When I walk through the spice market in Luxor, certain stalls always smell the same. Earthy, warm, a little nutty. That’s cumin. This smell was already familiar in Egypt more than three thousand years ago, and not only in the kitchens of the living, but also among the grave goods of the dead.
Cumin in ancient Egypt isn’t a romantic marketing line. There are real finds, texts and studies. I’ll go through the three pieces of evidence that matter most to me as an Egyptologist. At the end, I’ll explain where you can best try the spice for yourself today.
The tomb of Kha, early evidence
On 15 February 1906, the Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli opened a tomb at Deir el-Medina, across the river from Luxor, that had never been robbed. A rockfall had sealed the entrance in antiquity. Inside lay the married couple Kha and Merit, buried around 1400 BC.
What Schiaparelli found there was not a royal burial. Kha was a foreman of the royal tomb builders, a well-off craftsman, not a pharaoh. That is exactly what makes the tomb so valuable: it shows what a middle-class Egyptian household in the New Kingdom packed for eternity.
Alongside furniture, textiles and more than four hundred other objects were baskets of provisions. In one of these baskets: cumin seeds. In ancient Egyptian the spice was called tepnen. The seeds have survived three and a half millennia and are now in the Museo Egizio in Turin.
So the next time you unscrew the cumin jar in your kitchen: it’s the same spice Kha sent with his wife on her eternal journey.
The Ebers Papyrus: cumin as medicine
The Ebers Papyrus is the most extensive medical document from ancient Egypt. Dated to around 1550 BC, it is roughly twenty metres long and holds more than 842 remedies and healing formulas. Cumin appears in several of them: for digestive complaints, for flatulence, and as an ingredient in ointments.
That’s not as exotic as it sounds. Ask an Egyptian grandmother today what she recommends for a stomach ache, and there’s a good chance you’ll get a cup of cumin brew. Its medicinal use has barely shifted in four thousand years.
What this says about trade is interesting too. Cumin originally comes from the eastern Mediterranean and south-west Asia. The fact that it appears in Egyptian texts and tombs of the second millennium BC shows that the ancient Egyptians were not culinary isolationists. They traded: in spices, in herbs, in knowledge.
In Tutankhamun’s tomb, too
Archaeobotanical studies of the finds from Tutankhamun’s tomb (discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter) have so far identified 24 plant species: coriander, black cumin, broad bean, onion, Egyptian luffa. The seeds lay in small clay jars, some on their own, some in mixtures.
It’s a story worth telling at the entrance to KV62 in the Valley of the Kings: Tutankhamun’s seed stores are now in the Grand Egyptian Museum, and the same spices (coriander, black cumin) are sold a hundred metres away at the market in Luxor. The distance between the ancient kitchen and today’s is shorter than most people think.
How cumin is used today
In modern Egyptian cooking, cumin is practically everywhere. It goes into ful medames (the bean breakfast), into koshary (the national dish of rice, lentils and pasta), into hawawshi (the stuffed flatbread) and into almost every spice mix you’ll find in the cupboard of an Egyptian household.
One important point: Egyptian cumin is usually freshly toasted before it is ground in a mortar. That changes the flavour considerably. It becomes sweeter, rounder, less sharp. If you only know cumin as a pre-ground powder from the supermarket back home, you haven’t really understood how the spice tastes in Egypt.
In Sinai, among the Bedouin, people often drink tea with a few toasted seeds at the bottom of the pot. In Upper Egypt, where I grew up, lamb dishes are rubbed with cumin, coriander and garlic before roasting. Every region has its own signature.
If you want to experience Egyptian spices for yourself
At Orientoura, we take our guests through the markets in Luxor and Aswan. Not as a shopping tour, but as part of how we understand the culture: what people here eat, cook and put on the table. The cumin stall is one of the best places to talk about the continuity of the Egyptian way of life, because it’s concrete: you can smell it, you can touch it.
This is especially memorable on our slower journeys, which leave time for these little side scenes. On the dahabeya Nile cruise, you eat what the cook on board has bought fresh at the village market. On our family trips to the farm experience near Luxor, children often try cumin for the first time and, happily, mostly like it. And on Luxor’s West Bank it grows (quite literally) to the left and right of the path, in fields where pharaohs’ tombs and farms take turns.
More from the Egyptian kitchen: Molokhia – the green soup · Ful medames – the breakfast of the pharaohs
About the author: Dr Sherif Azab-Els grew up in Egypt, lives in Germany, is a trained Egyptologist and the founder of Orientoura.
Auf Deutsch lesen: Kreuzkümmel im alten Ägypten: Aus dem Pharaonengrab