: Predrag Matvejevi?
: Our Daily Bread Its Cultural and Religious Significance throughout History
: Istros Books
: 9781912545117
: 1
: CHF 3.00
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: Themenkochbücher
: English
: 140
: kein Kopierschutz
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: ePUB
Our Daily Bread charmingly weaves together the customs, rituals, anecdotes, legends and sayings that tell the story of bread, from Mesopotamia, through Egypt, to the Far East, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and the New World. Matvejevi? shows how bread is depicted in literature and art (with beautiful illustrations) and examines especially closely the role of bread in the major world religions, drawing from the Bible, Talmud and Quran, but also at various apocryphal texts. In his seventh and last chapter, his narrative moves to the personal, explaining what motivated him to write this book; the lean years of his childhood during World War II and his father's detention in a German concentration camp. Warning about the pending threat of hunger in the 'developed world,' the book fittingly ends with a quote from the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin: 'The question of bread must take precedence over all other questions.'

Predrag Matvejevi? (7 October 1932 - 2 February 2017) was a Yugoslav writer and scholar. A literature scholar who taught at universities in Zagreb, Paris and Rome, he is best known for his 1987 non-fiction book Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, a seminal work of cultural history of the Mediterranean region which has been translated into more than 20 languages. Throughout his long academic career, he taught Slavic literature at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle from 1991 to 1994 and then moved on to the Sapienza University of Rome until 2007.Selected works in English:Sarajevo (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998) Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (University of California Press, 2000). The Other Venice: Secrets of the City (Reaktion Books 2007).

II. Trails and traces

Ceres. Etching by F. Perrier.Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

 

Bread followed paths that took it through space and time, memory and oblivion. It is hard to say where these journeys begin and where they end. Most often they moved from east to west, following the sun. Sometimes the paths returned the same way, at others they took a different route, all the while crossing plains, scaling mountains, roaming deserts. Grain was transported across seas and along rivers by ship, and on land by carts and packhorses, and even on the shoulders of men and women. Travellers, merchants and caravans all passed through these crossroads, evoked by prophets, preachers and poets. Futile though it often is, let us try to imagine what the past was like in prehistoric times, for memories of those times have been preserved in stories and legends.

Bread does not travel well: it goes hard, turns stale, becomes rotten. What does travel well are seeds, customs and the need for this daily sustenance. Objects, implements and surviving traces attest to the cultivation of grain since preliterate times: grindstones are more durable than grains; the hoe came before the plough; the mortar is older than the mill and the millstone is contemporaneous with flour. The vestiges of cereals have been preserved in long-extinguished hearths, although the ashes of firewood are similar to the ashes of burnt grains. Rye and barley seem to be more resistant to decomposition than other varieties, whereas wheat is sensitive and quicker to spoil. The various places in which grains were preserved had in common a darkness and silence that helped the seeds to retain their form, if not their fertility. We may never know how long they survived or when they died. The past does not always leave
behind a legacy.

Time erases, changes or augments the story.

* * *

Depictions of different grains are found on clay tablets from the ancient cities of Uruk and Ebla, as well as in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics of Memphis and Thebes. Mesopotamia was one of the first cultures to sow and harvest grains, and this civilization situated “between two rivers” worshipped Nisaba, the goddess of grain. According to the author of theAvesta, the sacred Persian book of wisdom, the goddess’ long tresses flowed around her as she walked in the field, amongst the stalks of grain. The book also pays tribute to the stone and iron pestles that crushed the grain for the “offerings of bread”; the water used to make it “rushed down from the top of Hukairya to the Vourukasha sea”, spilling into the shimmering sun-drenched fields of Mithra, where golden-hued plants, including the sweet-smellinghadhanaepata, were cultivated, in tune with established ritual. Up above, the star Tishtrya shone brightly at night, giving its name to the prophet Zarathustra.

TheAvesta also tells us the differences between “farmers”, “warriors” and “priests”, who each had different kinds of bread, from the very best to the most mediocre.

“A bread-offering to all the ancestral gods” was brought to the grave of Gilgamesh, sun of Ninsun. The ferryman Utnapishtim made him “seven celestial loaves” for the afterlife. TheEpic of Gilgamesh, written in Akkadian and translated into Hittite, Sumerian and other languages, also celebrated bread.

Thus, perhaps, spake Zarathustra.

Pre-Semitic communities shared similar origins and fates, and more than one particularity differentiated them in the course of their migrations: Sumerians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Assyrians and Syrians, Amorites and Arameans, Akkadians and other peoples of western Asia cited in holy and other books, sometimes drew together and at other times moved apart. Migrating tribes followed various routes to reach the fertile plains bordering the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, while Semitic tribes arrived in Palestine via Suez. Some came through the strait of