Yale Publishes Cookable Babylonian Recipes Decoded from 3,700-Year-Old Tablets

Yale’s Babylonian Collection has turned cuneiform tablets from roughly 1750–1730 BCE into recipes anyone can cook today. The centerpiece is a lamb-and-beet stew built on rendered sheep fat, beer, and water, layered with onion, arugula, Persian shallots, cilantro, cumin, leek, and garlic, then finished with a pounded paste of kurrat (or ramps) and coriander. A second dish, a barley-and-herb broth called ‘Unwinding,’ calls for making a fermented beer-bread (bappiru) from home-toasted, ground barley and crumbling it into the pot at the end.

The recipes were reconstructed by scholars Gojko Barjamovic and Nawal Nashrallah, who translated terse tablet instructions into modern quantities, times, and oven temperatures — an example of digital-humanities and food-archaeology work reaching a general audience via Hacker News. The techniques (searing off moisture, mortar-and-pestle pastes, hour-long simmers) map surprisingly cleanly onto contemporary cooking.

For a technical readership the interest is cultural rather than practical: it’s a well-executed act of making inaccessible primary sources reproducible and testable, which is why it circulated in tech circles. There is no cybersecurity or technology news content here.