1064 storage and preservation: The Middle East where the grain was poured in Another opening at the bottom was used to remove the grain This structural form existed until the beginning of the Greco-Roman Period in 332 b.c.e and was supplemented by trapezoidal structures used for storing cereals to be used for sowing in the next season Quadrangular chambers, fi lled through small holes on the ceiling, also are evidenced by models and drawings Sometimes terms for the contents were written on the models The Egyptian temples were given estates and royal endowments as offerings to the gods The priesthood, in turn, received food and other offerings through an elaborate allocation formula called the Reversion of Offerings Holding and redistributing the offerings required the use of large storage facilities, which belonged to the temples The best-preserved set of large storage facilities is attached to the Ramesseum, which could support about 3,400 families (about 17,000 to 20,000 people) for a year with grain The temple storehouses consisted of long mud-brick, barrel-vaulted halls of varying size with fi lling holes at the top, erected in groups with a shared vestibule The temples built up substantial reserves for grain and other goods From these or state granaries each farmer got his grain for sowing, again recorded by scribes The granaries housed the food that was used as payment for the army, workers on building projects, and other citizens Egyptian houses, including palaces, also contained storerooms and granaries Some of the houses of the planned towns in El-Lahun, Tell El-‘Amârna, and Medina had a row of storerooms El-Lahun shows evidence of several locations within the town rather than a central granary Large estates had large private storerooms, while those who lived in the country had smaller, mostly conical ones that stored nearly everything in the Egyptians’ diet As a form of preservation, most food was dried in air and sunlight There is little evidence for smoking, probably for lack of wood Pickling with brine, oil, or salt was common as salt draws out liquid The use of vinegar is assumed but not evidenced Meat and poultry were preserved through the use of fat, honey, or beer If meat was not consumed immediately after hanging, it was cut, wet- or dry-salted, dried in sun and air, possibly smoked, and cured in jars As the food cooled inside the jars, a sort of vacuum was created that kept the food from spoiling Some of these jars were made of marl clay, which kept their contents cool The food was later cooked before it was eaten, which killed most bacteria in the process Another perishable food was fish Much of the catch was cleaned, gutted, and dried in the sun on wooden frames It sometimes was salted or pickled in oil Roe was dried or pickled in salt and then pressed and dried Drying, salting, and pickling were methods of preservation for small birds, too Dairy products such as cheese were salted and sometimes preserved in oil, dried, and hardened Dates, figs, olives, or grapes could be dried, ground, pickled, or pressed Storing grain in spikelet form, rather than threshed, helped to protect it from attacks by insects or other pests Herbs such as coriander, black cumin, and fenugreek were added as insecticides, as evidenced in a model granary of the Egyptian king Tutankhamen (r 1333–1323 b.c.e.) containing emmer with other seeds THE MIDDLE EAST BY LYN GREEN The first permanent settlements appeared in the ancient Near East during the Neolithic Period They were small and usually clustered around sources of water, as all later towns would be These most ancient farmers tended to settle particularly along rivers, where alluvial soil carried by the water spread out and made fertile, easily cultivated agricultural land Their houses and probably storage buildings were made of the same unbaked river mud The crops grown by these earliest farmers did not have a high yield, since they were still essentially wild forms of the plants The farmers, therefore, would not have been able to put aside large quantities of food between growing seasons To supplement the grains and pulses such as barley, einkorn, emmer, lentils, peas, chick peas, and bitter vetch, they also ate wild fruits and nuts, fish, birds, and game Because storage facilities did not need to be large or to keep food for extended periods of time, the earliest-known storage facilities (from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A Period, perhaps as early as 8500 b.c.e.) were small bins and silos and probably baskets or sacks The latter have not survived because they would have been made of rushes, reeds, or hide Later civilizations of the area, such as the Halaf culture (dating to as long ago as the sixth millennium b.c.e.), practiced agriculture and stored grain in beehive-shaped communal granaries Many centuries later, granaries of the same shape were built at the sites of Arad and Beth Yerah The Halaf storage facilities were small and shared only among a few dwellings By contrast, the Bronze Age (ca 3500–ca 1200 b.c.e.) granaries of Arad and Beth Yerah were much larger and served whole communities They rested on stone foundations and were usually from 13 to 30 feet in diameter All of these storage buildings were built above the ground, but farmers of the fift h millennium b.c.e in the Negev desert stored their food in below-ground chambers linked to each other and to the living quarters by a serious of subterranean tunnels Within the underground storerooms were pits where grain, lentils, and other foodstuffs were stored Underground storage in the desert was both cool and dry and proved so effective that these farmers continued to store grain underground even after they began to build their houses on the surface The earliest storage containers of the ancient Near East, dating to the early Neolithic Period, differ markedly from all later forms of storage because they appear before pottery was made All later civilizations depended heavily on pottery storage jars in all sizes and shapes These pottery pieces were almost always of undecorated fired clay, though they could be covered with a thin clay coating called a slip Slip makes