Bread began in southwest Asia and spread across the world with wheat farming. The oldest known bread-like food was baked about 14,400 years ago by Natufian hunter-gatherers at Shubayqa 1, in the desert of northeastern Jordan, from wild cereals and tubers. Wheat was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago; leavened bread was being baked in southern Mesopotamia by about 6000 BC and refined in Egypt; Rome turned baking into a trade, and European ships carried wheat to the Americas, Africa and Asia after 1500. The result is today’s bread map: leavened wheat loaves across Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, flatbreads such as lavash and naan from Turkey to South Asia, maize tortillas in Mexico and teff injera in Ethiopia. Behind it all stands a wheat crop of about 799 million tonnes in 2024, led by China, India and Russia.
14,400 Years Ago: Natufian Flatbread at Shubayqa 1, Jordan
People were grinding plants long before they farmed. Starch residues on pounding stones in Europe and Australia, about 30,000 years old, suggest that roots of plants such as cattails and ferns were mashed and perhaps cooked on hot rocks. The first clear bread, though, comes from the Natufian culture of the Levant. At Shubayqa 1, a 14,400-year-old site in Jordan’s northeastern desert, archaeologists found charred remains of a pita-like flatbread made from wild cereal seeds and the tubers of a relative of papyrus, ground into flour and baked. That is about 4,000 years before agriculture appeared in southwest Asia.
The Natufians were not farmers; they harvested wild grasses and gathered roots. Bread, in other words, came before agriculture, and the first place on the bread map is a hearth in the dry country of northeastern Jordan.
10,000–3000 BC: Einkorn, Emmer and the Ovens of Mesopotamia and Egypt
Around 10,000 years ago, farmers in the Fertile Crescent domesticated einkorn, one of the first cultivated wheats. DNA fingerprinting points to the area around Karaca Dağ, a mountain in southeast Turkey surrounded by early farming villages. The change from wild to domestic plant, a seed head that stays intact rather than shattering, may have taken as little as 20 to 200 years. Emmer wheat was cultivated alongside it from the start, and with grain in storage, bread became a daily food rather than an occasional one.
Leavening came next. Yeast spores live on the surface of grain, so dough left to stand rises on its own. Leavened bread was being baked as early as 6000 BC in southern Mesopotamia, the land of the Sumerians, who may have passed the knowledge to Egypt by about 3000 BC; the Sumerians were already adding ash to their dough as it baked. The Egyptians made their bread almost entirely from emmer, which had to be moistened and pounded to free the grain from its husk, then ground on a saddle quern. Their ovens evolved over two thousand years: heavy pottery moulds set in embers in the Old Kingdom, tall cones on square hearths in the Middle Kingdom, and in the New Kingdom a cylindrical clay oven whose hot inner wall took slapped-on dough, much like a modern tandoor. New Kingdom tombs show loaves shaped like human figures, fish and animals, some flavoured with coriander seed or dates, while grit from the millstones wore down Egyptian teeth.
As farming spread out of the Fertile Crescent, bread went with it. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder later recorded the different ways people across that range leavened their dough: the Gauls and Iberians used barm, the foam skimmed from beer, to make an unusually light bread; wine-drinking regions used fermenting grape juice and flour; and nearly everyone kept back a piece of yesterday’s dough as a sourdough starter.
168 BC to 1863: Roman Bakers and England’s Assize of Bread
In Rome bread became a trade. Greek bakers appeared in the city in the 2nd century BC, as the Hellenised East came under Roman rule, and were allowed to form a collegium; the first bakers’ guild in Rome dates to 168 BC. Rome is where bread was first mass-produced, the point at which the baking profession can be said to have begun, although some bakers (pistores) were slaves and large households kept their own. The ruins of Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, hold at least 31 bakeries, each with wood-burning ovens, millstones and a sales counter. In the bakery of N. Popidius Priscus on the Vicolo Storto, the whole cycle from milling grain to baking the loaf took place under one roof.
