Further Experiments in Ancient Baking: Pop-tarblets

A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote about my visit to the British Museum, one person commented that the cuneiform tablets looked like pop-tarts. Anyone familiar with the CREWS Project and our love of ancient baking will know that this is the sort of challenge we can’t let go. I haven’t had pop-tarts since I was a kid, and not too often then, but it turns out they’re not too difficult to make. Naturally we had to give it a try.

When Ancient Writing Is an Art, Science, and Snack

Philip has just given an interview for Atlas Obscura, all about his adventures in making Ugaritic cookies. As regular readers will know, this is more than just baking – this is a lovely opportunity to work on replica Ugaritic cuneiform tablets, think about how they were inscribed, and then eat the results afterwards!

You can read the article here:

Baking With CREWS – Ugaritic Tablet Biscuits

Here’s a Christmas treat – our first CREWS video. If you’ve ever seen our ancient writing baking and wanted to have a go, join Philip as he shows you how.

Back to the Phaistos Disc

Readers who know German may be interested in a short piece on the Phaistos Disc in Süddeutsche Zeitung today, for which I gave a brief interview. You can read it in full HERE.

(If you don’t read German and want to know more, don’t worry – the Wikipedia page on the Phaistos Disc is quite neutral and can give a lot of the basics about the object.)

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/sz-serie-was-steht-denn-da-scheibe-aus-der-bronzezeit-1.3636554

Phaistos Discuits!

We all love a good pun. And by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’, and by ‘good’ I mean ‘terrible’. So for a long time I’ve wanted to make ‘Phaistos Discuits’ – biscuit versions of the famous Phaistos Disc.

The Phaistos Disc is probably the most controversial inscription from ancient Crete, showing a ‘writing system’ (if that is what it is) that is almost unparalleled – a one-off as far as ancient inscriptions go. Despite some (really very unconvincing) attempts at decipherment, our understanding of this object remains extremely limited. However, it is just the perfect shape to turn into a biscuit!

The first CREWS conference: Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets

Last week the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge played host to the CREWS Project’s first international conference, Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets.[1] This was a wonderful opportunity for us to bring together experts on ancient writing systems from around the world and discuss each other’s research.

As with all good academic conferences, despite having a unifying theme – early alphabets – the range of papers was extremely broad. We heard about writing systems from across thousands of years of history and thousands of miles, from the earliest probable alphabetic inscriptions from the Sinai peninsula or the Egyptian desert at Wadi el-Hol, through the Phoenician and Ugaritic alphabets of the Levant, to ancient Greece, Italy and Spain. We heard from epigraphers, linguists and archaeologists, and people who stand somewhere in between.

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:

Just can’t get enough of edible ancient inscriptions?

Team Cuneiform (@cooleiform) tweeted us yesterday with a picture of their cuneiform cookies in the latest episode of ancient baking. And delicious they look too!

I’ll also take this opportunity to mention our colleague Anna Judson, a fellow researcher in Cambridge who is an expert in making cakes of ancient inscriptions (in this case I can testify to their deliciousness, having been on the receiving end many times!).

More Ancient Baking

I have a feeling this will not be the last blog post focused on the special problem of creating edible versions of ancient inscriptions…

In response to the previous post on this theme, A Taste of Ancient Writing, we had a lovely message from Hallvard Indgjerd, a researcher based at St Andrews, who told us about his own experience of baking ancient inscription cookies. He was aiming to make a Linear B tablet and some Greek Alphabetic ostraca in gingerbread.

A Taste of Ancient Writing

Philip Boyes, the new Research Associate on the CREWS project, officially started work this week – and he made cookies to celebrate! Well, there was some discussion as to whether they are cookies or biscuits… but whatever you call them, they taste delicious.

You can read more about them over on Philip’s blog.

As you can see, they are inscribed with several different ancient writing systems – of which you may recognise some from the project logo! There’s also Cretan Hieroglyphic (third from the top on the right) and Cypro-Minoan (the ones at the top of the second and third columns), which were writing systems used in Bronze Age Crete and Cyprus respectively.

Why not try making your own ancient cookies? All you need is a recipe and a pointed object for writing on them. And if you do, please send us photos! (You can send them to the new CREWS email address, crews@classics.cam.ac.uk, or tag us on Twitter, @crewsproject.)