ABSTRACT
Investigating life in Babylonia involves assessing two main types of evidence: theevidence of archaeology, including representations in ancient art, and the evidence of texts, predominantly written in cuneiform script in the Akkadian language. In the case of food and drink modern scholars rely mainly on Akkadian texts, since the evidence from the archaeological record is more limited. Little work has been done in the following areas of Babylonian archaeology: the analysis of human skeletal remains, a potential source of information about diet; the study of animal remains; and the study of plant remains, many of which do not survive (Nesbitt 2003: 26-30). Archaeology is more revealing about food technology, the equipment and facilities used for storing, preparing and eating food, but the picture is far from complete. The extensive and varied textual record includes administrative texts, letters, lexical texts, literature and even some recipes. However, it too gives only a partial picture. Texts do not reflect society as a whole, since cuneiform literacy was restricted to highly trained professional scribes, and we cannot identify many Akkadian words for foodstuffs, including names of plants and fish, or how many of them were used (Powell 2003: 14-15). On balance, however, most of our knowledge about Babylonian food and drink derives from Akkadian texts rather than archaeological sources.
