And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. Genesis 1:29

Agathos Daimon, Osiris, Demeter, Neper, Abellio… All the gods have blessed human farming, but how old is our knowledge of agriculture?

The Zagros Mountain range, located along the border between Iran and Iraq, was home to some of the world’s earliest farmers. Around 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer ancestors began experimenting with farming. Somewhere else, it says that Egyptians were among the first to practice agriculture on a large scale, starting in the pre-dynastic period from the end of the Paleolithic period into the Neolithic period, between around 10,000 BC and 4000 BC. This was made possible with the development of basin irrigation.

However, this transition may have deeper historical roots. In “Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers,” author Tudge explains that agriculture was not abruptly invented 10,000 years ago; instead, it had already existed in a form he refers to as proto-farming or hobby farming for at least 30,000 years prior. This sheds light on the origins of the population explosion associated with the advent of agriculture.

Let’s return to Egypt, where agriculture and harvesting have been essential practices since ancient times. Thanks to the unforgettable friend Marc Chartier and the dear and adorable Marie Grillot for presenting this excellent article.

Egypt: Harvesting information on harvests

via égyptophile

In ancient Egypt, the harvest season (“chemo”) was a period of intense activity that kept agricultural workers busy for several weeks. When they were not enough for the task, mobile teams of reapers were added to them. Harvesting cereals began in Upper Egypt and progressed north to the Delta.

Administrative preambles marked the beginning of each harvest to check the equivalence between the result obtained and the forecasts: “When the ears of corn began to turn yellow,” writes Pierre Montet, “the peasant saw with apprehension the fields invaded by his natural enemies, his masters or the representatives of his masters, with a swarm of scribes, surveyors, employees and gendarmes who would first measure the fields. After that, the grains would be measured by the bushel, and one could get a very exact idea of ​​what the peasant would have to deliver, either to the agents of the treasury or to the administrators of a god such as Amon, who owned the best lands in the country.”

The peasants used sickles with short handles and straight wooden blades in which flint teeth were embedded for their harvesting work. Later, this tool was replaced by a sickle with a curved metal blade. The harvester, leaning slightly forward, did not cut the stalks at ground level but as close as possible to the ears of corn, which he let fall to the ground. Women collected the ears of corn in baskets which, once complete, were carried to the end of the field, then from there, on the backs of donkeys or men, in large wicker baskets suspended from long sticks, were transported to the threshing floor.

The work had to be carried out quickly, often punctuated by the sound of a flute player. A supervisor was particularly attentive to the smooth running of operations, “watching over the grain.”

On the threshing floor, the harvested ears of corn were trampled to be threshed by oxen while the men used the flail to remove the grain and the pitchfork to separate the grain from the chaff. The final sequence was winnowing, often carried out by women, using hollowed-out ox hooves, curved pallets or wooden cups. The grain was finally stored in silos or warehouses, where scribes and controllers came to count the final product of the harvest. “The grains are cleaned,” Pierre Montet explains. “It is time for the scribes who come forward with everything they need to write and for the measurers who have taken their bushel. Woe to the peasant who has hidden part of his harvest or who, even in good faith, cannot give the lawyers everything that the field survey allows to be demanded. He is stretched out on the ground and beaten in rhythm, and worse misfortunes perhaps await him.”

The harvesters then had free rein to harvest for themselves, with the permission of the owners or managers, as much wheat or barley as they could gather in a day.

