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Entered according to Act of Congress, in June, 1869, by J. W. Burke & Cos., in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the So. District of Georgia
Vol. Ill — No. 50.
BREAD 1800 YEARS OLD.
copy the following from that
v ery interesting publication,
Wonders of Pompeii , one of
Scribner & Co.’s “Illustrated Library
of Wonders : ”
Bakeries were not lacking in Pom
peii. The most complete one
is in the street, of Hercula
neum, where it fills a whole
house, the inner court of
which is occupied with four
mills. Nothing could be more
crude and elementary than
those mills. Imagine two
huge blocks of stone repre
senting two cones, of which
the upper one is overset upon
the other, giving every mill
the appearance of an hour
glass. The lower stone re
mained motionless, and the
other revolved by means of
an apparatus kept in motion
by a man or a donkey. The
grain was crushed between
the two stones in the old pa
triarchal style. The poor ass
condemned to do this work
must have been a very patient
animal; but what shall we
say of the slaves often called
in to fill his place? For
those poor wretches it was
usually a punishment, as their eyes were
put out and then they were sent to the
mill. This was the menace held over
their heads when they misbehaved. For
others it w r as a very simple piece of ser
vice which more than one man of mind
performed —Plautus, they say, and lei
ence. To some again, it was, at a later
period, a method of paying for their
vices 5 when the millers lacked hands
they established bathing-houses around
their mills, and the passers-by who were
caught in the trap had to work the ma
chinery.
Let us hasten to add that the work ol
the mill which we visited was not per
formed by a Christian, as they would
say at Naples, but by a mule, whose
bones were found in a neighboring room,
most likely a stable, the racks and
troughs of which were elevated about
two and a half feet above the floor. In
a closet near by, the watering trough is
still visible.
Mills driven by the wind were un
known to the ancients, and water-mills
Di-covertes of Loaves of Bread baked 1800 years ago in a Baker’s Oven.
« UtrTi *•-
did not exist in Pompeii, owing to the
lack of running water. Hence these
mills were put in motion by manual la
bor —the old system employed away
back in the days of Homer.
On the other hand, the institution of
complete baking as a trade, with all its
dependent processes, did not date so
far back. The primitive Romans made
their bread in their own houses. Rome
was already nearly five hundred years
old when the first bakers established
stationary mills, to which the proprie
tors sent their grain, as they still do in
the Neapolitan provinces; in return
they got loaves of bread ; that is to say,
their material ground, kneaded and
MACON, GEORGIA, JUNE n, 1870.
baked. The Pompeiian establishment
that we visited was one of these com
plete bakeries.
We could still recognize the troughs
that served for the manipulation of the
bread, and the oven, the arch of which
is intact, with the cavity that retained
the ashes, the vase for water to besprin
kle'the crust and make it shiny, and,
finally, the triple-slued pipe that carried
off the smoke—an excellent system re
vealed by the Pompeiian excavations
and successfully imitated since then.
The bake-oven opened upon two small
rooms by two apertures. Ihe loaves
went in at one of these in dough, and
came out at the other baked. The
whole thing is in such a perfect state of
preservation that one might be tempted
to employ these old bricks, that have
not been used for eighteen centuries, for
the same purpose. The very loaves
have survived. In the bakery of which
I speak several were found with the
stamps upon them, siligo yrani (wheat
flour,) or e cicera (of bean flour) a
Whole No. 154.
■wise precaution against the bad faith of
the dealers.
Still more recently, in the latest ex
cavations, Signor Fiorelli came across
an oven so hermetrically sealed that
there was not a particle of ashes in it,
and there were eighty-one loaves, a lit
tle sad, to be sure, but whole, hard and
black, found in the order in which they
had been placed on the 28d
of November, 79. Enchant
ed with this windfall, Fio
relli himself climbed into the
oven and took out the preci
ous relics with his own hands.
Most of the loaves weigh
about a pound ; the heaviest
twelve hundred and four
grains. They are round, de
pressed in the centre, raised
on the edges, and divided in
to eight lobes. Loaves are
still made in Sicily exactly
like them. Prof. De Luca
weighed and analyzed them
minutely, and gave the result
in a letter addressed to the
French Academy of Sciences.
Let us now imagine all these
salesrooms, all these shops,
open and stocked with goods,
and then the display, the pur
chasers, the passers-by, the
bustle and noise peculiar to
the South, and the street will
no longer seem so dead. Let
us add that the doors of the houses
were closed only in the evening ; the
promenaders and loungers could then
peep, as they went along, into every
alley, and make merry at the bright
adornments of the atrium.
Nor is this all. The upper stories,
although now crumbled to dust, were
in communication with the street. Win
dows opened discreetly, which must,
here and there, have been the frame
work of some brown head and counten
ance anxious to see and to be seen.
The latest excavations have revealed
the existence of hanging covered bal
conies, long exterior corridors, pierced
with casements, frequently depicted in