History of cheese

The production of cheese predates recorded history, beginning well over 7,000 years ago. Humans likely developed cheese and other dairy foods by accident, as a result of storing and transporting milk in bladders made of ruminants' stomachs; within the stomach an inherent supply of rennet would encourage curdling, forming cheese. There is no conclusive evidence indicating where cheese-making originated: possibly Europe, or Central Asia, the Middle East, or the Sahara.

It is unknown when cheese was first made. The earliest direct evidence for cheesemaking has been found in excavated clay sieves (holed pottery) dated to be over seven thousand years old; For example in Kujawy, Poland, and the Dalmatian coast in Croatia, the latter with dried remains which chemical analysis suggests was cheese. Shards of holed pottery were also found in Urnfield pile-dwellings on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland and are hypothesized to be cheese-strainers; they date back to roughly eight thousand years ago.

For preservation purposes, cheese-making may have begun by the pressing and salting of curdled milk. Animal skins and inflated internal organs already provided storage vessels for a range of foodstuffs. Curdling milk in an animal's stomach made solid and better-textured curds when compared to other traditional storage methods, such as clay jars.

Hard salted cheese is likely to have accompanied dairying from the outset as it is the only form in which milk can be kept in a hot climate. Dairying existed around 4,000 BC in the grasslands of the Sahara. Cheese produced in Europe, where climates are cooler than in the Middle East, required less salt for preservation. With less salt and acidity, the cheese became a suitable environment for useful microbes and molds, giving aged cheeses their pronounced and interesting flavors.^{[citation needed]}

The earliest written evidence of cheese is in the Sumerian cuneiform texts of the Third Dynasty of Ur, dated at the early second millennium BC. The earliest cheeses were sour and salty and similar in texture to rustic cottage cheese or present-day feta. In Late Bronze Age Minoan-Mycenaean Crete, Linear B tablets recorded the inventorying of cheese, (Mycenaean Greek in Linear B: 𐀶𐀫, tu-ro; later Greek: τυρός) flocks and shepherds. The oldest preserved remnants of cheese were identified on mummies in Xiaohe Cemetery in present-day Xinjiang.

An Arab legend attributes the discovery of cheese to an Arab trader who used this method of storing milk. However, cheese was already well known among the Sumerians.

Archaeological evidence for making cheese in Egypt goes back about 5,000 years. In 2018, archeologists from Cairo University and the University of Catania reported the discovery of the oldest known cheese from Egypt. Discovered in the Saqqara necropolis, it is around 3,200 years old. Earlier, remains identified as cheese were found in the funeral meal in an Egyptian tomb dating around 2900 BC. Visual evidence of Egyptian cheesemaking was found in Egyptian tomb murals made in approximately 2000 BC.

Cheese-making was known in Europe at the earliest level of Hellenic myth. According to Pliny the Elder, cheese became a sophisticated enterprise at the start of the ancient Rome era. During the ancient Rome era, valued foreign cheeses were transported to Rome to satisfy the tastes of the social elite.