Romans got a kick out of roast ass
Mark Henderson and Nigel Hawkes at the Festival of Science in Leicester



A CHAIN of Ancient Roman “Little Chefs”, serving roast donkey, camel steaks and watermelon to soldiers and quarry workers, has been found in the Egyptian desert.
Excavations at two quarry sites in the remote Red Sea mountains show that the labourers who worked them and the soldiers in charge had a diet much richer and more varied than was thought. Staples included wheat, lentils, dates, donkey meat and wine, along with luxuries such as artichokes, pine nuts, pomegranate, grapes, watermelon and even black pepper from India.

There were also a number of transport cafés along the roads linking the quarries to the Nile Valley. “You’d have smaller settlements with your ancient equivalent of a Little Chef,” Marijke van der Veen, of Leicester University, a member of the team studying the sites, said.

The quarries, at Mons Claudanius and Mons Porphyrites in the Eastern desert 300 miles (480km) south of modern Cairo, were worked throughout the first four centuries AD. Mons Claudanius produced a type of high- quality stone known as grey granodiorite, and supplied all but three of the columns of the Pantheon in Rome. Mons Porphyrites was the world’s only source of purple porphyry, and produced the stone for the sculpture of the Tetrarchs in St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice.

The evidence for the diet comes from extremely well preserved rubbish dumps still containing the seeds, stones, shells and bones of meals consumed up to 2,000 years ago. The findings indicate that workers at the sites were almost certainly not slaves, but were skilled craftsmen well compensated for their exertions.