepper or other spices for added flavor.
Elsewhere
A single large geographical region embraces the whole story told earlier, stretching from Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, and Spain.
Beyond that region evidence at this early period is slight or absent. Evidence is vanishingly scarce, and cheese was generally not an important food in early India and early China. In all of ancient Sanskrit literature there are, at most, two uninformative mentions of cheese. The archaic Rigveda poems, possibly of about 1000 b.c.e., name two kinds of dadhanvata, with and without holes, and the word “dadhanvata” may mean “cheese.”
The extensive legal treatise, Arthaśastra, attributed to Kautilya and dated conventionally to the rule of Candragupta Maurya in the third century b.c., gives an instruction, in a list of subsidiary products of animal herds that “kurcika is to be delivered to the armed forces,” and the word “kurcika” may mean “cheese.” Chinese literature offers even less: cheese was a minor food from the southern provinces that was not noticed by any authors before the medieval period. Evidence for cheese is entirely absent from the pre-Columbian New World civilizations of Mexico and Peru, where animal milk was not used as human food and cheese was unknown. It is absent, too, from the information available to us about early peoples of the Eurasian steppes. Greek and Latin sources, in fact, say specifically that among those peoples milk was an important food and was converted into butter but not into cheese.
By Andrew Dalby in "The Oxford Companion to Cheese", edited by Catherine Donnelly, Oxford University Press, 2016, excerpts pp. 25-29. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.