Nicolai Peitersen, PhD

Ancient Cheese and Language

Nicolai Peitersen

Once people started milking domesticated animals, they also developed a vocabulary for this activity. In most languages around the World the word for milk and (woman's) breast is the same amongst non-milkers, while people milking their animals generally use different words. Later when production of different milk products began the dairy vocabulary expanded.

In Europe milk lipids have been identified on various types of neolithic ceramics, the oldest samples dating to 6000 BC, thus several millenia before speakers of Indo-European languages arrived, and at a time where we know very little about the languages spoken. But following the arrival of Indo-Europeans in Europe, Iran and India during the second millenium BC we can reconstruct a number of words associated with milk and milk products. This variety may suggest that some of the Indo-European words were coined after the migration from a Southern Russian homeland, and so these words may have been based on products or traditions already known locally.

The oldest written information about cheese – a concentrated milk product produced by rennet addition - is from the early cultures in the Middle East in Sumerian, Akkadian and other languages written in cuneiform script. However, the earliest physical remains of ancient cheeses are found in Asia in the Tianshan Mountains and the Tarim Desert in Xinjiang.

In Africa milk lipids dating back to around 5000 BC have been found on pottery from Sahara, but generally our information about African milk products is based on newer ethnographic and linguistic studies.

In contrast to the situation in the Old World we have neither archaeological information about milk products in South America before the Spanish conquest nor any linguistic support for this.