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Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods and dates to the neolithic age. Records of people adding other ingredients to bread in order to make it more flavorful can be found throughout ancient history. In Sardinia, French and Italian archeologists have found a kind of bread baked over 3000 years ago. According to Professor Philippe Marinval, the local islanders knew and used the leaven[1]. The Ancient Greeks had a flat bread called plakous (πλακοῦς, gen. πλακοῦντος - plakountos)[2] which was flavored with various toppings like herbs, onion and garlic. It is also said that soldiers of the Persian King, Darius the Great (521-486 B.C.) baked a kind of flat bread upon their shields and then covered it with cheese and dates, and in the 1st century BC, the Latin poet Virgil refers to the ancient idea of bread as an edible plate or trencher for other foods in this extract from his Latin poem, the Aeneid:
Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:
“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”
These flatbreads, like pizza, are from the Mediterranean area and other examples of flat breads that survive to this day from the ancient Mediterranean world are "focaccia" which may date back as far as the Ancient Etruscans, "coca" (which has sweet and savory varieties) from Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, the Greek "Pita" or "Pide" in Turkish or "Piadina" in the Romagna part of Emilia-Romagan in Italy [3]. Similar flat breads in other parts of the world include the Indian "Paratha", the South Asian "Naan", the Sardinian "Carasau", "Spianata", "Guttiau", "Pistoccu" and the Alsatian "Flammkuchen" and Finnish "rieska".