Philobiblon

p. 25 “In recent decades new research into agricultural history has overturned paradigms that many of us learnt at school. We were taught that large-scale farming began in the Fertile Crescent when Mesopotamian chieftains consolidated their hold over multiple towns and create bureaucracies that coordinated the work of irrigating grain fields. … The theory had its roots in 19th-century concerns … the narrative of state-formation, which was the major political preoccupation of post-Napoleonic Europe, was further linked with the origins of the coercive power of the community – that is to say, the origins of war…. What prehistorians now believe is quite different. The agricultural revolution came about in fits and starts; it was by no means the creation of a single culture. Its great effect was achieved by the combination of scattered discoveries into a readily adaptable package of seeds herds and techniques of cultivation…. Researchers in other fields began to revise long-accepted views of the nutritional soundness of cultivated crops. What for generations had seemed to be a positive, progressive emergence from the dark uncertainties of the Paleolithic period was turned on its head. A utopian view of the Paleolithic is now far more common, along with a nagging sense that a lot of today’s proglems can be traced to the Neolithic Revolution, the beginning of today’s problems.”
p. 17
Jericho … when excavators reached the earliest levels,.. what they found contradicted everything they believed. Pottery had always been seen as a necessary part of the agricultural revolution. Theorists believed that it was re required to store grain and oil and carry water to houses and fields. Yet there was no pottery in the earliest levels at Jericho. The people of Jericho were sedentary and lived in houses surrounded by a high wall, but much of their diet cam from hunting and foraging. … The third feature of Jericho that confounded theory was the importance of trade to a society with no obvious social hierarchy.” Argument that grain at this time rare and precious – being grown on silt deposited by spring floods in an area with little rainfall – so a luxury commodity rather than a staple. They also had naturally occurring bitumen to trade.
p. 18 Catalhoyuk – in the earliest phases of city life the meat of wild aurochs was the mainstay… evidence of widespread and diverse trade. The quantity and quality of the imported goods that the city could afford poses the question of what they had to offer in exchange. Noting that the skulls and bones of aurochs became smaller over time, Sherratt and others have suggested that Catalhoyuk may have been the first place wild aurochs were domesticated. … less robust and less aggressive. … When domestication of cattle became a widespread practice, the city lost its commercial edge and simply vanished.
p. 53 Home ground for the matriarchal view of early societies is a group of farming communities that began to spread through the Danube Valley 7,000 years ago. … recognition of a culture of ‘Old Europe’. This culture flourished in much of the Danube basin from the western coat of the Black Sea eastward into the rich soils of Hungary. The culture was precocious and longlasting. It rested on a Neolithic package that originated in the Levant and reached the region through Greece. Between 5,000 and 3,500 BC the civilization of the Danube valley was one of the largest and most technically proficient in the world… the earth was moist, deep and easy to cultivate… the Danube floodplain covered hundreds of square miles… large expanses of rich soil encouraged housing clusters and the villages of Old Europe could be quite large, certainly bigger than any housing concentrations that had existed before this time….houses were relatively uniform… though plenty of pottery and skilled metalwork have been found in burials throughout the region, the villages had no potters’ or metalworkers quarters, nor any evidence of social hierarchy. There were no obvious headmen’s houses and certainly no palaces. There is no evidence of a priestly caste, and there are no distinct shrines or temples. Religion appears to have been a matter of household practice. … the most common art objects are small, portable figures… by far the greatest number are of women … one obvious characteristic of the figurines is their obesity. Whether that represents an ideal of beauty or even of fecundity, the figurines clearly show the effects of plentiful nourishment. … Female dominance in one sphere did not carry over into another, and contemporary specialists believe that these communities were not strictly matriarchal. Men seem to have controlled external relations involving trade and negotiations with neighbouring chiefs, while the rituals represented by the female figurines seem to have emphasized the dominant role of women inside the house, and perhaps were connected with ancestor cults centred on their mothers and aunts.”

p. 82 Though sharing crops and linked by trade, Egypt and Mesopotamia had distinct cultural and agricultural traditions. Irrigation in Mesopotamia depended on breaching the banks of the Euphrates and allowing river water to flow into the fields. The annual Nile flood could be exploited without engineering. The pattern of water management that developed in Egypt was an extension of natural process. The Nile floodplain had low ridges running parallel to the river … as the water fell after each annual flood, pools collected behind these natural embankments. Frmers learned to increase the volume of water captured in this way and to use it for irrigation. The process required no central oversight of coordination to make it work. Water capture and irrigation were the job of each village ,,, and Egypt remained a country of relatively independent small farming villages into the modern era.”

Can’t blame Mesopotamia agricultural devastation on the fall of Nineveh, still flourished after that p. 86… “though commonly portrayed as devastating, the Mongol invasions of the Arab world did not put an end to regional agriculture; much irrigated land returned to cultivation after the invaders were expelled. What finally put an end to widespread agriculture in Iraq was not environmental failure at all but the oil wealth that started flowing into the country in the 20th century. The oil bonanza made farm labour unattractive in Iraq, as it did in many parts of the oil-rich Arab world. Iraq became a net importer of agricultural products because it could afford to do so, not because it had to. The region’s environmental declined in the present day has been accelerated by the damming of the Euphrates River in Syria and Turkey… Cuneiform records show that salinization became a problem only when population pressures reduced the possibility of letting fields lie fallow. Even in these circumstances, administrators made efforts to counteract salinization by increase sowing of barley … and by cultivating shok and agul, inedible plants that served no other purpose than to lower salt concentrations in the fields.”

