Iraq- A study on 3,800 Babylonian tablets unearthed in Iraq in the 1990s reveals that the tablets contain the world’s oldest known recipes.

In the 1980s, French historian Jean Bottéro translated four cuneiform tablets that held in a collection in the Yale University Babylonian Collection and documented that the tablets contained approximately 40 recipes for Mesopotamia cuisine. 

In 2019, Gojko Barjamovic, a Harvard University Assyriology expert, retranslated the clay tablets, revealing the recipes having ingredients such as beef, lamb, goat, pork, deer and wild fowl.

According to researchers, these tablets are an important source for understanding the historical development of food culture. The tablets also show how important Mesopotamia cuisine was.