Ruth and Boaz, Past and Present

There is much interest these days in “back to the land” efforts to reconnect folks with country life. It is encouraging to see examples here some rural communities in our area of sufficient revival evident in thriving local schools and main streets. Art historians remind us that life back in “the good old days” was not always that “good” for lots of folks, nor especially “sustainable.”  Writings of medieval theologians confirm the view of many present-day researchers that European peasants were practitioners of extractive farming methods who were often deemed unworthy by the Church for anything other than servile labor to await reward in the hereafter. In the main, depictions of harvest from the Middle Ages do not show happy workers gathered together in fields of plenty. Reapers and gleaners still seen in the surviving stained glass, frescoes, and bas reliefs of great European cathedrals typically show a single individual or pair of field workers armed with sickle or scythe in tall, thin stands of grain. The expressionless figures are typically cast in larger theological “Labors of the Months” narratives as emblems of Christian suffering intended to impress parishioners with the need to toil ceaselessly throughout the year as sinful consequence of humanity’s fallen state.

G. Freman, P[eter]P. Bouche (engraver), Boaz espouseth Ruth; From Richard Blome, History of the Holy Bible (London, 1688), 7 ⅛ x 12 ¾ inches

For three millenia the Old Testament Book of Ruth has been synonymous with the abiding theme of divine deliverance associated with gleaning, and served to inspire depictions of her and Boaz throughout the centuries from the vivid images of medieval illuminated manuscripts to the modern dreamy reverie of Surrealist Marc Chagall. The annual harvest of feudal times made possible the exchange of peasant labor for manorial protection and provision. Notions of upward mobility in moral or imaginative terms, therefore, are not found in the French Song of Roland, Slavic Tale of Igor’s Campaign, sermons of St. Francis, or visions of Hildegard of Bingen. (Hildegard did write, however, of the praiseworthy qualities of ancient grains like spelt and emmer.) The very constraints of social stratification fostered a degree of egalitarianism among serfs, who represented some 90% of the population, which significantly altered ancient Judeo-Christian concepts of gleaning intended to benefit the poor.

A Heritage Grains Adventure Through Europe, Part 2

Part 1 of this blog post is available here.

Nordic Pancakes and Landscapes

Our Baltic adventure continued with visits to the capitals of Finland, Sweden, and Norway so at every stop we took advantage of tour options to area farms and locations related to rural life and agrarian arts. One gets thoroughly spoiled on cruise ships with food so nicely prepared and abundant along with all manner of entertainment. Our Regal Princess did not disappoint with wondrously rich and crusty European breads and flavorful entrees including buttermilk pancakes and sweet and savory crepes. I’ve come to have special interest in crepes since our Palouse Heritage team has been on the hunt for some time to determine the grain varieties traditionally grown for crepe flour. I’m happy to report that we finally have done so and that next season we will be harvesting our first (though small) crop of Yellow Breton wheat. We learned that buckwheat was customarily used for savory crepes.

Regal Princess Buttermilk Pancakes topped with Strawberries

A special highlight among the Scandinavian stops was a visit to Oslo’s Norwegian Folk Museum, which is a living history park similar to Germany’s Hessenpark near Frankfurt with some 160 historic structures divided among nine areas representing the country’s principal cultural regions. Since Mom’s Sunwold/Anderson ancestors hailed from the scenic Hallingdal Valley northwest of Oslo, Lois and I headed to the park’s restored Hallingdal Village and found not only several 18th century log homes with grassed roofs, there was also a substantial threshing barn and granary. I marvel at the all the effort that must have gone in to deconstructing these and the park’s other many old buildings and then transporting them and reconstructing them here. Walking into the old barn impressed on me the original meaning of the term “threshold” since the entry way had the well-worn raised board that ensured the precious grain flailed (threshed) inside remained inside the building and was not lost outside. Inside the barn were old photographs from Hallingdal showing families at work in fields from long ago fashioning and drying grain sheaves, and flailing and winnowing (cleaning) grain inside the barn. It crossed my mind that those pictured might well have been some distant kin.

Norsk Folkemuseum Hallingdal Village Threshing Barn and Granary and Winnowing

A few minutes’ walk found us entering the park’s restored village of Trøndelag where Lois and I encountered a crowd of enthusiastic children with their parents waiting to enter a long kitchen where a pair of the park’s many workers playing the part of an village inhabitant labored over a hot fire to prepare delicious whole wheat lefse “pancake-bread.” These two ladies spoke perfect English and offered substantial samples slathered in butter and honey which may have accounted for the long line and delighted kids. I knew of lefse because of regular family visits in my youth to our beloved Norwegian-born Aunt Mary Sunwold in Spokane, a native of Hallingdal who had immigrated to America as child and after some years in the North Dakota and Minnesota had relocated with her family to Spokane, Washington.

