"Heavy pottery bread molds were set in rows on a bed of embers to bake the dough... within them"
Jane Howard, Bread in Ancient Egypt
Just as the Egyptians brought the prehistoric era to an end in about 3000 B.C.E., they appear to have produced the first closed oven. It was invented as a way to satisfy the demand for better bread. Flatbread had been around for approximately 5,000 years, but Egyptian ovens enabled the bakers to produce bread with yeast; bread was no longer flat, it was rising.
A traditional oven is one of the simplest inventions; it traps heat within its walls in order to cook the food placed within. However, when considering the timing of the invention of the oven it is necessary to consider the agricultural advances that resulted in the need for it. After the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago, the land began to warm up
from its frostbitten slumber and gradually provide its inhabitants with grain and other foods from plant species that had been hibernating beneath the ice. Our predecessors may have been a little slow in responding to these new sources of nutrition but, as demonstrated by the Egyptian bakers, they eventually got there.
Open tandoor (cylindrical clay brick) ovens have been found in Mohenjo-daro, the Indus Valley city settlement also dating from 3000 B.C.E. However, it was the ancient Greeks who developed front-loaded and portable ovens, and used them to turn breadmaking into a profitable venture.
