Ancient Israelite cuisine aside, and the loaves were baked on the heated surface. People also began placing a convex dome, initially earthenware and later metal, over the pit-oven and cooking the flatbreads on the dome instead of on the ash-covered surface; this type of oven is probably what was meant by the biblical "machabat", often translated as “griddle”. The Persians introduced a clay oven called a tanur (similar to the Indian tandoor), which had an opening at the bottom for the fire, and through which the bread was placed to be baked on the inner wall of the upper chamber from the heat
Masonry oven modular (and sometimes portable) variant—essentially a large, upside-down clay pot with an door opening cut into the side. They were often surrounded with brick as they were built into English chimneys, allowing coals and ashes to be swept onto the common hearth, and smoke to go into the chimney. "Like the Athenian cooking bell and the primitive quern, the rough clay oven had its counterparts for several thousand years, among its descendants being our own seventeenth-century Devon gravel-tempered clay wall ovens... Built into the side wall of the open hearth so that from the front only the opening was visible,