Oldest Cheese in the World: The Evidence and What Is Still Made

The oldest sign of cheesemaking is fat from milk soaked into perforated clay pots in Europe, from the sixth millennium BC. The oldest actual cheese is a kefir cheese from Bronze Age burials in China. The oldest solid cheese is a lump from an Egyptian tomb.

None of those cheeses is still made, and no named cheese on a shop shelf today can be traced to them. What does survive is a handful of old cheeses with long, documented or at least disputed histories, which is the second half of this page.

The oldest cheese in the world at a glance

This is the oldest cheese in the world by type of evidence, with where each find came from and what it proves.

The oldest evidence of cheesemaking: pots from the sixth millennium BC

The oldest evidence of cheesemaking is chemical, not edible: Mélanie Salque, Richard Evershed and colleagues reported milk fat in perforated pottery from early farming sites in temperate Europe, dated to the sixth millennium BC. Archaeologists had long guessed that the holed pots were cheese strainers. The 2013 study in Nature tested that guess and found abundant milk fat in them, which fits a vessel that separates fat-rich curds from whey. The encyclopedia entry on cheese places the Polish finds at about 5500 BCE.

The pots also hint at why cheese came first. Fresh milk is hard for adults without lactase to digest, but draining off whey removes much of the lactose, so early farmers who kept cattle had a reason to make it. The guide to how cheese is made shows the same curd-and-whey split today.

The oldest preserved cheese: kefir cheese from Xiaohe

The oldest preserved cheese in the world comes from the Xiaohe cemetery in Xinjiang, in the Tarim Basin of northwest China, where crumbs of cheese lay on the neck and chest of the mummy known as the Beauty of Xiaohe. Yimin Yang, Andrej Shevchenko and colleagues analyzed the material with proteomics and reported it in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2014. The Max Planck Institute describes it as about 4,000 years old, from the Early Bronze Age, while the encyclopedia entry on cheese dates it to as early as 1615 BCE, so treat the age as roughly 3,600 to 4,000 years.

It was not like cheddar. The team found it was made with a bacteria-and-yeast culture, in the style of kefir, rather than rennet. That meant it needed no animal slaughter for rennet and had very little lactose. It was a soft, fermented product, and the dry desert burials are why any of it survived.

The oldest solid cheese: the tomb of Ptahmes

The oldest solid cheese found so far came from the tomb of Ptahmes, a mayor of Memphis who served the pharaohs Seti and Ramesses, at Saqqara in Egypt. A University of Catania team led by Enrico Greco dug it up in the 2013/2014 season from a 19th-dynasty tomb dated to about 1290 to 1213 BC, and published the analysis in Analytical Chemistry in July 2018.

They identified the proteins with liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The result was a dairy product made from sheep or goat milk mixed with cow's milk. Peptides in the sample also suggested it was contaminated with Brucella melitensis, the bacterium behind brucellosis, which would be an early biomolecular trace of that disease.

Oldest cheeses in ancient texts

The oldest cheeses in ancient texts are described long after the pots and the tombs. Egyptian tomb paintings from about 2000 BCE show it, according to the encyclopedia entry on cheese. Homer's Odyssey, from the 8th century BCE, has the Cyclops Polyphemus drying cheeses on racks and curdling milk in wicker strainers.

The Roman writers are more technical. Columella's De re rustica, around 65 CE, sets out how to coagulate milk and press curd, and the Pecorino Romano consortium quotes his advice on rennet and temperature. Pliny the Elder's Natural History, around 77 CE, describes the cheeses sold in Rome. These texts matter because they show cheesemaking had become a craft with named methods, but they do not prove any modern cheese is the same product.

Oldest cheeses still made today

The oldest cheeses still made today are the ones that can show a long chain of records, and the three best-known cases are Pecorino Romano, Cantal and Roquefort.

• Pecorino Romano: a hard sheep's milk cheese made in Lazio, Sardinia and the province of Grosseto. Its consortium traces it back more than 2,000 years and says Roman legionaries received a daily ration of 27 grams. The Pecorino Romano guide covers the PDO rules.
• Cantal: a French cow's milk cheese that is described as one of the oldest in France, reaching back to the time of the Gauls. It became an AOC in 1956. See Cantal.
• Roquefort: a French sheep's milk blue. Its AOC dates to 1925, and a charter of June 4, 1411 gave the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon a monopoly on ripening it. Read more on the Roquefort page.

For how the legal names work, see PDO and PGI cheeses.

What most oldest cheese in the world claims get wrong

Most oldest cheese in the world claims blur three different records into one. A residue in a pot, a crumb on a mummy and a block in a jar are not the same kind of proof, and "oldest" changes with each.

The second mistake is trusting a cheese's own age story. Roquefort is the clear case: in 1737 Jean Astruc suggested that Pliny's praise of cheeses from Lozère and Gévaudan in AD 79 referred to its ancestor, but scholars note Pliny never clearly names a blue cheese. A tradition can be real and still be much younger than its marketing, and the same caution applies to anything advertised as "2,000 years old."

The third is picturing ancient cheese as aged wheels. Most early cheese was fresh, sour or brined. Cheeses built to last, like Pecorino Romano, came from the need to feed armies and travelers.

Questions about the oldest cheese in the world

These are the questions about the oldest cheese in the world that come up most.

What is the oldest cheese in the world?

The oldest cheese in the world is the kefir cheese from the Xiaohe cemetery in China, at roughly 3,600 to 4,000 years old. The oldest evidence of cheesemaking, in pottery, is older still.

How old is the oldest cheese ever found?

The oldest cheese ever found is about 4,000 years old by the Max Planck Institute's account, or about 3,600 years old by other dating. Pottery residues point to cheesemaking in the sixth millennium BC.

What is the oldest cheese still made today?

The oldest cheese still made today is hard to name, because the claims are not provable. Pecorino Romano, Cantal and Roquefort are among the oldest with long records.

Was ancient cheese edible?

Ancient cheese from tombs is not safe to eat, and nobody has tried it. The Egyptian sample went to a lab, where it showed signs of bacterial contamination.

Did ancient Egyptians make cheese?

Ancient Egyptians made cheese: tomb paintings from about 2000 BCE show it, and a solid cheese was recovered from the tomb of Ptahmes, a sheep or goat and cow milk mix.

Tasting the oldest cheeses today

To taste the oldest cheeses in the world that you can actually buy, start with a wedge of Pecorino Romano, which the consortium ties to Roman legionaries' rations, and add Cantal for a French cow's milk comparison. Eat them with plain bread so the age of the tradition, not the seasoning, is what you taste.