Eating more ancient artefacts

Well, there is a pleasant trend emerging for the baking of edible forms of ancient artefacts! Małgorzata Zadka at the University of Wroclaw sent us pictures of some gluten-free vegan cookies she had made with Linear A inscriptions:

These are replicating a particular type of Linear A text found on small, round clay documents known by modern scholars as nodules and roundels. They often bear a single sign (as in the examples shown here) that seems to have functioned in some way logographically – which is to say that it stood for a whole word or concept. Here are some close-ups:

 

I was also pleased to notice last week that there was a news story in the New York Times about the efforts of Katy Blanchard (who works with the Near Eastern collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania) to create cuneiform cookies. Here is a picture of some of her creations:

And finally, CREWS project researcher Philip has found some images of previous ancient baking endeavours, including biscuits and a pie featuring Minoan iconography and a Phoenician jug cake. I feel lucky to work with someone so talented!

 

Don’t forget that we would love to see your own creations if you have a go at making ancient inscription cookies or anything else like this! You can share them with us on Twitter (we are @crewsproject and use the hashtag #ancientbaking) or you can email us at crews@classics.cam.ac.uk. You could even look for inspiration on ancient writing systems you could use on some previous CREWS blog posts, e.g. this Ugaritic Cuneiform one, this Greek Alphabet one or this Linear B one. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

~ Pippa Steele (Principal Investigator of the CREWS project)

 

Edit: I couldn’t resist adding these pictures of cupcakes inspired by black figure pottery, made for an open morning at the Classics Department of Bolton School Girls Division, shared with us on Twitter today. I love the colours – channelling Exekias right there!

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