Mansaf Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Mansaf is a dish of the Levant, the lands along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and above all of Jordan. Rice is spread over a large tray, boiled lamb is laid on top, and over it goes a sauce made by dissolving jameed, yoghurt that has been fermented and dried. It has long been described as a dish of hospitality among the Bedouin, the nomads of the desert. Today it is the feast that Jordanian celebrations cannot do without, and in 2022 it was inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage.

Lamb, milk and rice have all been eaten in this land for a long time. Rice, for one, appears in the description of the region that the geographer al-Muqaddasi wrote in 985, which names Baysan on the Jordan (today's Beit She'an) as the place from which comes all the rice eaten in the provinces of Jordan and Palestine. A word for rice heaped on a tray is on record by the nineteenth century. An Arabic dictionary published in Beirut in 1870 gives the popular expression mansaf al-ruzz, 'mansaf of rice', for a mound of cooked rice on a tray from which people eat. The dictionary says nothing of meat or sauce, though, and does not say where the expression was used.

Rice and lamb heaped on a great tray for guests were written down in the desert early in the twentieth century. In May 1917, T. E. Lawrence was staying with the Huwaytat in their camp in the Wadi Sirhan, in what is now northern Saudi Arabia, and was served the same dish again and again. In his memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom he describes a copper tray five feet across, its rim banked with white rice, piled high with boiled legs, ribs and heads of mutton, with melted butter and fat poured over it from the cooking pot. He gives the dish no name, and no jameed sauce appears.

Interviews in Hartha, a farming village in northern Jordan, trace one village's dish decade by decade. As Hartha remembers it, before 1945 meat was laid on thin flatbread (shrak) and moistened with broth and clarified butter. Later a layer of cracked wheat (bulgur) went on top of the bread; from around 1945 rice spread, and by the early 1950s it had overtaken bulgur. Almonds were added in the early 1960s and pine nuts in the mid-1960s, and at about the same time a sauce of dissolved jameed took the place of the clarified butter and broth. The flatbread stayed underneath into the early to mid-1970s. The villagers' memories seldom reach back before the 1940s, and the researcher who recorded them cautions against applying the sequence to Jordan as a whole.

Mansaf's standing as the dish of the whole country is comparatively recent. In 1964 King Hussein, writing in National Geographic to encourage tourism, called mansaf 'the traditional Bedouin feast dish' and tied it to 'the hospitality of the desert Arab'; he did not present it as the dish of all Jordanians. An article by Wojnarowski and Williams in the journal Contemporary Levant in 2020 argues that mansaf's ingredients, the way it is made and served, and the uses it is put to grew out of the course of modern history, closely bound up with the building of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Jordan has a tradition that places the beginning of mansaf in antiquity. It holds that Mesha, king of Moab in the ninth century BC, had lamb cooked in milk to set his people apart from the Hebrews, who do not eat meat and milk together. Some tellings tie the dish instead to Abraham in the Book of Genesis. Others say the name comes from nasafa, 'to destroy', and marks the shattering of a pagan custom.

Take the name first. That nasafa can mean to tear a building down from its foundations is itself true; the Arabic dictionary published in Beirut in 1870 gives that sense. But the same root also yields words for a tool for winnowing grain and for a mound of cooked rice heaped on a tray, and nineteenth-century dictionaries also give mansaf as a copper table or a wooden vessel. The people of Hartha, the village in northern Jordan, say the name comes from a word for 'bursting', after the bubbles that pop in boiling water or in the sauce. The name has no single settled meaning. What the sources do not support is the step that ties the sense 'to destroy' to the story of King Mesha.

The dates do not fit the tradition either. The mansaf of today, made with rice and a fermented-milk sauce, took its form in the twentieth century; in Hartha the fermented-milk sauce came in only in the mid-1960s. That dish could not yet have stood on the table of a ninth-century-BC king, still less in the time of Abraham. No contemporary record, the Mesha Stele among them, has been found to mention it.

Some scholarship also declines to treat mansaf as a dish that never changed. The 2020 article cited above rejects the picture of mansaf as a relic carried over unchanged from an imagined pre-modern desert life. None of this denies the age of the nomadic way of eating meat with dairy and bread. What falls away is the storyline in which today's mansaf began with a single ancient king.

Where, then, was the first mansaf made? A desert camp in 1917 already set a great tray of rice before its guests, and in a northern Jordanian village the fermented-milk sauce arrived in the 1960s. Joining such records together still does not lead back to a single starting point, and those who tell the dish's story do not agree on where it began. Far closer to the surviving record than the glittering tale of an ancient king's invention is a modern dish that changed shape little by little through the years when the nation was being built.