p. 87 “Diamond … reflects the 19th-century view that agriculture, state formation and warfare are indissolubly linked. E takes it for granted that vulnerability to military conquest is a valid measure of the vigor of the resource base of an ancient society… Ancient warfare and modern warfare differ dramatically in their dependence on a combatants’ resource base. Modern armies supply themselves, but ancient armies lived off the land. An ancient city under siege and the army besieging it shared the same resource base, which was fixed by what either side was able to forage from the areas that it controlled. When critics argue that vulnerability to military attack is a valid measure of ancient resource variability, they are overlooking this fact.”

p. 111 “The Uluburun shipwreck … a trading vessel that foundered on the southern coast of Turkey some time around 1300 BCE provided a detailed snapshot of the range and influence of Mediterranean trade in the heart of the Bronze Age…. The main cargo on board was copper ingots. More than 300 ingots weighing a total of ten tons were stacked in the ship’s hold.A tn of tin ingots, the proper percentage to turn the whole mass o copper into bronze, were also stored on board. Ingots of cobalt blue glass were stacked near the copper and tin … luxury goods almost certainly on their way to a high-ranked ruler in mainland Greece. The excavators found scattered logs of ebony, a previous wood imported from a region as far south as modern-day Somalia, which regional craftworkers used to make high-quality furniture. Traders brough elephant ivory wither from the same region or north Africa – on board there was one large tusk along with 14 hippopotamus teeth from Egypt, a substitute for ivory. .. artisans attached to the court of the purchaser would have been ready and able to make it into luxury items of local design… resin from a species of pistachio tree was also being shipped. It was used as a preservative for wine and added as a scent to oils. Olives formed a substantial portion of the cargo, as did pomegranates. Spices included coriander, black cumin and safflower. .. The advantages of trade have long been recognised by economists, though in recent years there has been considerable criticism of the unequal partnerships that prevail when powerful nations coerce their weaker neighbours into exchanging goods and services at disadvantageous prices. What the Uluburun shipwreck shows is the absence of this one-sided trade relationship in the bronze age. If such a relationship cannot be said to have existed between the powerful and sophisticated states of the Levant and less developed Greece, then the regional pattern was probably one in which fair exchange was the norm.”
p. 149 Lucretius represents the road not taken in the philosophical dethroning of First Nature. After adopting a landscape-based cosmology wholehearted in the great foundation poem of the Greeks, the pre-Socratics undermined it, and Plato and Aristotle replaced it, substituting a cosmology based on the celestial order. Their new view was underwritten and reinforced by the Stoics, who gained increasing intellectual and political power. In the Roman world, under the emperor Augustus, their view was in the ascendant. The alternative, an earthbased , landscape-anchored view, of order and life, was brilliantly represented in the masterpiece of Epicurean literature, but was a minority view that was strictly censored. (De rerum natura)

p.162 Libya – much of what was grown in their carefully watered fields was olive trees. .. AS the Roman dominance of the Med disappeared, local agriculture changed. Pioneering historians misperceived the cause of this shift and attributed it to environmental neglect. .. Intensive agriculture there led to soil enrichment, not deletion. Political collapse, not environmental exhaustion, led to the abandonment of the Libyan fields.”
P 203 The relative dynamism of the two systems stands in sharp contrast. .. Crops like artichokes, spinach and eggplants… were grown all the way to the frontiers of the Muslim sphere, but there their cultivation stopped. .. Even after the reconquest of Spain and Italy, European farmers showed no interest in these crops. … crops like sugarcane, rice and citrus tress disappeared from the Christian world until their reappearance in the Renaissance.”
Romantic sensibility p. 270 Armed with this concept of nature as antagonistic, 19th-century European men and women found it hard to acknowledge they were biological being dependent on air, water, food and shelter for survival. They knew they were of course, but they preferred to think of biological necessities as unworthy of consideration among enlightened and advanced people and nations.”
p. 296 “Critics like Jared Diamond, who recently characterized he Neolithic as the ‘greatest disaster in human history’ seem especially prone to forget where food comes from. .. Farms feed us, but what farms feed us with has for millennia been, and will continue for the foreseeable future to be, the descendants of the wild plants and animals brought into the human community by Neolithic farmers and herders around the world… BUT .. wheat flour may appear to refer to the same product today as it did a hundred or a thousand years ago, but that is not the case. Contemporary wheat represents a small part of the spectrum of wheats cultivated historically. It is chosen for extensive cultivation because it has characteristics that suit contemporary planting, harvesting, shopping and storage conditions. It is milled and processed, packaged and shipped in ways that ancient grains were not… Studying the history of domestication uncovers the choices that agribusiness has made and challenges the notion that the most modern or most commercially viable crop is necessarily the most healthful. “

p. 302 “From a more general ecological perspective, it is important t recognize how closely traditional agriculture in the Med mimicked the fundamental traits of naturally occurring ecosystems. It was divers, complex, self-regulating and resilient… reliable and sustainable. .. a paradigm for a longterm constructive human engagement with the surrounding biological community… The men and women who still remember the techniques that managed that landscape are themselves a valuable and rapidly disappearing resource…. Farmwork is hard work… Generally speaking, however, when compared with a repetitive industrial task or work at a desk or computer terminal, the work is varied and challenging, and it calls on a range of manual and intellectual skills… a highly skilled occupation. .. if new tools nad sophisticated technology can make old jobs easier without compromising their success, then they should by all means be used. … must be success in the long term Too many of today’s technological advances have sacrificed long-term ecological health for short-term gains.”