In the ancient district of Hasankeyf in southern Türkiye, a team of academics has successfully recreated a 3,000-year-old barley honey bread recipe once common across Mesopotamia, as well as in the Roman and Greek worlds.
The effort was led by instructors İlker Aksoy, Hüseyin Gül, Erşad Tan, Seren Kavas and Esra Yıldırım from Batman University’s Hasankeyf vocational school, who discovered the recipe while tracing culinary references in historical sources.
The team examined cuneiform tablets and ration records dating back to the Third Ur Dynasty of the 21st century B.C, where barley bread frequently appeared in daily food allocations.
Aksoy noted that tablets from the Old Babylonian period listed break varieties produced for the state, including “large barley breads” and “honey-sweetened breads” prepared for temple feasts, while ritual texts describe barley bread as an offering.
“Some of these clay tablets read like early recipe lists,” Aksoy said, adding that even bakery price records survive from the Hammurabi era.
After extensive research and numerous trials, the lecturers prepared a dough of barley flour, warm water, honey and sea salt, and baked it on a hot stone in the school’s kitchen.
The recipe they followed uses two cups of barley flour, one cup of warm water, two tablespoons of honey and a teaspoon of sea salt.
“Recreating this bread allowed us to witness the long journey of humanity,” Aksoy said. “Learning what people ate on these lands over twelve millennia gave us a deep sense of connection. Reviving an ancient stable and showing it can still be made today was a unique pleasure and motivation for our future research.”
Batman University Rector İdris Demir called the project meaningful for a region where history “first took root,” stating that the bread will be introduced during special events and festivals as part of efforts to promote the province’s culinary heritage.
“We believe this will contribute to our city’s visibility in tourism and gastronomy,” he said.
