page_title: Primitive clay oven
section_title: Firing
hierarchical_section_title: Primitive clay oven / Preparatory steps before baking / Firing
caption_attribution_description: Oven they use to bake bread etc. Valley of the Kings, Egypt
context_page_description: The primitive clay oven, or earthen oven / cob oven, has been used since time immemorial by diverse cultures and societies, primarily for, but not exclusive to, baking before the invention of cast-iron stoves, and gas and electric ovens. The general build and shape were, mostly, common to all peoples, with only slight variations in size and in materials used to construct the oven. In primitive courtyards and farmhouses, earthen ovens were built upon the ground and seen as regular fixtures, along with querns, mortar and pestle, a trivet, iron brazier, a grid-iron, a crook, and a butter churn.
  In Arabian, Palestine, Middle-Eastern and North-African societies, bread was often baked within a clay-oven called in some Arabic dialects tabun, or else in a clay oven called tannour, and in other dialects mas'ad. The clay oven, synonymous with the Hebrew word tannour, was shaped like a truncated cone, with an opening either at the top or bottom from which to stoke the fire. Others were made cylindrical with an opening at the top. Built and used in biblical times as the family, neighbourhood, or village oven, clay ovens continue to be made in parts of the Middle East today.
context_section_description: Where clay ovens are made with a top opening, it is covered and, in the case of a tabun oven, a layer of fuel is spread on the outside of the shell and lid. Once the fire takes hold, the fuel is covered with a layer of ash. The fuel will smolder for hours, usually all night long. In the process the heat gets stored in the foundation. The amount of fuel varies depending on the size of oven.
  In Yemen, whenever the woman of the house wished to light a fire in her tannour, she would take-up a little of each kind of wood kindling and arrange them in the oven. First, she would place thin splinters (luṣwah; Arabic: لصوة) or twigs within the mouth of the oven, and directly on top of it she would place thin pieces of wood, followed by thicker pieces of wood. On the two sides of the wood pile she would set up two cakes of sheep dung (kiba; Arabic: الكبا), and then she would set down over the stove all the cooking pots and the coffee kettles that needed heating. The most important splinters for lighting were the jiʿdin, which is a bush where there was a sticky, elastic-like inflammatory substance between its bark and wood. The substance was inflammatory and would light quickly. The fire is started in the oven by inserting a burning rag or paper.
caption: Tannour (Egypt)
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