The Recipes of Cleopatra
By Jennifer Park In Robert Allott’s edited prose commonplace book, Wits Theater of the Little World (1599), he introduces a section on beauty with this line: “Cleopatra writ a booke of the preseruation...
View ArticleYou’ll thank me later
In my previous post, I presented a comic parody of an ancient eye-remedy. That recipe, created by the comedian Aristophanes, was too horrid to be true. Yet eye-remedies were far from pleasant in the...
View ArticleWormy beer and wet nursing in the Roman Empire
As pointed out by Elaine Leong in a recent post, beer is a favourite topic at The Recipes Project. As a Belgian, I felt I should perhaps add something to the subject. As a classicist, however, I rarely...
View ArticleFrom the dry sands of Egypt… Greek medicine labels on papyrus
By Isabella Bonati Amongst the many objects depicted in the “unswept floor” mosaic by Heraclitus (II cent. CE) there is a drug container (unguentarium) with a narrow, probably folded, papyrus tag...
View ArticleMedieval Arabic recipes and the history of hummus
By Anny Gaul Between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, cookbooks flourished throughout the Arabic-speaking world, from Baghdad to Murcia. Fortunately for scholars, in recent decades both critical...
View ArticleCleopatra’s Eye: The Significance of Kohl in Ancient Egypt
By Hazel Lunn Kohl has been a popular cosmetic in civilisations across the world since prehistoric times, but its association with ancient Egypt is most well-known. We are all familiar with the...
View ArticleWhat’s In an Ancient Egyptian Makeup Bag?
By Alana Martini, published as part of the Undergraduate Series I have been fascinated by the world of cosmetics for a very long time, and it appears that I am not the only one. Our love affair with...
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