25
CHAPTER
3
PROMISCUOUS PLANTS
OF THE NORTHERN
FERTILE CRESCENT
When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the
founders of human civilization.
Daniel Webster (1782–1852)
HUNTER-GATHERERS, who had previously made a living based on their
solid knowledge of plant life and an understanding of animal behavior, con-
tinued to follow many of their old ways even as they engaged in agricultural
activities. Consequently, the Neolithic Revolution, as we have come to call
the invention of agriculture, although the most momentous of humankind’s
achievements, was not revolutionary in that it brought abrupt change. Rath-
er, beginning about 11,000 years ago, grain gathering began to shade into
grain cultivation in the Jericho Valley and, at about that time or a little later,
hunting started giving way to herding in the Zagros Mountains.
1
Millennia
later surpluses were generated, giving rise to agricultural civilizations such
as of Mesopotamia, Egypt, northern China, and the Indus Valley, and with
them came more complex and stratifi ed societies.
2
It is probably not coincidental that all of these fi rst civilizations emerged
within a relatively few centuries of one another, despite the distances sepa-
rating them. Each one was located on a river and dependent on annual fl ood-
ing for moist, rich soils rather than on the vagaries of rainfall.
3
Agriculture
was simplifi ed because there was little need for plowing or manuring and,

26
A Movable Feast
as a result, despite occasional famines, populations grew larger. At least
they did until around 2200
BCE
when droughts and reductions in river
fl ows caused severe and successive famines, exhausted grain stores, and
brought about the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, Sumerian civili-
zation in Mesopotamia (from the Greek meaning between the rivers), and
Harrapan civilization in the Indus Valley.
These early Neolithic Revolutions link the end of the Stone Age with the
beginning of recorded history, when we can see early civilizations with rela-
tive clarity. Yet, the end of the Stone Age is so obscure that we cannot be cer-
tain where the fi rst Neolithic Revolution occurred, although as a rule pride
of place is given to that large and fertile arc running from the Persian Gulf
to the eastern Mediterranean and south to the Nile Valley that we call the
Fertile Crescent. But since agriculture in the northern part of that arc devel-
oped substantially earlier than it did in Egypt, we employ the term “northern
Fertile Crescent” to exclude Egypt from this geographic generalization.
Because of the Old World’s west-east axis, the northern Fertile Crescent
was a region ideally located to radiate agriculture in all directions. Its crops
could and did spread westward throughout the Mediterranean and into North
Africa, northwestward to Europe, and eastward to the Indus valley.
4
Such diffusion often took place over water. The Fertile Crescent is an area
surrounded by bodies of it – the Persian Gulf on its southeast, the Red Sea to
the southwest, the Caspian and Black seas to the north, and the Mediterra-
nean to the west. It is also bounded by mountains on the north and east, and
desert to the south, all of which acted in concert to moderate a climate that
nurtured the growth of wild grains, especially the ancestral forms of wheat

and barley – seminal crops that were the foundation of food production
in western Asia. These plentiful wild grains made possible (and practical)
widespread cereal exploitation and, consequently, encouraged sedentism, as
previously nomadic peoples discovered perennial sources of food.
WHEAT
Wheat (genus Triticum ) is a grass that today helps to sustain 35 percent
of the world’s population. Its origins are in Southwest Asia where its wild
ancestors (einkorn and emmer) were fi rst manipulated by humans. Sickle
blades, grinding stones, even grain storage pits have been found on Natufi an
(pre-Neolithic foragers) sites that were lived on year round by people who
harvested wild grain, although with less than optimal effi ciency.
5
Promiscuous Plants of the Northern Fertile Crescent
27
The trouble with wild wheat, and other wild
grasses, is that nature intended that its seed-con-
taining spikelets fall easily off a ripe ear to be
dispersed by the wind, whereupon their arrow
shapes and barbs would establish them in the
earth. It is a strategy that promotes reproduc-
tion but is wasteful of food. Domestication
involved reversing this procedure so that the
spikelets became plumper, tended to stay put
even on a ripe ear during harvesting, and sported
poorly developed barbs.
6
It stands to reason that
this reversal was an accidental product of a selec-
tion process whereby plants with spikelets that
remained attached to sturdy stalks were the most

likely to have their seeds gathered and planted the
following season. But the price was that wheat that
had always planted itself now depended on humans
for that task.
Such accidents were often the midwives of domesti-
cation and this one must have taken place at some time
before 8000
BCE
– the approximate date when domesti-
cated einkorn and emmer were being cultivated around
Jericho in the Jordan Valley and at about the same time, at
Tell Aswad (just to the southeast of Damascus).
7
Shortly
after this a fully agricultural economy based on farming
and herding emerged throughout the region. Within a few
generations the “self-planting” ability disappeared and the wheat had been
domesticated.
8
It has been estimated that it took 5,000 acres to support a
single hunter-gatherer. In the new agricultural societies 5,000 acres of wheat
could sustain 5,000 people.
After this fi rst (but very lengthy) phase of grain domestication that also
included barley (see ahead), fruits such as grape, olive, date, and fi g were
brought under cultivation, although their full dietary potential could not
have been immediately appreciated. Wild nuts – especially almond ( Prunus
dulcis), pine nuts (genus Pinus) and pistachios ( Pistacia vera) – became
tame and as important in the diets of the fi rst farmers as they had been
for the foragers they supplanted. According to the archeological records of
the third and second millennia

