Researchers have long agreed that the tale of the Magi of the New Testament reflects a thriving long-distance trade that brought exotic oils and resins from the Arabian Sea and points east to the Mediterranean region in Roman times. But a startling new discovery reveals that the former residents of what is now Israel enjoyed fruits and spices from South Asia 3,500 years ago.
A recent analysis of the fossilized dental plaque of more than a dozen skeletons ranging from the Middle Bronze Age to the early Iron Age (circa 1500-1100 BC) showed evidence of bananas, turmeric and soy, all crops. which grew in South Asia at that time.
The findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, add to artistic and archaeological evidence showing that ancient Mediterranean civilizations mattered everything from chickens to black pepper and vanilla from countries as far away as India and Indonesia.
“We once thought people got food locally and imported gems from far away,” says co-author Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. “But even in the Bronze Age they are very similar to us, important their food everywhere.”
An unexpectedly rich source of evidence
Tooth decay is the hardened plaque that builds up on the teeth. Until recently, it was considered rubbish to be ripped from archaeological samples and thrown away. But recent discoveries have shown that it is actually a rich source of information that traps everything from ancient DNA to bacteria and proteins.
Traces of sesame and even banana were identified in the teeth of individuals buried at the site of Tell Erani, near Megiddo.
Courtesy of Philipp Stockhammer
“If I stopped brushing my teeth, in 2,000 years I could tell what I was eating,” Stockhammer says.
To find out what the people of the Levant ate in antiquity, an international team analyzed the 16-skeleton mouth plate. Some remains were excavated in Megiddo, an ancient city-state better known by its biblical name, Armageddon. Megiddo prospered in the Bronze Age, a fact that is reflected in the elite burials tested for research, but it did not have the great wealth and imperial reach of its larger neighbors. “He was rich and well connected,” says Stockhammer, “but he wasn’t a major player, nothing compared to Egypt or Mesopotamia.”
Although dental calculations from Megiddo’s upper-class tombs showed that there were people who ate many grains, including wheat and millet, and fruits as dates, they also ate delicacies from far away. Samples from several people showed that they ate soy and turmeric from bright orange spices, both crops native to South and East Asia that archaeologists did not think were familiar to the tables of people in the ancient Mediterranean region.
“Even from this small number of samples, we see the appearance of something that was not expected at that place at the time,” says Matthew Collins, a former protein expert at the University of Copenhagen, who did not participate in the study.
Researchers also scraped the calculus of the teeth of people buried around 1100 BC at a nearby settlement site called Tell Erani, which archaeologists have linked to people known as Philistines in the Bible. The simpler burials in Tell Erani reflect a place with less wealth and the authors wondered if it would also have fewer exotic imports. Their results showed traces of sesame, which was also present in samples of Megiddo.
Although sesame oil, pasta and seeds are common ingredients in today’s Levantine cuisine, the plant is native to South Asia. Archaeologists had found sesame seeds in the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, buried around 1400 BC, but many researchers doubted that sesame was common in the local diet until much later.
The most startling dental discovery, however, was from a man in his fifties buried in Tell Erani: a protein that triggers the ripening of bananas. “[The Tell Erani burials] they are very humble burials, with no evidence of an elite group, ”says Stockhammer. “It doesn’t look like the king has his first banana.”
Evidence of the “invisible”
Dental calculus is proving to be an invaluable tool for identifying foods that are otherwise uncommon or rarely preserved in most archaeological environments, such as spices and oils. Although fundamental pillars of ancient trade routes are known, “these two kinds of food are almost invisible in the archaeological record,” says co-author Christina Warinner, a paleogeneticist at Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for the study of human history in Jena, Germany. . “This allows us to see foods of high economic value that would otherwise leave no trace,” such as rare sesame and soybean oils and exotic fruits like bananas.
Bronze Age burials at Megiddo show that members of the elite enjoyed soy and toric-based foods, both native to South and East Asia.
Courtesy of Philipp Stockhammer
In the case of bananas, archaeological evidence is particularly difficult to obtain: the domesticated fruit has no seeds and its soft flesh decays rapidly. That is why banana staples are unlikely to be sent to Megiddo. Instead, the people there could have been important and eating dried banana chips, which would have survived a long sea voyage with ease.
Among the tests that researchers can now provide on the plaque of fossilized teeth, plant proteins, unlike animal DNA, milk proteins or the more resistant microscopic crystals found in hard-grained hulls and stalks , decompose easily. As a result, they are rarely preserved in dental calculus, leaving the misleading impression that milk, meat, and porridge dominated the old table. The researchers used a new method to get more protein out of the calculus and spent more time than past studies comparing what they found with vegetable protein libraries to grain research.
Researchers believe it is very likely that Mediterranean residents enjoyed plant foods such as sesame and bananas, but the proteins were not trapped on the plate nor did they survive in later centuries. “We just get the tip of the iceberg,” Stockhammer says. “That doesn’t mean only one individual ate bananas, but only one where enough evidence is preserved.”
Because it is difficult to know when the dental calculus was formed, it is also possible that the long-dead Tell Erani banana weeper was a merchant or sailor who ate the fruit while traveling to Asia before dying on the edge of the Mediterranean, which would be an equally remarkable test of long-distance travel in prehistory.
This new evidence adds to the growing realization that the Bronze Age was surprisingly global, with long-distance trade connections stretching from China to the Mediterranean. “It’s no longer surprising,” says archaeologist Ayelet Gilboa of the University of Haifa, director of the Zinman Institute of Archeology at the University of Haifa, who did not participate in the study. “There has really been a transformation in the last decade of our perceptions of long-distance trade in prehistory.”
Five years ago, for example, when Gilboa published research showing that pots found in a place not far from Megiddo contained cinnamon, “people said it was impossible,” Gilboa says. “But as we delved deeper, it turns out the tests were there all the time, but no one bothered to pay attention.”
“We now have so much evidence that, at least from the second millennium BC, commodities were moving long distances,” he adds. “This shows that small-scale societies functioned as part of a vast network.”