After Rome, bread remained the central food of medieval Europe, and its price became a political matter. In 13th-century England the Assize of Bread and Ale regulated the price, weight and quality of bread and beer sold in towns and villages, the first law in British history to regulate the production and sale of food. Manorial courts enforced it in the countryside. It was amended by the Bread Acts of 1822 and 1836, which required loaves to be sold by the pound, and only repealed in 1863. Across northern and eastern Europe, from the Netherlands and Germany to Poland and Russia, rye bread was a staple through the Middle Ages.
1492 to 1920: Wheat Crosses the Oceans, and the Baguette Gets Its Name
The Columbian exchange after 1492 rebuilt the bread map. Old World wheat became an important crop in the Americas, while maize, potatoes and cassava travelled the other way. In Mexico the encounter produced two breads side by side. The corn tortilla was already ancient: Mesoamerican cooks soaked and cooked maize in limewater, a process called nixtamalization, which loosens the hull, makes the grain easier to grind into the dough called masa, and frees niacin that prevents the deficiency disease pellagra. Once the Spanish brought wheat to the lands around Mexico City in 1523, the flour tortilla was invented beside it, and wheat growing spread out from the Central Mexican Plateau with Franciscan and Dominican friars.
Where wheat would not grow well, other grains filled the role. In the Ethiopian Highlands, teff, a tiny-seeded grass native to the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea and cultivated since at least 1000 BCE, possibly since 4000 BCE, is fermented into the spongy flatbread injera. Ethiopia grew more than 90% of the world’s teff in 2016, and injera supports around 6.5 million small farmers; the government banned exports of raw teff in 2006 for fear of shortages and partly lifted the ban in 2015.
Across the band from Turkey to Kashmir, thin flatbreads baked on griddles or oven walls remained the norm. Their importance is now recognised by UNESCO, though not without argument: Armenia’s nomination of lavash was inscribed in 2014, a listing opposed by officials from Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey and Georgia, and a separate listing for flatbread culture in Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey followed in 2016.
In Europe, the 19th century brought new technology. The Viennese steam oven reached Paris in 1839 with August Zang, and compressed yeast from the Austrian Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof was shown at the 1867 Universal Exposition. Long, thin loaves had been spreading in France since the 18th century, and in August 1920 a regulation of the Seine department gave the baguette its name in law: a minimum weight of 80 g, a maximum length of 40 cm and a maximum price of 0.35 francs. Colonial rule carried it further. The French introduced the baguette to Vietnam in the mid-19th century, it was a staple there by the early 20th, and in the 1950s Saigon turned it into the bánh mì sandwich, whose name literally means “wheat bread”.
1928 to 2024: Sliced Loaves, Chorleywood and an 800-Million-Tonne Wheat Crop
The 20th century industrialised the loaf. Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, built a bread-slicing machine whose 1912 prototype burned; his working machine was first used by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, which sold its first sliced bread on 7 July 1928. Wonder Bread began marketing sliced bread nationwide in 1930, and by 1933 about 80% of bread sold in the United States was pre-sliced; a wartime ban on sliced bread, imposed in January 1943 to conserve resources, was rescinded that March. Britain installed its first slicing and wrapping machine in 1937, at the Wonderloaf bakery in Tottenham, London, and by the 1950s around 80% of British bread was sold pre-sliced too. In 1961 the Chorleywood bread process used intense mechanical mixing to cut fermentation time drastically and to allow lower-protein flour; it is now used in large factories around the world, though critics question its effect on nutritional value.
Craft bread pushed back. France’s 1993 Bread Decree required anything sold as pain maison to be kneaded, shaped and baked where it is sold, and banned pre-made dough from traditional baguettes; in 2022 the artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage lists.
Today’s map is set by wheat. In 2024 the world grew 799 million tonnes on 219.5 million hectares, more land than any other food crop, and China, India and Russia together supplied 42% of it. Trade moves the grain from a few exporters to the bread-eating cities of the world: the largest exporters in 2024 were Russia (32.7 million tonnes), Canada (25.5), the United States (21.8) and Ukraine (20.7), while the largest importers were Egypt (13.1 million tonnes), Indonesia (12.1) and China (11.0). The farms behind those exports are mapped in the geography of the world’s breadbaskets. The first fields of einkorn and emmer belong to the Fertile Crescent, and the stews scooped up with injera are covered in the traditional food of Ethiopia.