In the pancake we have most probably the earliest form of farinaceous food known to the nations which derived their civilization from the basin of the Mediterranean. Among these nations wheat has been in use from a time far beyond the remotest historical period, and to account for its introduction myth has been invoked; but this wheat was cooked without leaven, or was fried in a pan, after the style of the tortilla still used in Spanish-speaking countries, or of the pancake common among ourselves. Pliny[489] says that there were no bakers known in Rome until nearly six hundred years after the foundation of the city, in the days of the war with Persia; but he perhaps meant the public bakers authorized by law. The use of wheat and the art of baking bread, as we understand it to-day, were practically unknown to the nations of northern Europe until within the recent historical period.[490] Nothing would be more in consonance with the mode of reasoning of a primitive people than that, at certain designated festivals, there should be a recurrence to the earlier forms of food, a reversion to an earlier mode of life, as a sort of propitiation of the gods or goddesses who had cared for the nation in its infancy and to secure the continuance of their beneficent offices. Primitive man was never so certain of the power of the gods of the era of his own greatest development that he could rely upon it implicitly and exclusively and ignore the deities who had helped him to stand upon his feet. Hence, the recurrence to pancakes, to unleavened breads of all kinds, among various peoples. This view of the subject was made plain to me while among the Zuñi Indians. Mr. Frank H. Cushing showed me that the women, when baking the "loaves" of bread, were always careful to place in the adobe ovens a tortilla with each batch of the newer kind, and no doubt for the reason just given. UNLEAVENED BREAD. The unleavened bread of the earliest period of Jewish history has come down to our own times in the Feast of Unleavened Bread, still observed by the Hebrews in all parts of the world, in the bread used in the eucharistic sacrifice by so large a portion of the Christian world, and apparently in some of the usages connected with the half-understood fast known as the "Ember Days." Brand quotes from an old work in regard to the Ember Days: "They were so called 'because that our elder fathers wolde on these days ete no brede but cakes made under ashes.'"[491] The sacred cake or "draona" of the Parsi "is a small round pancake or wafer of unleavened bread, about the size of the palm of the hand. It is made of wheaten flour and water, with a little clarified butter, and is flexible."[492] A variety of the "draona," called a "frasast," is marked with the finger nail and set aside for the guardian spirits of the departed.[493]