OBA

The history of Cheese

From the steps of Central Asia to Messopotamia and from Anatolia and the Middle East to Europe, wherever people worked on agriculture and animal husbandry, cheese was an important comestible. But where was cheese, that is a global aliment like bread or wine, first was found? This is really a question that is hard to answer. Although there is no historic evidence, it is thought that cheese was found eight or ten thousand years ago in Messopotamia or the Indus Valley by sheperds.

On a tomb relief that is thought to be from the year 2500 B.C. and is to be seen in the British Museum, you can see pictures of agricultural life. On an other Hittite relief in the Ankara Anatolian Civilization Museum, a monk with a sheep a goat and a ram behind him is to be seen.

In Babylon cheese was seen as food for the aristocracy. In the Old Testament it is said that cheese is “food for the heroes”.The young sheperd David, who is on his way to his brothers who fight in the war, in order to bring them cheese to eat, crosses the way of the giant Goliath and kills him with his slingshot.

It is known that the Greeks and the Romans use fig milk, goat sperm, thistle flowers, wild saffron, even vinegar and donkey milk to ferment milk.

It is obvious that cheese for adults is as vital as milk is for babies. On Chios and Kos the people offered cheese to Hercules as oblation. Some kinds of cheese that were found by monks living in the golden age of the middle eve in the Xth and XIth century in Europe are still known and produced.

Don Quichotte, Miguel de Cervantes’ hero in his book, written in 1605, passes herds, and tells about sheperds, who eat cheese, that is harder than sand and stone. Cheese as preservable food, even if not as long preservable as wheat or dry vegetables,  has really been a friend in need to mankind. The history of cheese, from alimentation of soldiers and shepherds for thousands of years to guest on todays gorgeous tables, still goes on...