When the Yale Peabody Museum reopens as a free museum next year, there will be much more than dinosaurs to wow visitors.

There’s a clay page from a Mesopotamian cookbook, dating from 1700 B.C.E., which Peabody staffers have used to make a dish. There are the tiny, cute “mommy and her seven piglets.”

There’s a section of the first book known, the Epic of Gilgamesh. And there are three pages of the first book with a known author, and it’s a woman, known as Enheduana.

The Peabody’s renewed display of ancient civilizations will demonstrate how so much of what we know, and even what we eat, stretches back as much as 5,000 years.

“This tablet here is one of three tablets from this period that have food recipes on them and they’re the only ones in the world,” said Agnete Lassen, associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection. Yale owns all three.

“This one is better preserved. But the recipes are just like a few lines,” Lassen said. “This is a collection of different types of stews. Some of them are vegetarian, they call them green, but most of them have animal fat in them, even if they’re not vegetarian in the modern sense. I’ve tried cooking several of them.”

The recipes are written in Akkadian, a Semitic language related to Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic.

“The cookbooks, because they’re so unique, and because they really speak to something that has very broad interest, we’ve been doing a lot of work on them,” Lassen said.

“I was part of a team collaborating with Harvard. We had a food chemist. We had a philologist, a person to translate, me, a cultural heritage specialist, a culinary historian and a chef. And we’re working together on re-creating the recipes to see how can our different perspectives improve our understanding of the recipes, our understanding of the translation of the texts and also our understanding of ancient cooking.”

The result was a series of academic dinner parties. The recipes aren’t quite as detailed as today’s cookbooks. They might say “prepare the meat,” Lassen said.

“And so we experimented with the same recipes over and over again, slightly modifying cooking times and even ingredients,” Lassen said. “There’s a range of options for how these can taste. We can’t know exactly how they tasted in ancient Mesopotamia. What we can do is just play around and for us get a better sense of what they could have tasted like.”

“So many of the ingredients, many of the animals and plants that we are familiar with today, were originally domesticated in what’s called the Fertile Crescent,” Lassen said.

“More than 50% of all of the calories that are consumed on Earth today come from a tiny little geographical area: sheep and cow and barley and wheat, pigs, other things that really are staples in a lot of people’s cooking. They were domesticated a long time ago, but they still make up a substantial part of what you would eat in the area today or even most of the world.”

The animals displayed in the case are meant to appeal to young people, an idea advocated by Kailen Rogers, associate director of exhibitions.

“I may have advocated for including a few more animals. We had an abundance here,” Rogers said. “It is an opportunity … including things that might capture small children’s attention in a gallery where we have a lot of text that maybe isn’t as immediately accessible to them.”

That’s why the “little piggies are down at eye level,” she said. The rest of the case is divided into grain, livestock and dairy.

There is also a modern, local component.

“We’re also bringing in community voices to expand our range of storytellers across the museum,” Rogers said. “So in this gallery, for example, for the cooking case, we’re working with the local nonprofit Sanctuary Kitchen to develop stories around cooks who are now in New Haven who came from this area.”

A chef from Syria will tell “about her experience cooking in this area,” Rogers said. “There are a lot of ties across the millennia.”

Also, local artist and owner of the Pistachios cafes Mohamad Hafez is creating a large sculpture that will include replicas of many of the exhibits.

The cases also have drawers, which may be used by students from the New Haven Public Schools to store drawings or other projects, according to Chris Renton, Peabody’s spokesman.

“It helps with critical thinking and creativity,” he said. “If we give them a pool of objects and storylines, then they can choose how to do it. They’ll maybe see it’s harder than they thought it was to make some choices and pare things down, which is always helpful for future characters to learn that lesson.”

The Mesopotamian literature case contains the two classics of Babylonian writing: a tablet from the Epic of Gilgamesh, considered the first piece of written literature, and the poems by the woman known as Enheduana, the first named author, according to Lassen.

“This is an Old Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh … and we are showing tablet number two,” she said. “The cool thing about Iraqi archaeology is that we’re discovering new fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh, still, to this day. The archaeological wealth of Iraq is so vast that we’ve hardly even scratched the surface.”

It’s not easy to study Babylonian literature from Iraq, however. “I have been studying ancient Iraq for my entire career, and I still haven’t even been in the country,” Lassen said.

“Every time I want to go, there’s some issue that makes it unsafe or other practical things,” she said. “I’ve worked in Syria. I’ve worked in Jordan. I’ve worked in Turkey. I’ve worked in Greece. But not still not Iraq.”

Hopes run high, however. And there is a lot of “cultural continuity” between Iraq and Turkey, another of her specialties, she said.

Lassen then pointed to three 2-by-4-inch tablets. “They are much less well known than the Epic of Gilgamesh, but they shouldn’t be, in my opinion,” she said. “This is a long poem that was written by a woman named Enheduana and she is the first named author in human literature.”

While the Epic of Gilgamesh is about a  Mesopotamian mythological hero, stories were originally passed down orally and “authorship wasn’t that important,” Lassent said. “But Enheduana writes explicitly that this is her story, and she did something that nobody had ever done before. And so she wrote her story down.”

The tablets date from 500 years after Enheduana’s death. She lived about 2350 B.C.E. “They come from an Old Babylonian school where somebody was writing out her full epic, or her full poem,” Lassen said. “And that just speaks to her significance in ancient times.”

Lassen wishes Enheduana was better known, even by scholars. “It’s decades since the poem here was first published and known to the academic world, at least. But I feel it’s only very recently that the story is gaining more traction in a broader audience,” she said.

The poem is about Enheduana, a high priestess, being driven out of her city during a war and turning to the goddess Ishtar for help. “She is an incredibly fierce goddess,” Lassen said. “And a lot of the poem is about praising her fierceness. For instance, one sentence that I really like, which is … your teeth can crush flint. Like a badass.”

A tablet of Ishtar shows her holding both a bow and a scimitar and standing on two lions. “She’s the goddess of war and physical sex,” Lassen said. “It’s often said love, but she’s not a loving person. She’s sex and war and violence and badassery.”