Table of Contents
The usual story of agriculture is a slow one: foragers learn to plant, villages follow, then cities. Many sources on this site tell it differently. In their version farming is a gift, brought by a god or a teacher, and sometimes it arrives already finished, with crops that have no wild ancestor at all.
Here I set the two versions side by side: the myths of the teachers, the crops that look too old, and the archaeology that keeps moving the dates.
A gift of the gods
In Egypt the teacher has a name:
In this central Egyptian myth, Osiris rules as the benevolent king of Egypt, bringing civilization, agriculture, and just laws to humanity.
MythVision, Cain and Abel and older myths, at 6:46
See Cain and Abel beside older brother myths, where MythVision compares the farmer Cain and the herder Abel with Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Roman tales of brothers. Kara Cooney draws the line further:
Jesus connects to Osiris and to festivals of seasonality and these are agricultural gods
Kara Cooney, Egyptian myth and Christian origins, at 16:07
See Egyptian myth and the Christian story. The bull, the animal that pulls the plough, became sacred for the same reason; see The bull.
The Greek and Roman version is a fall. Ovid’s Golden Age needed no farming at all:
Then of her own accord the earth produced a store of every fruit. The harrow touched her not, nor did the plowshare wound her fields.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.101-102, Brookes More, Boston, Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922
See Ovid’s Four Ages, where agriculture begins only in the Silver Age, under Jupiter, together with the seasons.
Crops that look too old
W. Scott-Elliot points to wheat as a puzzle:
It is well known that wheat as we know it has never existed in a truly wild state, nor is there any evidence tracing its descent from fossil species.
W. Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis
He adds that five varieties of wheat were already cultivated in Europe in the Stone Age. See The Story of Atlantis. In his account of Lemuria he describes an early time before farming:
Up to this time agriculture was unknown, and the uses of fire had not been discovered.
W. Scott-Elliot. The Lost Lemuria (1904), p. 33
See The Lost Lemuria (1904). The channeled pages add the Atlantean farmers themselves. On Atlantis: Diet they plant companion crops together and listen to their plants, taught by Thoth that everything in the cosmos follows the same harmonies.
What the digging shows
The archaeology keeps pushing the dates back. At Guilá Naquitz Cave in Oaxaca, domesticated squash seeds date to 8,000 to 10,750 years ago; see also Cucurbita: cultivation Before the Great Flood. On Göbekli Tepe a temple stands on a mountaintop with no clear signs of farming, and has reopened the debate over whether farming led to settlement or settlement to farming.
Karahan Tepe, from the same early horizon, points the same way. On Karahan Tepe before farming History Time notes:
Still, not one shard of pottery has ever been found, nor any evidence of domesticated plants or animals.
History Time, Karahan Tepe and early gatherings, at 13:58
That is why its builders are described as complex foragers, not farmers.
In the Americas the farmers left records too. Cyrus Thomas writes of the Maya codex he studied:
That the people of the section where it was prepared were peaceable, not addicted to war; and were sedentary, supporting themselves chiefly by agricultural products
Cyrus Thomas, A Study of the Manuscript Troano (1882), p. vi
See A Study of the Manuscript Troano and Atlantean Peruvian Civilization, where land was surveyed for its best use and soils were analysed.
The oldest farming manual
Nabatean Agriculture, the Falaha Nabatiya, is counted among the oldest known works on agriculture, with farming methods that were advanced for their time. And on Red Pyramid: a Fertilizer Factory I follow the idea that the Red Pyramid at Dahshur produced fertilizer, against the background of Mesopotamian farmers who manured their fields some 10,000 years ago.
Related pages
- Nabatean Agriculture
- Guilá Naquitz Cave
- Cucurbita: cultivation Before the Great Flood
- Red Pyramid: a Fertilizer Factory
- Ovid’s Four Ages
- Atlantis: Diet
- Göbekli Tepe
- The bull
- Karahan Tepe before farming
For every page I tagged with agriculture, see the Agriculture tag archive.
