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Sauces and condiments from Mesopotamia

Šiqqu (Mesopotamian fermented fish or locust sauce)šiqqu (Akkadian)

Šiqqu was a fermented sauce of fish, and sometimes of locusts or shellfish, that Mesopotamian households bought and stored like vinegar. Cuneiform letters, word lists and medical texts name it, but no surviving text says how it was made, so the steps below are a reconstruction.

Fully documentedSauces and condiments

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedNo recipe survives. Letters buy it by the sila, a unit of volume, such as five silas ordered with vinegar in one Old Babylonian letter.
Fish[cad]
LocustsA medical text names šiqqu made with locusts[cad]
Shellfish and grasshoppersNamed in a popular account of the Yale culinary tablets[aramco1988]
Start
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What changes: Fish or locusts are packed into a pot (reconstruction)

Step 1 of 3
Pack fish or locusts in a jar (reconstruction)
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented

Reconstruction. The ingredients come from the texts; no text describes the method. Output: packed fish or locusts.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Šiqqu was a fermented sauce of fish, and sometimes of locusts or shellfish, that Mesopotamian households bought and stored like vinegar. Cuneiform letters, word lists and medical texts name it, but no surviving text says how it was made, so the steps below are a reconstruction.

What makes this one different

Roman garum is known from detailed recipes. Šiqqu is far older and known only from its name, its pots and its uses, so how it was made is a guess.

Related ferments

Safety

No surviving text records how Mesopotamians kept šiqqu safe. As a general hazard of salted or fermented fish, the FDA says spores of Clostridium botulinum are very common in the gills and viscera of fish, and that fish preserved by salting, drying, pickling or fermentation should be eviscerated first, because without it toxin can form during the process even with strict temperature control. The steps here are a reconstruction, not a recipe to follow.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary defines šiqqu as garum, a brine or sauce made of fish or locusts, attested in Old, Middle and Standard Babylonian texts. It was a household staple paired with vinegar, bought for dates in a Middle Babylonian record, and used in medicine. A popular account of the Yale culinary tablets of about 1700 BC says cooks made it from fish, shellfish and grasshoppers.

Starter
The sources we found do not say how its fermentation begins.
Microbes
No study we found names its microbes.
Process times
The sources we found give no figure for how long any of its steps take.
Temperature, salt and pH
The sources we found give no temperature, salt or pH figure for any of its steps.
  1. [cad] Reiner E. (ed.) 1992, The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, vol. 17 Š part III, šiqqu (šiqu), pp. 99–100book
  2. [aramco1988] Lawton J. 1988, Mesopotamian menus, Saudi Aramco World 39(2):4–13web
  3. [wilson2025] Wilson S.M. 2025, Cut the mustard, flavor archeology from fish sauce to ketchup, Natural History (author's copy)web
  4. [fda-ch13] US Food and Drug Administration, Fish and Fishery Products Hazards and Controls Guidance, Chapter 13: Clostridium botulinum Toxin Formationgov