Ancient Origins

Before farming existed

In 2018, archaeologists working at Shubayqa 1, a site used by Natufian hunter-gatherers in northeastern Jordan, published findings of charred crumbs preserved in a fireplace. Analysis showed the crumbs were unleavened flatbread, made from flour ground from wild wheat and barley, mixed with flour from the tuber of a sedge plant, and cooked flat. Radiocarbon dating put the find at roughly 14,400 years old — around 4,000 years before agriculture is thought to have begun anywhere in the world. The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

At that point in human history, there is essentially no meaningful distinction between “the oldest bread” and “the oldest pancake” — both terms describe the same object: grain flour, mixed with water, cooked flat on a hot surface. Leavened, risen bread came much later. What the Shubayqa 1 hunter-gatherers were doing was, in every practical sense, making pancakes.

There is earlier — but much more tentative — evidence too. A 2023 study in the journal Antiquity examined charred plant remains from Shanidar Cave in Iraq and found that Neanderthals, as far back as roughly 70,000 years ago, were pounding and soaking wild pulses and grains and shaping the resulting paste into a flat mass before cooking it. The researchers describe this as evidence of surprisingly sophisticated food preparation — soaking, pounding, and combining ingredients — rather than a confirmed pancake. It is best understood as the earliest known ancestor of the idea, not a pancake itself.

Ötzi the Iceman's last meal

Ötzi, the mummified body found in the Alps in 1991 and dated to roughly 5,300 years ago, offers one of the most direct windows into Copper Age diet. A 2018 study in Current Biology, led by researchers at Italy's Eurac Research institute, analysed the contents of his stomach and found unmilled einkorn wheat alongside ibex and red deer meat.

It's worth being precise here: Eurac Research's own account describes the grain as found in non-milled form — the study confirms Ötzi had eaten wheat shortly before he died, not that he ate a cooked flatbread or pancake. Some secondary sources online claim the grain was finely ground into a cooked flatbread; that specific detail contradicts the primary research and shouldn't be repeated as fact. What's certain is that grain was a meaningful part of the diet in the Alps five millennia ago — which is itself notable evidence for how central grain-based food was, long before any written recipe existed.

Ancient Greece: pancakes in poetry

By the 5th century BC, pancakes had a name and a literature. The Greeks called them τηγανίτης (tagenites) or ταγηνίας (tagenias) — both derived from tagenon, the frying pan they were cooked in. They were fried in oil and typically served with honey. Much of what we know comes from a single source: the writer Athenaeus, whose Deipnosophistae ("Philosophers at Dinner"), written around 200 AD, preserves quotations from much earlier comic poets whose original plays have otherwise been lost.

Athenaeus quotes the 5th-century BC comic poet Cratinus describing “the fresh taganias, dropping morning dew,” and Magnes asking, “Have you never seen the fresh taganiai hissing, when you pour honey over them?” An earlier poet, Epicharmus, is credited with a related dish called staititēs — a wheat-flour-and-honey cake fried in a pan and topped with sesame and cheese.

Pancakes were popular enough to headline a whole play: Aristophanes wrote a comedy called Tagenistae — literally “Frying-Pan Men” — around the same period. The play itself does not survive; it is known only through the fragments Athenaeus chose to quote centuries later. Later still, the physician Galen (2nd century AD) discussed tēganitai made with olive oil in his work on the properties of foodstuffs, treating them as an established, everyday food rather than a novelty.

Ancient Rome: a recipe in Apicius

The Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria, traditionally attributed to the gourmet Apicius, contains a recipe that maps closely onto a modern pancake: durum wheat flour cooked into a thick paste (puls) with milk or water, left to cool, cut into pieces, fried in oil, and finished with honey and pepper. The text survives in full and has been translated and published by, among others, the University of Chicago's LacusCurtius project and a public-domain edition on Project Gutenberg — both directly checkable.

A separate, better-known section of the book titled “aliter dulcia” (“other sweet things” — sometimes garbled online as “alita dolcia”) describes bread soaked in milk and egg, then fried and honeyed — a dish closer to what we'd now call French toast than a batter pancake. The two are often conflated in casual food-history writing; they are, in fact, different recipes in the same collection.

Egypt and the wider ancient world

Ancient Egyptian bread-making is exceptionally well documented, mostly through tomb paintings rather than surviving recipes — scenes from tombs including Beni Hasan and Senet's tomb depict griddles, hearths, and grinding stones, and some Middle Kingdom bread was baked flat on hot stones or slapped directly onto the walls of a hot oven, producing something closer to a flatbread than a modern loaf. Egyptian bread-making is generally dated back roughly 5,800 years based on predynastic evidence. It's a reminder that the underlying technique — grain, water, a hot flat surface — was independently useful across the entire ancient Mediterranean and Near East, not just in Greece and Rome.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Sources & further reading

• Arranz-Otaegui et al., "Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan" — PNAS (2018)
• Kabukcu et al., "Cooking in caves: Palaeolithic carbonised plant food remains from Franchthi and Shanidar" — Antiquity (2023)
• Maixner et al., "The Iceman's Last Meal Consisted of Fat, Wild Meat, and Cereals" — Current Biology (2018)
• Eurac Research — "The Iceman's last meal"
• Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Book 14 (Cratinus, Magnes, Epicharmus quotations) — Attalus.org translation
• Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, Book 6 (Aristophanes' lost Tagenistae) — LacusCurtius, University of Chicago
• Apicius, De Re Coquinaria, Book VII — LacusCurtius, University of Chicago
• Apicius: Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, trans. Vehling — Project Gutenberg
• Smithsonian Magazine — "A Brief History of Pancakes"
• National Geographic — "The Long, Surprising History of Pancakes"