Īncient Africans, Sumerians, Egyptians, Polynesians, Native Americans, Chinese, Indians, Greeks, Celts and countless other people used mortars and pestles for processing materials and substances for cooking, arts, cosmetics, simple chemicals, ceramics and medicine. These rock mortars are large enough for a person to stand upright by them and crush the cereals inside the cavity with a long wooden pestle. Īnother Stone Age example are the rock mortars in the Raqefet Cave in Israel, which are natural cavities in the cave floors, used by Late Natufians around 10000 BC to grind cereals for brewing beer in the cavities. The Kebaran mortars that have been found are sculpted, slightly conical bowls of porous stone, and the pestles are made of a smoother type of stone. Stone mortars and pestles have also been used by the Kebaran culture ( Levant with Sinai) from 22000 to 18000 BC to crush grains and other plant material. Scientists have found ancient mortars and pestles in Southwest Asia that date back to approximately 35000 BC. Various stone mortars and pestles have been found, while wooden or clay ones would perish much easier during the course of time. Mortars and pestles have been invented in the Stone Age, when humans found that processing food and various other materials by grinding and crushing into smaller particles allowed for improved use and various advantages, such as hard grains could be cooked and digested easier if ground first, grog would vastly improve fired clay and larger objects such as blocks of salt would be much easier to handle and use when ground and pulverized into smaller pieces. Rock mortars in Raqefet Cave, Israel, used for making beer during the Stone Age Butter would be churned from cream or milk in a wooden container with a long wooden stick, very like the use of wooden mortars and pestles. Large wooden mortars and wooden pestles would predate and lead to the invention of butterchurns, as domestication of livestock and use of dairy (during the Neolithic) came well after the mortar and pestle. Mortars and pestles anticipate modern blenders and grinders and can be described as having the function of small, mobile, hand-operated mills that don't require electricity or fuel to operate. Working over a large mortar that a person can stand next to is physically easier and more ergonomical (by ensuring a better posture of the whole body) than for a small quern, where a person has to crouch and use the uncomfortable, repetitive motion of hand grinding by sliding. Large mortars allow for several people with several pestles to stamp the material faster and more efficiently. Another advantage is that the mortar can be made large enough for a person to stand upright and adjacent to it and use the combined strength of their upper body and the force of gravity for better stamping. The invention of mortars and pestles seems related to that of quern-stones, which use a similar principle of naturally indented, durable, hard stone bases and mallets of stone or wood to process food and plant materials, clay, or minerals by stamping, crushing, pulverizing and grinding.Ī key advantage of the mortar is that it presents a deeper bowl for confining the material to be ground without the waste and spillage that occurs with flat grinding stones. In cooking, they are typically used to crush spices, to make pesto and certain cocktails such as the mojito, which requires the gentle crushing of sugar, ice, and mint leaves in the glass with a pestle. They are used in chemistry settings for pulverizing small amounts of chemicals in arts and cosmetics for pulverizing pigments, binders, and other substances in ceramics for making grog in masonry and in other types of construction requiring pulverized materials. Mortars and pestles have been used in cooking since prehistory today they are typically associated with the profession of pharmacy due to their historical use in preparing medicines.
![quern alchemy lab quern alchemy lab](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0cplDPjEgvw/mqdefault.jpg)
The substance to be ground, which may be wet or dry, is placed in the mortar where the pestle is pounded, pressed, and rotated into the substance until the desired texture is achieved.
![quern alchemy lab quern alchemy lab](https://www.trueachievements.com/customimages/l/110265.jpg)
The pestle ( / ˈ p ɛ s əl/, also US: / ˈ p ɛ s t əl/) is a blunt, club-shaped object. The mortar ( / ˈ m ɔːr t ər/) is characteristically a bowl, typically made of hard wood, metal, ceramic, or hard stone such as granite. Mortar and pestle is a set of two simple tools used from the Stone Age to the present day to prepare ingredients or substances by crushing and grinding them into a fine paste or powder in the kitchen, laboratory, and pharmacy. Guinean women stamping into a large mortar.