The world’s oldest known culinary recipes are preserved on nearly 4,000-year-old clay tablets held in the Yale Babylonian Collection. The tablets date to 1730 BCE and offer a glimpse into ancient Mesopotamian cuisine. Through a collaboration of historical scholarship and scientific experimentation, we translated the texts and used modern techniques to reconstruct the recipes. The project explores the outer bounds of what these ancient recipes may originally have been. It also demonstrates how scientific methods can bring ancient food cultures to life and make them accessible through sensory experience.

Related publications and news (selected):

Barjamovic, G., Jurado Gonzalez, P., Graham, C., Lassen, A., Nasrallah, N., and Sörensen, P. M. (2019). The Ancient Mesopotamian Tablets as Cookbook. Lapham’s Quarterly, 12(2). https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/ancient-mesopotamian-tablet-cookbook

Barjamovic, G., Jurado Gonzalez, P., Graham, C., Lassen, A. W., Nasrallah, N., and Sörensen, P. M. (2019) Food in Ancient Mesopotamia. Cooking the Yale Babylonian Culinary Recipes, in A. Lassen, E. Frahm and K. Wagensonner (Eds.) Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks. Highlights from the Yale Babylonian Collection. New Haven, CT: Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, 108-125. [link]

In February 2025, we presented our work and curated a dinner at Yale University ‘s Franke Program in Science and the Humanities in collaboration with the Yale Babylonian Collection and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.