Bread, in the form in which we consume it today, has passed the long evolutionary path, alongside the development of human civilization. It is very possible that a man, before he began to prepare bread, ate fresh cereals. It is assumed that later, at some point, they began to dip them in water, and only after that to grind them and bake them. In the beginning, the bread was made without yeast, but in the Old Age, yeast is used as well as various types of flour (soft and hard).
Egyptians, according to some indications, made bread 5,000 years ago. It was made, initially, of barley, and baked in clay stoves, usually located in a separate part of the house or in the courtyard. Interpreting drawings from the pyramids, scientists have concluded that the first public bakeries in Egypt were formed at the same time as the pyramids. Bearing this in mind, we can say that Egypt is the land of origin of bread.
The bread continued its historical journey by the persecution of the Jews from Egypt. In the absence of time, and yeast, Jewish women made bread only from flour and water. It was baking in the strong sun on the back of a horse or camel, and the kind of bread made that way was called “maces”, and today it is eaten on the great Jewish holiday Pesach (Passover).
Returning with Greek sailors from the Egyptian coast, bread has found its way to the European soil. The ancient Greeks made it with yeast, in two varieties: from millet and from barley. The yeast was made at the time of grape harvest, from the dried dough of the millet. Ancient Greeks baked bread in special ovens, using iron, bronze or brick containers. The earliest bread found in the basement of an ancient Greek temple was of a triangular shape, baked about 2000 BC.
The Romans believed that the bread was given to the people by the god Pan, and from there came the modern Italian word for bread – il pane. Romans brought the first bakers out of Greece, where the craft had long been known. The production of bread in Rome developed so much that at the time of the reign of Emperor Augustus there were two competing esnafs – the guild of white and the guild of black bread bakers. As early as 168 BC, there are large state bakeries in Rome, and about 30 years before the new era in Rome there were 329 bakeries. The bread harvested from wheat flour was a privilege of the rich, while most of the Roman people ate barley bread.