Lastly let
us turn to the testimony of tradition. About fifty years before
the beginning of the Christian era Diodorus Siculus was writing
his history, in which he gave the story of Osiris and Isis,
who were associated in Egypt with the cultivation of corn. In
this account he states that Isis discovered wheat, or to be
more exact Emmer, and barley growing promiscuously about the
country along with other plants and unknown to mankind. In another
passage he states that the country in which these plants were
found by the goddess was Nysa, which he describes as a high
mountain of Phoeicia, far away. It is significant that Mount
Hermon, on the slopes of which in 1908 Aaronsohn first found
Emmer growing wild, lies about thirty miles inland from the
sites of the Phoenician settlements of Tyre and Sidon.
Time will,
perhaps, show us which, if any, of these three suggestions is
the true solution of our problem; either the first or the last
seems the most probable. In any case the balance of evidence
seems in favour of the view that wheat was first cultivated
at some spot in South-West Asia, in all probability within a
few hundred miles of Aleppo. Whether one of the three grains
was first cultivated, after which the knowledge spread to the
regions in which the others grew wild, or whether, on the other
hand, two or three different centres experimented independently
with different kinds of wheat we cannot be sure. Since Wild
Barley is found more commonly in Asia than in Africa, it is
natural to expect that it was first cultivated in the same region
in which wheat also was first grown, but, until it can be shown
that the predynastic graves in which barley has been found near
Silsileh and at Nega-ed-Dêr are later than sequence date
40, we cannot be sure that the dwellers by the banks of the
Nile had not made independent experiements in the cultivation
of that grain.
Euphrates,
having nearly killed out the game on which they had formally
subsisted, searching for nuts, berries, and roots, like the
Epipalaeolithic inhabitants of Europe, and, being unable, like
their western contemporaries, to live on clams and limpets,
with an occasional oyster feast. Hungry and despondent they
were at times driven, like the inhabitants of Queensland or
Kordofan, to collect the seeds of wild grasses, until there
arose a woman, who was to be their saviour and to lay the founations
of civilization.
It was,
we may well believe, about 5000 BC, or conceivably some centuries
earlier, on the slopes of Mount Nysa, in Phoenicia, far away,
that this woman collected the seeds of barley and of Emmer,
which there grew wild, and scattered them upon a bare surface
of the mountain side, where they were watered by the dew of
Hermon that descended upon the mountains of Zion, so that the
seed that she had cast upon the hillside she found increased
a hundredfold after many days. This woman, one likes to think,
was immortalized by the Egyptians as Isis, and as Cybele, Agdistis,
and Dindymene by the peoples of Asia Minor, later by the Greeks
as Demeter and by the Romans as Ceres. Her memory has been preserved
almost to our own time by our country folk as the Corn Goddess,
whose effigy was carried to the barn in the last harvest waggon.
From The
Origins of Agriculture by Harold Peake 1928
