What did they eat?

Some of the best evidence for what ordinary people ate comes from whoever was feeding them, the temples, palaces and treasuries that handed out barley, beer, oil and rice by the measure and wrote every ration down. You don’t get much of a menu from these, but you do get the quantities, and quite often the names.

• Mesopotamia

  Barley by the month

  A worker in the temple or palace economy drew a monthly allowance of barley, about sixty litres for a man and less for a woman, and the lists record it for centuries. The hymn to the beer goddess is also a recipe, and people have brewed from it.

  Read: Beer, bread and the working day

• Ancient Egypt

  Bread, beer and skeletons

  The tomb paintings show Egyptians well fed, clean and young forever. Their bread, their houses and above all their skeletons tell a harder story, of heavy work, frequent injury and early death, and of a surprising amount of care for the sick.

  Read: Bread, beer and bodies

• The Achaemenid Persian Empire

  A hundred jars of wine

  Thirty thousand clay tablets from a wall at Persepolis record who received how much grain, wine and beer. The royal inscriptions talk about ruling many lands by the favour of Ahuramazda, and the tablets have a woman named Irtashduna ordering a hundred jars of wine out of a village store.

  Read: The tablets from the fortification

• Minoan Crete

  Jars taller than a man

  Eighteen long narrow storerooms at Knossos, lined with jars taller than a man, held something like two hundred thousand litres between them. The residues point to olive oil and farm produce rather than treasure, which tells you what the palace was really for.

  Read: The storerooms at Knossos

• The Hittites

  A matter of life or death

  A dry plateau that grew barley most years and wheat in some, and a state that never had much surplus to spare. Near the end a Hittite king wrote to the king of Ugarit that a ship carrying grain to Hatti was a matter of life or death.

  Read: Grain, barley and the hungry years

• The Hellenistic World

  The state owned the oil

  The Ptolemies decided how much oilseed every village would sow, bought the harvest at their own price, pressed it in their own workshops and sold the oil through licensed shops. Importing oil was effectively banned, and the same papyri record the whole system failing.

  Read: A state that owned the oil

• Ancient Japan

  Rice as the measure

  Rice was the tax, the salary and the measure of wealth. The state allotted rice land by head, two tan for every man over six and two thirds of that for every woman, and for about a century it kept a register of every person in Japan to do it.

  Read: The rice fields and who owned them

Then the places where getting food out of the land at all was the achievement. A lake that was partly salt, a rainforest, a mountain range, a Norwegian winter… and the answers people came up with are some of the cleverest things in the whole Archives, for me anyway.

• The Aztecs

  Gardens that didn’t float

  The Spanish called them floating gardens, and they don’t float. Ten thousand hectares of built-up mud in a lake, a dike ten miles long to keep the salt water off, and seedlings planted out by hand, all of it feeding a quarter of a million people.

  Read: The floating gardens

• The Maya

  Seventy per cent maize

  Carbon isotopes in Maya skeletons put maize at around seventy per cent of the diet, higher for commoners than for lords. It was soaked with lime, ground by hand for hours every day, and eaten with beans, squash, chilli, turkey and dog, with cacao for those who could afford it.

  Read: What people ate

• The Incas

  Nobody bought anything

  A highland community might hold maize fields two days’ walk below it, coca plots on the forest slope beyond, and salt pans and herds above, and its members went between them. Nobody bought anything, and the Inca state was built on top of that arrangement.

  Read: Farming a vertical world

• The Sasanian Empire

  When the dredging stopped

  One canal has been traced for ninety kilometres from the Tigris across the plain. The irrigated land of southern Mesopotamia fed the empire and paid something like a third of its revenue, and maintaining it needed a state. When the state stopped, the plain went back to what it had been.

  Read: Water in a dry country

• Carthage

  The one book Rome kept

  When Carthage fell, the Roman senate gave the city’s libraries away to the Numidian kings and kept one work, twenty-eight books on farming by a man called Mago, which it ordered translated into Latin. A state that had just destroyed a city stopped to save its farming manual.

  Read: The richest farmland in the world

• The Viking and Norse World

  Hay before plunder

  A Norwegian farm had to cut and dry enough hay between June and August to keep its animals alive through seven months indoors. Get that wrong and the household starved, and everything else, the raiding included, happened around it.

  Read: The farm

• Kush and Aksum

  A grain a millimetre across

  Teff grains are about a millimetre across, a handful sows a field, and the crop grows almost nowhere outside the Ethiopian highlands, which is where somebody domesticated it. Down on the Middle Nile people farmed sorghum and millet on land watered by the flood, two diets with almost nothing in common.

