Karak Resources Project

In Simakiyya only about ten village women continue to bake bread using traditional village methods. There are many different types of bread in Jordan but the bread, khobiz, from the tabun, earthen oven, is the favorite for most villagers. Umm-Saati`, the mother of Saati' our research assistant, mixes the dough for the flat round bread, khobiz tabun, the night before so that it will have risen sufficiently by the time she is ready to bake bread at 6:00 each morning. She has been baking bread in this traditional way every morning for more than 50 years.

The earthen oven, tabun, is a small round dome constructed of rocks and mud built over a pit where sheep dung is constantly burning. First, a large pottery vessel that serves as the actual oven must be constructed from clay mixed with straw and dried in the sun for several weeks before burrowing in the middle of the oven shelter. The archaeological excavation at Mudaybi’ has uncovered several of these clay pots in the fortress ruins. After placed in the ground, sheep dung is packed around the sunken pottery vessel. Inside the actual pot are several hundred small round river rocks found in Wadi Mujib. The stones are getting harder and harder to find. A metal disk covers the submerged oven and a ring has been welded on top where a wooden handle can be inserted when the oven is hot. New dried dung needs to be added each evening and, even though burning dung must never go out, the ash build up must be occasionally removed.

Even though Umm - Saati' is a small woman, she must stoop to enter the low structure and with her bowl of dough pats out two small flat round pieces to bake. She removes the lid by sliding the wooden handle through the lid's top ring and places two round pieces on the hot river rocks quickly replacing the lid. Occasionally she burns her fingers while lying down or removing the bread from the hot rocks. Two pieces of bread can be baked at a time and the first loaves take only two to three minutes to bake. But as the oven starts to cool off, baking the last of the eight loaves takes much longer, possibly even up to ten minutes.

Umm - Saati' will sometimes return the few hundred yards to her home to tend to other household tasks. If she remains at the tabun, her mother-in-law will visit with her. The earthen oven structure is actually built just behind the house of her husband's mother who is considered to be the oldest woman in the village with an estimated age of over 93 years old. With the eight pieces of khobiz tabun finally baked, Umm - Saati' is ready to return home and serve the five members of her family breakfast (as well an any hungry anthropologists that might be hanging around).