Ancient Ration Bowl? The Enigmatic BRB
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- Опубликовано: 21 май 2024
- Today I'm back in the Near East Study Room at the Penn Museum looking at Mesopotamian artifacts. The focus of this episode is a rather crude looking bowl that we call the Beveled Rim Bowl, or BRB for short.
It was very popular in the Late Uruk period more than 5,000 years ago, but we don't really know what it was used for. An Uruk period site can have tens of thousands of these bowls, so many that excavators have been known to suggest they are more common than the dirt itself!
But why? It's not a simple soup bowl, since it isn't good at holding liquids. Some say it's for baking, or for cheese-making, or even salt drying. I like the idea that it might be a ration bowl, filled with grain for a day's work, or half a day, or something like that. So in this video I measure this one while talking about the importance of measurement and the difficulty of knowing the ancient standards.
Join me, and, be sure to visit the Penn Museum whenever you can. We've got one of these bowls on display and a replica of one you can touch.
www.penn.museum/visit/plan-yo... 
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“So BRB” was an underrated joke
Maybe it's sorta like an ancient shopping basket? Like as said BRB itself is not meant to be precise because it wasn't used to carry out the measurement, something else did that, the BRB instead just needed to be big enough to comfortably carry a standardized measure of dry goods. Similar to how today shopping baskets come in a few roughly similar sizes, with one size being dominant, based roughly on things like how much one person can comfortably carry on each arm, and the measurements of the goods we buy. Like our drinks tend to come in one liter containers and most shopping baskets have dimensions where two one liter flaskes can lay side by side in the bottom.
Similar to shopping baskets BRBs were also made quickly and cheaply and in large numbers out of readily available materials, because tons of them were needed and it was probably expected that they'd break so you'd need a new one. They could of course have used reed baskets that were lighter but those required more labour so I guess they were kinda like modern reuseable shopping baskets. Also in a society where walking is the only form of transportation I bet having a bowl just large enough to carry your wage in one go made the most sense, a larger bowl would have just been needlessly cumbersome. And grain was probably the lowest density good the average person needed to transport on a regular basis.
Either way I love this look into the everyday life of ancient people.
Glad you’re back from the field safe!
Two lil bowls of wheat? I gotta work all day on THAT?
Boy you boutta GilgaMESH with my FIST
I love BRBs. Such a fascinating insight into society just by virtue of these things!
I never thought I would find economy and wages interesting. But here I am.
I remeber learning about you in Milo channel I would like to see more colab and it would help bring your fantastic video to more people.
The fact that there are so many of these, and that they are so crude, makes me think of the clay tobacco pipes that were made and sold with a single charge of tobacco in them in the past in the UK. They were basically disposable, single use items. That may make sense from a ration bowl perspective as well - at the end of the shift, you come to where these are distributed, and there is a bowl of grain ready for you to take as your salary. Would that make sense?
It's hard to imagine these being something you'd use for anything too long term or important. I really don't know anything about ancient pottery making, but I'm guessing they were capable of making bowls with less voids if they wanted to. So that seems likely. And if you've got something else you just want to put in there, well a bowl's a bowl.
I'm thinking of them as like ancient shopping baskets, just meant to get the job done and probably expected to break at some point so they're made cheaply and just large enough to hold your daily “groceries”.
@@brettwood1351 They absolutely were, there are plenty of examples of much finer pottery that is glazed so it's water tight. They could also make reed baskets that would have been lighter. But both of those are more labor intensive to make and I suspect that's the clinch here, there's no point in putting a ton of labor into such a simple item like that's probably expected to break, similar to a modern plastic bag.
Maybe they were just very heavy hats.
Literally was about to post that same joke haha 😂
Was the old band with pot hats Devo?
Yes, 'hard hats' for construction workers(?)
@@simonsaville9962 These wouldn't actually provide any protection.
Just found you through the mini minuteman video. This is the first of your videos I’ve watched on your channel. It was great. Gonna binge a few more.
It's really cool seeing you try out theories.
yea i agree they probably were just used for alot of stuff. it definitely seems like the sort of thing youd be buying or making lots of.
any time youd need to feed a bunch of people like work sites, weddings, etc.
as a modern-day wage worker it makes more sense to me that there would be a standardized ladle of some kind-- the boss isn't gonna stand for big-hands joe taking more than his share lol
Imagine the top 1/6 of your ration blowing away on a windy walk home from work-what a pain!
I always enjoy your content
Rationalizing archaeological finds? 😄👍
Seeing millennia old hand marks is so cool.
Very cool video!
So, I was thinking around that 7 minute mark, just before you started talking about the double handful, what if the bowl (and with that possibly the sila) is just two fists? Has that been considered? Its formed by a fist and the excess space formed by the shape (as in the bowl shape) could make the second fist.
The 20% irregularity would also indicate to me personally that these would be hand made [correction: I mean this as in, random people make their OWN bowl, not that its just hand made, which is obvious lol], although of course, that may also be just hundreds of workshops pumpinh them out.
Also I mean those that distribute the rations would probably themselves have a pretty regular way of distributing Sila, maybe it was 2 times their double handful.
