#sumeria
Atlantis is one of the most fascinating mysteries of our time.
Left: Illustrations of Sumerian garments from 2500 BC
Right: Dsquared2 dress from the Spring 2014 collection
It’s been a whole year since I started this project, and seeing it grow to the size it is today is amazing - I never imagined that it would ever get this popular! So to celebrate, I decided to take a look at some roast duck - based on some Sumerian cuneiform fragments.
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!
Ingredients
2kg duck
ground cumin
ground coriander
salt
pepper
1 leek, chopped
1 onion, minced
2 cloves garlic
750ml water (or stock)
butter
Method
1 - Prepare the Duck
To begin making this roast duck, we need to prepare our duck. I’m using a whole bird here, but you could just as easily cook this in pieces - it’s up to you! Start by scoring the breast with a knife a few times, to increase the seasoning surface area. The original fragment claims to be dealing with an unnamed bird, so I opted for duck - as wildfowl would have been a staple for Mesopotamia. But chicken or squab would have also been eaten around this time.
In any case, season your bird of choice using some salt, some freshly ground black pepper, some ground cumin, and some ground coriander. Rub this into the meat with your hands if you can handle it. Though I’m going to be dry-roasting this, it’s likely that the meat would have been boiled in a stew or soup broth for a while before being roasted in an oven.
2 - Roast the Duck
Place your seasoned bird breast-side down on a roasting rack. And then place this into the centre of an oven preheated to 200C / 400F for about two hours (based on a 2kg bird of course), flipping this over about 30 minutes before serving so the breast meat roasts perfectly. When you’ve flipped the bird, go and prepare your soup.
3 - Prepare the Soup
To pair with this, I made a quick and easy leek and herb soup. Start by chopping a leek into segments as thick as your thumb or so. Also chop an onion in half, and mince each half.
Toss some butter into a pot and put it onto a high heat. When the butter melts, toss in your leeks and onions. Return the pot to the heat, and let everything sauté away for a few minutes until the onion turns soft and translucent. At this point, toss in a few shakes of cumin and coriander, along with 750ml of water (or a soup stock of your choice). Into this, add some thyme and mint sprigs.
Let everything cook away for about 20 minutes, or until the leeks are practically falling apart.
Fish out your herb sprigs, and serve up alongside your duck!
The finished roast is super succulent, and very flavourful. The seasoning on the duck gave it a sharp zesty flavour, which paired very nicely with the herby, minty flavour of the soup. The meat itself has a lovely crisp skin, and tender flesh. This is a reconstruction of a fragmentary recipe from the Yale Cuneiform collection - others have postulated that it is separate to the pigeon stew recipe fragment, while others have claimed it to be a continuation of it. I chose to do a simple roast here, as ovens for cooking and baking would have been able to do this with little modification in antiquity (such as the use of a spit or shaft of metal or wood to cook the meat over a naked flame.
Cuneiform tablet counting beer for the workers. Circa 3100-3000 B.C, from Uruk in what is now southern Iraq. Now in the British Museum.
The beer on the tablet is represented by a jar with a pointed base. Food is symbolized by a head eating from a bowl (bottom left). The semicircular imprints (possibly made by the edge of a finger) stand for the measurements.
~Hasmonean
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I finally managed to design some body armor. It only took my entire life. This is for the sci-fi novel me and k are working on.
A Culture of Mathematics
Thirteen cuneiform clay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia, dating from 1900 to 1700 B.C., are on display until Dec. 17 at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, part of New York University. Many are exercises of students learning to be scribes, who were mastering mathematics based on texts in Sumerian, a language that even at the time was long since dead. The items are drawn from archaeological collections of Columbia, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania and include two celebrated tablets, known as YBC 7289 and Plimpton 322, that have played central roles in the reconstruction of Babylonian math.
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