BCE
, new foods such as apples, garlic, and
28
A Movable Feast
coriander were being cultivated along with
foods domesticated outside the Fertile Cres-
cent such as millets, sesame, and rice, indicat-
ing contact with the other early centers of
agriculture and early steps in the direction of
food globalization.
9
Within Mesopotamia, diets varied according to the status and location of
the consumers. People in civilizations that practiced irrigation – those in the
south – used wheat but favored barley and beer, along with dates and date wine.
In the hilly regions, however, wheat was the favored grain and grape wine the
most important of the beverages. Close to the Mediterranean wheat and wine
were joined by olives and olive oil. Meat was seldom available to the lower
classes, and state workers received grains as the bulk of their food rations.
10
Following establishment of an agricultural beachhead in the northern
Fertile Crescent, wheat was transformed into the banner of an expand-
ing Neolithic Revolution. It arrived in Europe around 6000
BCE
, could be
found in northern Egypt after 5000
BCE
, and reached south Asia and China
by 4000
BCE
.

11
The major early civilizations that emerged – the city-states
of Mesopotamia, dynastic Egypt, and the civilization of the Indus Valley –
were all dependent on wheat. But there were also
other cereals and a host of legumes as well.
BARLEY
Wild barley ( Hordeum spontaneum) was present
in Western Asia and its story is similar to that of
wheat. It was gathered for many millennia before
evidence indicates that domestication took place
in the eastern Fertile Crescent around 9,000
years ago. But although domesticated barley
(H. vulgare) came along later than wheat, after
it did barley was generally its companion. They
spread together into the Aegean region and then
into the Balkans, central Europe, the Nile Valley,
and the western Mediterranean basin. By 8,000
years ago barley agriculture, but not yet wheat, had
reached the foothills of the Indus Valley and from
there it moved into South and East Asia.
12
Promiscuous Plants of the Northern Fertile Crescent
29
Much of barley’s appeal seems to have been its ability to ferment, which
lent it to beer-brewing. This was an important, early use of the grain in
ancient Mesopotamia
13
and by 2300
BCE
barley had almost completely

replaced wheat in the Mesopotamian Valley. The reason, however, was not
so much a desire for still more beer as it was that irrigation was turning the
region’s lands salty, and barley is by far the more salt tolerant of the two.
14
RYE
Rye ( Secale cereale) is a close relative of the genus Triticum (the wheats) –
so close, in fact, that it was recently possible to combine the two by breed-
ing Triticum and Secale to become the hybrid Triticale.
15
Wild rye grew to
the north of the range of wild wheat and barley in western Asia – in the
Taurus Mountains of Turkey through Iran to Caucasia, where it still grows
wild today. There is some evidence of rye cultivation during the Neolithic,
but very little, and the fi rst unequivocal indication that it was being delib-
erately cultivated only dates to the Bronze Age in north- central Anatolia.
A major problem with dating the domestication of rye is that it existed
for a long time as a contaminant of wheat and barley and was consequently
unintentionally cultivated. Illustrative was the “volunteer” rye now called
the “wheat of Allah” by Anatolian peasants – recalling a time when the
wheat crop failed but rye (much hardier that wheat), which had inadver-
tently been planted with the wheat, still stood. The peasants assumed that
Allah had “sent” them a replacement crop.
16
In like manner, rye probably smuggled itself into Europe where its
importance increased during Roman times when, because of its winter
hardiness and ability to resist drought and grow in acid soils, it became an
ever more valuable crop in northern and eastern Europe. At times, how-
ever, such virtues were cancelled out by the susceptibility of rye ears to
the ergot fungus, which, when ingested, causes the disease ergotism. Often
its symptoms were manifested in the nervous system dysfunction of con-

sumers, but sometimes in gangrene, and untold thousands died during the
132 European epidemics of ergotism counted between 591 and 1789.
17
OAT
Oat ( Avena sativa) is another grain whose wild ancestors were richly repre-
sented in the soils of western Asia. Like rye, oat found its way into domes-
tication as a weedy admixture in cultivated cereals such as wheat or barley,