4,000-year-old tablet details ancient cheese and meat dishes transported in a box

At the ruined site of a 4,000-year-old civilization in Anatolia, clay tablets have been discovered documenting a mundane but fascinating aspect of the culture: packed lunches.

The tablet specifically speaks of a Kültepe cheese that was part of the daily life of the people of the region, who, according to the tablet, took it with them on their travels.

Located today in central Turkey, in a province (Kayseri) whose name is strikingly similar to the German word for cheese factory (Käserei), the ruins of Kültepe are considered the cradle of Anatolian civilization.

It was an important city for the Hittites: the first Anatolian civilization of its time, and is today known as the site where the first definitive example of an Indo-European language was written: in the form of Hittite, whose loan words are mixed into Assyrian and Acadian cuneiform on the 20,000 tablets located in the city.

Professor Fikri Kulakoğlu, an archaeologist working at the site, which has been excavated and studied for 76 years, told Hurriyet Daily that cheese would have been essential to life in the region.

“Four thousand years ago, there was a cheese called ‘Kanis cheese.’ We can read on these tablets that they took it with them,” Kulakoğlu told the Daily. “Of course, regardless of the geography today, we see the same products in the same way four thousand years ago.”

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“People took this cheese with them when they traveled,” he added. “Back then, people took canned, sliced, dried meat with them when they traveled. Even today, it looks like making a normal sandwich under today’s conditions.”

Today, “pastırma,” a spiced dried meat, is still a traditional takeaway food in the region, and Kulakoğlu emphasizes that there is no reason to believe that the continuity connecting Hittite habits and today’s takeaway food culture has been interrupted.

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It’s not the oldest example of cheese-making in the world, as pottery found in Poland shows how relatively early Neolithic cultures in northern Europe were making cheese to circumvent lactose intolerance, or so it is assumed, 2,000 years earlier than the Kaniş cheese tablets.

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