History
The origin of kebab may lie in the short supply of cooking fuel in the Near East, which made the cooking of large foods more economical. Tradition has it that the dish was invented by medieval Persian soldiers who used their swords to grill meat over open-field fires. According to Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveller, in India, kebab was served in the royal houses during the Delhi Sultanate period (1206-1526 CE), and even commoners would enjoy it for breakfast with naan. The dish has been native to the Near East and ancient Greece since antiquity; an early variant of kebab (Ancient Greek: ὀβελίσκος - obeliskos) is attested in Greece since 8th century BCE (archaic period) in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and in classical Greece, amongst others in the works of Aristophanes, Xenophon and Aristotle. Excavations held in Akrotiri on the Greek island of Santorini by professor Christos G. Doumas, unearthed firedogs (stone sets of barbecue for skewers; Ancient Greek: κρατευταί - krateutai) used before the 17th century BCE. In each pair of the supports, the receptions for the spits are found in absolute equivalence, while the line of small openings in the base constitutes a mechanism for supplying the coals with oxygen so that they are kept alight during use.
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