And one is always told that 'day-old bread' is not ideal. Well, what about nearly 9,000-year-old bread ?!
I am fond of this location in Turkiye, since it was highlighted in my intensive art history class. I can still hear the professor speaking about its discovery and the findings there. The pronunciation of this Neolithic-era city, one of the world's very 1st, is "CHOUGHT all HUE yk".
As a result, I visited this site when in the area. It is southeast of today's Konya, former capital of the Seljuk Empire.
In ancient times, Konya was called Iconium. St Thecla, the disciple of St Paul and Martyr, was brought up in that city.
"Archaeologists Discover 8600-year-old Bread at Çatalhöyük May be the Oldest Bread in the World
Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in central Turkey.
Çatalhöyük is noteworthy because it is one of the first human proto-cities to have been built.
Full of densely packed mud brick houses covered in paintings and symbolic decorations, its population hovered around 8,000. That made it one of the biggest settlements of its era, somewhere between an outsized village and a tiny city.
People, mud-brick homes through ceiling doors, and they navigated sidewalks that wound around the city’s rooftops.
Archaeologists have discovered an oven structure in the area called “Mekan 66”. Around the largely destroyed oven, wheat, barley, pea seeds, and a handful find that could be food were found.
Analyses conducted...determined that the spongy residue was fermented bread from 6600 B.C.
Head of the Excavation Committee and Anadolu University Faculty Member Associate Professor Ali Umut Türkcan told the AA correspondent that when “archaeology” is mentioned, structures, monuments, and finds come to mind.
Pointing out that modern archaeology today also studies the archaeology of food, Türkcan said, “We need to say that the starting point of food archaeology is Anatolia. Çatalhöyük is one of the very important stops here...The small and round spongy find in the corner of the oven was found to be bread after careful documentation.
"The fact that the structure was covered with a thin clay allowed all of these organic remains, both wooden and bread, to be preserved until today. Radiocarbon tests conducted at the TUBITAK Marmara Research Center (MAM) showed that our sample can be dated back to approximately 6,600 BC.”