SUMERIAN TECHNOLOGY—BOBULA 657 
the British Museum (1927-57) discovered it. Maybe breads and 
cakes were made here, about which we read in later inscriptions; 
these were needed for ritual purposes. It seems that for the benefit 
of field and garden, seven breads were needed, made with oil, honey, 
flour, and sour cream. The Mesopotamian recipe in cuneiform re- 
sembles that of the festive cake called mézeskaldcs still made in 
Hungary. The Sumerian cakes were cast upon the waters; again a 
ritual not unlike the one called lepénvetés which was followed up 
to some decades ago in Transylvania. 
Recipes for making “heavy” beer, “black” beer, and “red” beer 
have been deciphered. Nineteen varieties of beer are enumerated in 
Sumerian texts. All these must have contributed to good cheer at the 
symposiums which seem to have been favorite high points in the life 
of the Sumerians. 
To keep themselves young and beautiful, the Sumerian ladies 
resorted to cosmetics. Cockleshells were the usual containers for 
cosmetics and of these some are present in most of the feminine 
graves. The cosmetics, of which traces have survived for thousands 
of years, were paints, the powdered remnants of which kept their 
colors; they may be white, black, blue, or red, but according to Sir 
Leonard Woolley (1950), “the normal colour is green.” Queen Shu- 
rete. a eetaer= Se ESS 
Ficure 31.—Box for cosmetics, made of silver, engraved shell, and lapis. 
bad used green paint, perhaps to match green eyes. She had not only 
large natural cockleshells for her cosmetics, but imitation shells, too, 
one of gold and another of silver. She kept her kohl or stibium, her 
black paint, in a box made of silver, engraved shell, and lapis lazuli. 
L. Legrain (1929b), another member of the team which excavated Ur, 
relates that “calcite vases, half empty, show on the surface of the 
black cosmetic the print of dainty fingers dipped in it centuries ago.” 
