Pizza, focaccia, pide and mountain bread – wherever you go today, you’ll find one or other on offer for lunch or a quick snack.

Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker's Atlas by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

They’re just a few of a huge variety of what can loosely be termed flatbreads – those staples of life which you’ll find in a sweep stretching from India, through Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Eaten in large quantities at each meal, the origins of these breads are ancient, stemming from the time when man discovered how to pound grain, moisten it and cook it over hot stones. Such breads evolved as a way of conserving the grain supply and provided nourishing carbohydrates through the long winter months.
In each country flatbread has a different name with varied recipes creating many varieties from the pocket pita to the Turkish pide, the Lebanese kemaj, the Armenian lavash,  the Moroccan khubz and the Algerian kesra.
In Afghanistan a naan, based on a sourdough leaven, and fashioned in the shape of a snowshoe is popular. In The Italian Baker, Carol Field (HarperCollins) points out that remains of carbonised focacce as old as Neolithic man indicate that even before recorded time, Italians were pounding grain, mixing it with water and boiling it into a mush. It was then cooked on hot stones or under the embers to form a flat pancake. Even today, in the Arab world, bread is cooked over a flat or concave metal sheet, called a saj. These early breads were not leavened, which means no yeast or raising agent was used to make them. The Egyptians discovered the miracle of leavening. Field suggests it was probably due to an accident: the flour and water mixed together for a batch of bread was left out, trapping wild yeasts from the air and transforming the mixture into a soft puffy mass (or leaven).
Someone then tossed a bit of the risen puffy mass into fresh dough and in doing so discovered the process of leavening dough.
Most of the breads we eat today are leavened.