It feels to me a lot like an unstandardized measurement like many used to be, for example (I believe) the foot, which as far as I know was incredibly irregular.
I bet undstandized measurements caused some of the first wage disputes in the history of the world.
Has there ever been any detritus found in the bowl voids? These are bowls after all, something had to contained therein.
i will never be able to say BRB again without it meaning bevel rimmed bowl.
maybe it wasn't actually used for anything, and was just a test bowl to see clay quality? Like the idea would be that you would just quickly make and fire a bowl, using a lot of straw to minimize the amount of wasted clay, to see if the clay was good or not. Then you just throw away the bowl, or maybe if you're buying the clay, the clay seller keeps it as a receipt? Something similar is done with chopmarks in currency, although that doesn't affect its usability at all.
I love your videos :D I learn new things every time.
Maybe they were given out with something, like a frut basket?
I’m not an archaeologist but I’m wondering if these aren’t intended to measure rations but as a method to hold the ration while it is being distributed
Thank you, fascinating!
Could it be just regular old dinnerware? An ancient cereal bowl? Just a bowl to eat out of, whatever it is you're eating for that meal.
Sure. Like one workshop per people group. Makes sense why size variations. Mass production 🤔
I can't think of a lot of food that can be eaten out of a pot that isn't water tight.
@@hedgehog3180 especially in that time when the majority of foods were soupy in nature
It doesn't seem likely they would use it for rationing. 20% variation would be very much noticeable, and you wouldn't like to deal with a bunch of angry workers thinking they've been given less than someone else.
He did mention there was some size variation amongst the bowls. Maybe, since they're (people and bowls) are local to each other, they wouldn't see a big difference 🤔
It might depend on where deviations are located; without knowing where each of the bowls in the study came from, we can’t rule out that all the bowels in village A were near enough 800ml, all the bowls from village B were 960ml and all the bowls from village C were near enough 640ml. As people did not travel as widely as they do today, it’s unlikely that they’d easily be able to compare bowl sizes. And if workers did move, either because they’d been conscripted into military service, or conscripted to work on a temple or tomb a king wished built, or whatever, given how disposable these are and how simple to manufacture, they probably wouldn’t bring one with them and instead get a new one when they arrived, so wouldn’t be able to compare that way either.
Fist size of grain. Fist is the common measurement.
Every time I watch one of your videos I get a whole new idea of what life in Ancient Mesopotamia looked like. Thanks so much , so interesting that there was already such a complicated social structure and you can learn so much from something so simple .
Can you make a video about what the government looked like at Ur ? It almost sounds like a communist government with rations for everyone... Or are the rations more like wages , where people work. I am also really curious about the different professions people had, and what we know about women in those societies. So much to learn , thank you as always.
The government at Ur and other places in Mesopotamia was complicated and shifted through time, but it looks like in many periods the government did issue rations to workers as payment for work. By the Ur III period, the government was highly bureaucratic and recorded distributions, so we get a better picture then, but rationing started much earlier. By that time we also get profession lists, and they are very interesting. I'll see if I can dig up enough information to do a video about it.
@@artifactuallyspeaking Thanks so much for your time. Did different professions get different wages? Did people with bigger families get more wages? I imagine birth control was pretty risky difficult back then. I wonder how everyone got enough nutrition . Surely the amount of rice you describe is maybe enough for 2 people for a meal. Maybe children also did some work? Is there any data on how big families were?
We don't always have the data to know, but in most cases we do find that there was a 'supervisor' of a work team (ugula in Sumerian) who got higher wages (larger rations). Later in time it looks like some professions did get more, but that might be from private enterprise rather than direct government wage/ration.
Families could be relatively large; we have inheritance documents that show houses/estates going to children, etc. and there could be quite a few recipients. But infant mortality was also very high. It is estimated that between 50 and 80 percent of all people born died by the age of 5. So, it's very difficult to know average family size for any period as we usually don't have enough data to make reliable statistics.
Depending on how many of these things were found, I'd just guess they were normal home-made quick-baked cereal bowls for home use. Like we still have today. But it wouldn't be fancy cause it was, used by the common folk for normal bowls of food. To eat a meal out of. To hold porridge in within the home. I dunno. If they were also used to accept a ration as a form of payment, every day, that could make sense, but would most people be getting their rations daily, not in the form of Dinner? Or would they be getting them weekly (or a similar length of time) in a woven basket or bag or something like that? To me, it makes more sense that they'd just be a serving size of food to eat at a meal. They're the perfect size. And would be easily remade/replaced if it was dropped and broken.
It seems most logical that they would be common eating bowls, but they are found in such quantities that they seem to be mass made and possibly distributed in quantity to workers by an organization.
It looks like people were paid daily though I'm not absolutely certain. People got their grain and then ground it into flour at home apparently. There are other rations they got less often, like sesame oil.
The sign for the earliest cuneiform word 'to eat' seems to show a person's head with one of these bowls raised to the lips, so that implies they were common eating bowls, but again that's not certain, and the porosity means soup or other liquids wouldn't work well. These questions are why I find the BRB to be so fascinating and you've pointed out a lot of the issues.
