Bread is one of humankind’s oldest prepared foods and dates back at least to the neolithic. Records of people adding other ingredients to bread to make it more flavoursome can be found throughout ancient history. The Ancient Greeks, for example, had a flat bread called "plakuntos" which was flavoured with various toppings like herbs, onion and garlic. It is also said that soldiers of the Persian King, [citation needed]Darius the Great (521-486 B.C.) baked a kind of bread flat upon their shields and then covered it with cheese and dates and in the 1st century BC, Virgil refers to the ancient idea of bread as an edible plate or “trencher” for other foods in this extract from the Aeneid:
"Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
Focaccia: an ancient Mediterranean flatbread.
Focaccia: an ancient Mediterranean flatbread.
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 two 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 and Greeks and "Pita". Other flat breads with added toppings and ingredients are found throughout the world today like the Turkish "Pide"[1], the Indian "Paratha" and the German "Flammkuchen".
