Industrial state bakery and brewery
Panadería y cervecería industriales de raciones
- Date
- c. 2550 BCE · confidence high
- Place
- Heit el-Ghurab (city of the Giza builders), Egypt; Uruk (bevelled-rim bowls), Iraq
- Credited to
- Egyptian Old Kingdom administration; Uruk temples
- Field
- Life & health
What it is
Facilities with rows of bread moulds (bedja), ovens and fermentation vats able to feed thousands of workers with fixed rations of bread and beer, alongside Uruk's standardised disposable bowls. The standardised ration is the currency of labour in the early state.
Leavened bread was known since the Neolithic; what is recorded here is industrial-scale state production.
What it led to
- Payment in kind: bread and beer rations as basic wages (the builders of the pyramids were paid 10 loaves and 2 jars)
- Centralised food production separate from the household, the first 'public sector'
- Selected yeast and mass-produced mould-baked bread
- Ration accounting as a driver of writing
Built on
- Fast potter's wheelc. 3100 BCE
- Neolithic beer
- Leavened bread
Made possible
- Accounting ledgers and balancesc. 3100 BCE
- Baker's yeast
- Cylindrical bread oven