656 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
still, on the strength of it alone, accord them high rank in the roll of civilized 
races. 
CHEMISTRY 
Who was the first chemist? Probably the man or woman who dis- 
covered that heat makes some kinds of food tastier. The first achieve- 
ments of applied physical chemistry were most probably connected 
with food. From these modest beginnings evolved further progress. 
Gordon Childe, the Australian scholar and excavator, stated (1958) 
that all early kilns to fire pottery developed from the prehistoric 
Figure 29.—Offerings of food are brought to the goddess, who holds the symbol of life. 
Seal. 
bread-baking oven, and the potter’s kiln may well have been the ances- 
tor of the smelting furnace. M. E. L. Mallowan, one of the great 
archeologists, describes (1930) the beehive-shaped bread ovens and 
the cooking ranges with flat, fired-clay tops and circular flues of the 
Sumerians. 
Refined cookery always bespeaks a highly evolved old culture, and 
this was the case in Sumeria. The Sumerian lexical material has 
a number of expressions which could be used only by gourmets. 
Judging from the beauty and variety of their dishes and cups and the 
many monuments portraying banquets and symposiums, they were a 
convivial people with a robust jote de vivre, 
which gave important place to the pleasuresof [K7 ORR) VE5 y 
the table. NaN Ved yas 
Our earliest records of food come from the 
Sumerians, who certainly knew how to roast 
meat and fish and cook vegetables, how to 
= z ane Figure 30.—Man and 
grind flour and meal, knead dough, bake bread, ae RO grew 
churn butter, press oil from olives, make wine one vessel, through long 
from grapes, and ferment barley for beer and tubes. A third person 
; } ; raises his hand in blessing. 
dates for some sweet, strong drink. 
Small grinding stones were still in the brick-floored kitchen of 
the high priestess in the temple of the goddess Ningal at Ur, when 
the Joint Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and 
