The earliest mention of a hummus-like dish was in a cookbook attributed to the historian Ibn al-Adim.
The work is commonly identified as Kitab al-Wuslah ila al-Habib, a 13th-century Syrian cookbook containing hundreds of recipes. Ibn al-Adim was an Aleppine historian, biographer, and diplomat who lived from 1192 to 1262.
The attribution is not completely certain: surviving manuscripts identify the cookbook inconsistently, and modern scholarship often describes its author as anonymous or possibly Ibn al-Adim. That uncertainty explains why the careful wording is “attributed to,” rather than “written by.”
The recipe itself was not identical to every modern version of hummus. Early preparations could include chickpeas, sesame, lemon, and olive oil while omitting garlic. Later Cairo cookbooks recorded related chickpea purées, showing that hummus-like dishes developed across the medieval Levant and Egypt.