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World's oldest cheese confirmed in Egyptian tomb. Just a bit over 3200 years old.

Eliar

Eliar

Aged cheeses might have an appeal but a 3,200-year-old sample of the popular dairy product found in Egypt may be just a little too old — and diseased — for even the most dedicated cheese connoisseurs.

Key points:
  • The cheese was found in the tomb of a 13th century BC mayor of Memphis, Egypt
  • The tomb was unearthed in the late 1800s, before being lost to the shifting sands of the desert until 2010
  • The cheese may also have been contaminated with a deadly disease brucellosis


The cheese was found in the tomb of Ptahmes, a 13th-century BC mayor of Memphis, Egypt, and according to a new study in the journal Analytical Chemistry it is probably the most ancient solid cheese ever discovered.

"The sample was wrapped with a canvas into a broken jar," said lead author Enrico Greco, from Italy's University of Catania.

"The archaeologists suspected it was a kind of food left for the owner of the tomb and they decided to ask for chemical analyses."

The team used unconventional scientific techniques to identify it as the remains of a solid cheese made from cow milk and sheep or goat milk.
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-...-discovered-in-ancient-egyptian-tomb/10133178





So, are you feelin lucky?
 
Reminds me of the time they found a huge chunk of either perfectly or near-perfectly preserved butter in some bog somewhere. Article.
 
So if we combine this with that ancient bread they found could we create some form of elder sandwich?
 
It's good to know that even thousands of years ago mankind was enjoying one of the finest things in life: a good cheese. It's too bad it's spoiled. I wonder if there's any way to analyze it and figure out how we could recreate that variety of cheese today? It would be pretty cool to eat the same style of cheese eaten 3,000 years ago.
 
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