Looking back over the centuries, we note, from what Benoît de Maillet wrote in 1735 in his “Description of Egypt”, certain differences, but above all, a real continuity in peasant practices in the Nile Valley: “You would hardly forgive me if I forgot to tell you about harvest time and how it is done here. We regularly begin to work on the harvest at the end of April or in the first days of May. Then, we do not amuse ourselves by cutting the wheat, putting it in sheaves, and transporting it to places intended to preserve it for a long time in this way. The inhabitants of Egypt are more expeditious than all this. They begin by pulling up the grain and gathering it in the very middle of the fields in a space prepared to receive it. There, they gather it into a heap twenty to thirty feet in diameter, on which they first drive a few oxen to lower it. Then two oxen are yoked to a machine made in the form of a chair, furnished underneath with sharp stones, or eight or ten iron wheels threaded into a wooden axle. From this machine, a man seated there touches the oxen and makes several turns over this heap of barley or wheat until the wheels have cut the straw and separated the grain, which nevertheless remains with this chopped straw, which is kept for the cattle and serves as their oats. After this first method, the straw is separated from the grain and thrown lightly into the air with forks prepared for this purpose. Finally, there come sifters, who, with particular skill, separate the grain from the earth on the spot; after that, it is transported to granaries. This is how the harvest is carried out here, and this is all the trouble one has to collect the finest and best grain in the world.”

Two centuries later, the same observation: “[In Egypt], the wheat is cut with a primitive sickle; the ears are immediately tied into small sheaves, transported on camelback to the area where the grain will be threshed. This bare surface is usually set up near the fields. The sheaves are piled up there in large stacks.

The threshing machine, the ‘nôrag’, looks like a sledge. It is powered by oxen. Its wooden frame, on top of which sits the driver, supports solid iron wheels passed repeatedly over the wheat; they open the ears and separate the grain from the chaff. The detached stalks are collected, packed in net bags, and loaded onto donkeys’ backs. As for the grain, naturally mixed with straw, is piled up in heaps, ready to be winnowed. (…) Custom dictates that all harvesters are paid in kind. Lines of women and children can be seen returning from the fields carrying their wages on their heads. This custom goes back a long way and is observed to pay other people still.” (W.S. Blackman, Les fellahs de la Haute-Egypte, Payot, 1948)

It must be believed that in Egypt, perhaps more than elsewhere, agricultural practices and traditions span the centuries to the point of being almost timeless, even in their ritual side effects. In ancient Egypt, the beginning of the “chemo” season included the ceremony of the offering of the sheaf by the pharaoh: “presenting himself successively as protector and nourisher of Egypt” to the God Min, God of fertility, or other divinities such as Harsomtous.

Many centuries later, we read this account of another rite, certainly not directly linked to the pharaonic tradition, but no less important in popular “mythology”: “Before starting to cut the harvest, some villagers will pull out the most beautiful ears of corn by hand. They braid them according to a particular pattern, and the object thus formed, called the ‘bride of the grain’, ‘arûset el-qamh’, is used as a charm. One can hang one above the door of a house as a remedy against the evil eye; another will often take its place in the room containing the food provisions to ensure abundance.” (W.S. Blackman)

Let us finally be guided to the Beyond of time, thanks to the symbolic richness of the tomb of Sennedjem (TT1) at Deir el-Medina in the fields of Ialou: “using a wooden sickle, the edge of which is encrusted with flint stones, Sennedjem, bent, cut the ears of corn very high. Thus, the straw will not be damaged by the trampling of the animals during threshing. Iyneferti (follows him) and collects the ears of corn, which she puts in a basket. We will notice in passing the size of the wheat stalks and the suggested immensity of the field that nothing limits. In the idyllic world of the Beyond, the harvests are always extraordinary.” (Osirisnet)

In these modern times, when Egypt is forced to buy wheat from foreign countries to meet the needs of its 90 million inhabitants, it is good to remember, as Benoît de Maillet wrote, that it produced “the most beautiful and best grain in the world.”

Marc Chartier

Sources :
Pierre Montet, Daily life in Egypt at the time of Ramses, Hachette, 1946 http://www.museum.agropolis.fr/pages/expos/egypte/fr/travaux/moisson.htm http://jfbradu.free.fr/egypte/SIXIEMES/agriculture/agriculture.html http://www.osirisnet.net/tombes/nobles/menna69/menna_02.htm

Published 11th May 2016 by Unknown