@@artifactuallyspeaking @artifactuallyspeaking Thanks for clearing that up! As some poor guy who buys mass-produced bowls from Walmart, it makes sense some group, a business or the government, would make them and distribute them, either through Sale of goods and services, or through a ration program of some kind.
Like you said, they couldn't hold liquid, but a porridge they could hold. Oatmeal can be made so thick and pasty, you can build stuff out of it. You could also bake in them, like you said. Bread in a bowl. A bread bowl, if you will.
I appreciate your informative comment! I find humans to be fascinating creatures. I'm glad I found your channel. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with the rest of us!
Interesting. I was told the grain ration bowl theory and assumed it was true until now. The thing is its pretty common for historical objects to be so uniform they are datable just by their physical appearance. Maybe we are reading too much into this and these are just common bowls.
And about the measurement stuff. Maybe the whole point was that the priests got to decide how much grain was in a ration of grain. So they don’t tell us in the sources because it was always changing with food availability.
They may simply be common eating bowls for some thick barley gruel or such, the main question would be why they are found in such numbers as if mass produced.
And measurements did change, usually by decree at least in the later period. Tolerance levels for difference around a measure, though, may have been pretty high at times. In other words, being 'close' to the measure was probably good enough since it was hard to measure truly accurately, especially in early periods.
What a ration of grain
The best RUclips channels are the ones with few viewers as a general rule?
Were they making sourdough at that point yet? Because it looks a lot like a proofing bowl
It does look like a proofing bowl, and Egyptians have a bread bowl somewhere around this time so it's possible, but the extreme number of the bowls would mean they were making a heck of a lot of bread in individual loaves. Maybe the bread was the ration?
Hi Brad! (or anyone else), I'm writing a report on a bevelled rim bowl as uni coursework - do you have any suggestions for readings that might be useful (or a bibliography for studies mentioned in this video)? thank you!!!
Here's a few important sources. Though they are relatively old, they established the debate:
Nissen, H. 1970
"Grabung in den Quadraten K/L XII in Uruk-Warka," Baghdader Mitteilungen 5: 137
proposes the ration bowl idea for BRBs
Johnson, G. 1973
Local Exchange and Early State Development in Southwestern Iran. Ann Arbor: Eisenbrauns.
276 bowls from Khuzistan region checked; says that there are clusters around 0.9, 0.65, and 0.45 liters
Beale, T.W. 1978
“Bevelled Rim Bowls and Their Implications for Change and Economic Organization in the Later Fourth Millennium B.C.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 37:289-313
calls Johnson's measures into question (no modal distribution at Choga Mish where 400 bowls have been measured)
reanalyzes Johnson's measures to show there is no modal distribution in Khuzistan either (though 600-700ml is the high mean)
question do we know if it's possible that the bowl had a coating or if the hole could be cause by the passage of time? If yes how do we know?
They don't normally have a coating, or at least not one we find on them. Some occasionally are found with bitumen in them, but it looks like they were being used in those cases for mixing the bitumen.
Given the markings on the inside, this is clearly a Punch Bowl.
Is there any consistency in the amount of clay used to make the bowls?
It seems roughly equivalent, but I haven't looked at enough of them to know. Most we find are broken into pieces, making it even more difficult.
I dunno man, it looks like it would be too easy to spill your grain if it's domed up like that. I for one would prefer to receive my wages in a tightly woven reed basket or something.
How long will a BRB of barley feed a worker?
Not sure, but probably just one meal? Early rations for a day were 2 sila (bowl?) for men and 1 sila (bowl?) for women or children, so maybe it was expected to be one day's average meal. Still, you would have to process the grain, unless the BRB held a grain gruel of some sort that was eaten on the spot.
Another way to approach the question is to determine what is the nutritional/caloric value of 0.8 litres of barley, and how does that compare to a labourer's daily needs. Is that a good amount of food or a bare subsistence ration?
ETA: Some quick online searching (and math) suggests that 0.8 litres (i.e. 1 cila) of _prepared_ barley would have roughly 2,200 calories.
Allowing for a reduction in total mass due to inedible parts, that would bring the caloric value of a cila of barley to well under 2,000 calories. That is rather low for a day's ration, especially for someone doing heavy labour.
Well grain wasn't the only thing they ate, their diet would have been subsidized by vegetables, beer and some meat and dairy. Also it'd make sense if the bowl was solely used to carry the portion of grain they got to take home, they probably ate some sort of meal during the work day and it'd make sense if that meal was eaten at the work site so the bowl sizes didn't account for that. Then again it's totally likely that they were suffering from malnutrition as well.
If in doubt ask Iraqis 😁 i think its a sieve strainer bowl my friend.
you should use the hand of someone that do manual labor with there hand they usualy have big finger that might get closer I would be interest to see the result of such test? mmm
Wait... weren't you going to sell these? With a discount using the BRB code? Wrong channel I guess! My mistake.
Haha, just kidding. I'm now very curious about BRB bowls!