  Read: What people wore and ate

• Medieval Christendom

  Better fed than a Londoner

  A villein couldn’t leave the manor and handed over his best beast when he died. He also held land his lord couldn’t take from him, and in a good year he ate better than a London labourer, which is not quite the picture of medieval peasant life most of us grew up with.

  Read: The manor

Some civilisations couldn’t feed themselves from their own fields, or had something everyone else needed, so the food came by ship, by camel, or in one case on its own four legs. These are the ones where what was on the plate depended on somebody else entirely.

• Rome

  A million mouths and a sailing season

  Rome had about a million inhabitants and couldn’t feed a tenth of them from its own countryside. The rest came by sea, something like 200,000 tonnes of grain a year on a sailing schedule that shut down for the winter, and any emperor who let it fail was in immediate danger.

  Read: Feeding a million people

• Greece

  Imported bread

  Athens couldn’t grow enough wheat for its people, and in 355 BCE Demosthenes reminded a jury that they ate more imported grain than anyone else. Bringing it safely into the Piraeus from the Black Sea, Egypt and Sicily shaped the city’s laws, its diplomacy and its wars.

  Read: Feeding Athens

• Phoenicia

  A place that has to sell something

  A narrow coastal strip with mountains behind it couldn’t grow enough grain for cities the size of Tyre and Sidon. A place that can’t feed itself has to sell something, and in Tyre’s case that was purple dye, which made the city a famously unpleasant place to live.

  Read: What the hinterland gave

• Medieval West African Empires

  Salt is not a luxury

  The savanna has almost no salt and the Sahara has it in slabs. In a hot climate, doing hard work on a diet of millet, sorghum and rice, a person who doesn’t replace what they sweat out will die, which is why salt went south for gold.

  Read: Gold for salt

• Hungary

  Beef that walked to market

  Hungary’s longest-lived export walked. The Vienna customs counted over a hundred thousand grey cattle in a single year in the 1550s, and the animals covered six hundred to a thousand miles to be sold and eaten in Germany and Italy, right through the Ottoman occupation.

  Read: Cattle on the hoof

And then the civilisations where what you ate, and who you ate it with, said who you were. A feast for a thousand guests, a marquise buried with her larder, a court cookbook, soup ladled out in order of rank… and two places where the rules about what not to eat ended up mattering more than any recipe.

• Mycenaean Greece

  Several thousand cups

  One room at Pylos held several thousand drinking cups, stacked and ready, and burnt cattle bone from beside the archive room shows a sacrifice of at least ten animals. Nobody keeps that many cups for their family, and the feast was one of the ways the palace ruled.

  Read: A feast for a thousand

• Han China

  Buried with her larder

  The marquise buried at Mawangdui in the second century BC went into her tomb with rice, millet, soybeans, plums, pheasant, venison, carp and dog. The pathologists found a hundred and thirty-eight melon seeds in her stomach, eaten within hours of her death.

  Read: The Lady of Dai

• The Islamic Caliphates

  A gentleman’s cookbook

  The oldest Arabic cookbook to survive was put together in tenth-century Baghdad, with over six hundred recipes. Some of them carry the names of a caliph’s brother and a court poet, because in Abbasid Baghdad cooking was something a gentleman could be good at.

  Read: The caliphs’ kitchens

• The Ottoman Empire

  Soup in order of rank

  The kitchens at Topkapi kept accounts of every sack of rice that came through the gate. Out in the city the imarets ladled soup and bread to students, travellers and the poor, in amounts fixed by the founder’s deed and graded by who you were.

  Read: The palace kitchen and the soup kitchen

• The Mongol Empire

  From kumis to a court cookbook

  In summer, the friar Rubruck wrote in 1253, the Mongols cared for nothing but kumis, the fermented milk of their mares. Seventy-seven years later a physician at the court in Beijing presented the emperor with a book of recipes drawn from kitchens across Asia, with mutton soup at the head of it.

  Read: Mare’s milk and a soup for the Qan

• Ancient India

  Two peacocks and a deer

  Ashoka’s first rock edict says the royal kitchen used to kill hundreds of thousands of animals a day for curries, and now killed three, two peacocks and a deer. The vegetarian ideal was argued into being over about a thousand years, against a much older diet that included beef.

  Read: Two peacocks and a deer

• The Byzantine Empire

  A goat in fish sauce

  The church calendar took meat, cheese and eggs off the table for something like half the year, so fish, beans, oil and fish sauce ran the Byzantine kitchen. In 968 the emperor sent a western envoy a goat stuffed with garlic and leeks, swimming in fish sauce, and the envoy was appalled.

  Read: Fish sauce and fast days