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Stretching the freshly-kneaded dough with his hands, Suleiman Daiffallah throws it on top of red-hot coals. Behind him, Wadi Feynan’s jagged mountaintops disappear into the darkness.
Daiffallah is a local Bedouin working with Feynan eco-lodge, a community-run project on the southern edge of Dana Biosphere Reserve, Jordan’s largest nature reserve. Today, he is making a shepherd’s bread called arboud as a pre-dinner snack for guests staying at the lodge. Made with just three ingredients—water, flour, salt—arboud is common in this mountainous part of Jordan where herds of goats and sheep scale ravines and peaks. It doesn’t need much fuss: ten minutes spent baked in the ash on each side, and it’s ready to be consumed, just like it was done 14,500 years ago.
Situated in the Fertile Crescent—the soil-rich swath of land alongside the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers where the onset of agriculture helped the world’s first civilizations flourish—Jordan has a long tradition of living off the land. It is here, in the remote northeastern region of Harrat al-Sham, known as the Black Desert for its striking basalt boulders, that archeologists made an astonishing discovery a few years ago. In a stone-lined fireplace, much like the open fire pit used by Daiffallah, they unearthed evidence of the world’s oldest known bread, later found to be made from a type of wild wheat called einkorn.
Before this find, most scientists believed that our hunter-gatherer ancestors settled around 10,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Neolithic age, to start cultivating crops and using wheat to make bread. But the discovery of the Black Desert breadcrumbs predates this moment by at least 4,000 years, signaling that perhaps humans were bakers first, and settled farmers and cultivators second.
Just like the einkorn found in the Black Desert, Jordan’s native baladi (meaning local) wheat varieties tend to be harder than the common wheat used to make commercial breads. As a result, bread made with this wheat gets stale faster than the soft wheat varieties. Across the Fertile Crescent, this has shaped the tradition of turning days-old breads into a base for multiple dishes. Fatteh, for example, is a regional breakfast staple, for which torn bread is served over a generous helping of yogurt, tahini, and chickpeas to soften it up. Then there is fattoush, a medley of finely chopped fresh tomatoes, radishes, and cucumbers with toasted or fried bread chunks.
In the small city of Madaba, south of the sprawling capital Amman, Feryal Kardasheh runs a family restaurant, Hikayet Sitti, from her grandparents’ home. On the restaurant’s shaded terrace, she serves—alongside other dishes like stuffed grape leaves and mezze—a traditional Palestinian dish called musakhan. Tinged with the bright red hue of the sumac spice, this fragrant meal of rice, chicken, pickled onions, and nuts would not be possible without taboun, a flatbread that forms its base. “Taboun is thicker than other breads, so it can hold the weight and the juice of musakhan well,” explains Kardasheh. For Hikayet Sitti, she sources her taboun, a flour-water-and-yeast staple for Jordan’s Palestinian communities, from countryside bakeries, where it is baked to perfection in tandoor-like ovens.