But Aunt Mary’s lefse was always made of flour mixed with mashed potatoes so had a very peculiar yet pleasant flavor. When we saw the informative Folkemuseum ladies working away on the next batch without any potatoes in sight I asked about their recipe. They laughed and told us that potatoes were commonly used for “poor man’s lefse,” and that most folks preferred it made from wheat flour. Since our clan certainly came from peasant stock, I can understand Aunt Mary’s preference for potato lefse but certainly found this “new old” recipe to be delicious, and nicely sweetened with honey and butter.

Richard the Trøndelag Rye Field Scarecrow and Baking Lefse, Norsk Folkemuseum

Our culinary historian hosts kindly shared their traditional wheat flour lefse recipe with us which I present here as given to us so will take some conversion from metric to English measure:

INGREDIENTS: 1 kilo wheat flour, 2 eggs, 250 grams sugar, 125 melted butter, ½ liter buttermilk, 1 teaspoon baking powder. DIRECTIONS: Mix eggs with sugar and butter, and stir into the milk. Mix the baking powder with some flour into the blend. Mix with enough flour so the dough is easy to roll flat. (May use barley flour for easier rolling.) Bake on griddle or in a dry frying pan. May be stored in the freezer. Serve with butter, sugar, and cinnamon on top.

The early nineteenth century’s foremost Scandinavian landscape artist was Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857), a native of Bergen raised in poverty who studied in Sweden and Denmark, traveled widely in Switzerland and Italy, and created most of his art in Germany. Dahl’s mature oeuvre represented a synthesis of academy training in Copenhagen in the emotional power of the great Dutch Master grand landscapes with the Naturalism for which Dresden had become famous by the 1820s and where Dahl lived continuously from 1818. Throughout his experiences across the continent, however, Dahl returned recurrently in his art to interpretation of the northern landscapes of his native land with dazzling oils and attention to detail as seen in such canvases as The Fortun Valley (1842) and Hjelle in Valdres (1851). Nestled at the head of narrow Lake Oppstynsvatnet one hundred miles northeast of Bergen, scenic Hjelle in late summer offered an ideal setting for the artist to express the beauty of the countryside and moral virtue of rural folk in a time of rising Norwegian nationalism. The spectacular Hjelle view rendered in Dahl’s meticulous tiny strokes depicts a golden brown field of upright sheaves that seems to glow between a row of village structures to the right with deep blue lake and emerald-clad mountain slopes in the background.

L A. Ring, The Harvester (1884), Oil on canvas, 74 ¾ x 60 ⅗ inches, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

Dahl’s most ardent disciple, Thomas Fearnley (1802-1842), met his mentor in 1826 during one of Dahl’s trips to his homeland, and studied with him in Dresden from 1829 to 1830. Unlike Dahl, Fearnley returned to Norway following his studies in Germany to reside there permanently from 1838. Among his many naturalistic rural scenes are Haystacks, Rydal, Cumbria (1838) and View from Romsdalen (1838) that show harvesters strolling throughrolling fields of ripened grain in the fabled coastal valley northwest of Hjelle. The views express Rousseau’s Enlightenment concept of the intrinsic nobility of country people who live apart from the decadent influences of urban life. The paintings of Norwegian Romanticist Hans Dahl (1849-1937) evoke similar sentiment and reflect the influence of his warm palette landscape and portrait studies at the Düsseldorf School in the 1870s and ‘80s. Many of his detailed yet fanciful paintings rendered in fine brushstrokes like Norwegian Girl depict farm maidens returning from the fields in colorful national dress.    

Nineteenth century Danish landscape art introduced a synthesis of traditional almue folk art motifs with a softly colored naturalism and rural social consciousness for a new Symbolic Realism evident in the evocative paintings of L. A. Ring (1854-1933), Harald Slott-Møller (1864-1930), and Peter Hansen (1868-1928). Ring was among Europe’s foremost landscape artists and in solidarity with rural identity replaced his surname of Anderson with the name of his native village in southern Zealand. Deeply influenced by Millet and Gauguin, Ring’s paintings depict life’s natural cycle in such masterful compositions as The Harvester (1884), for which his brother served as the model, and The Gleaners (1887). Peter Hansen was an influential member of Funen Painters group who withdrew from Academy traditions and gathered on the Danish island of Funen in a new spirit of Realism. Country scenes there and from his travels in Italy inspired his many genre paintings rendered in soft tones of yellow, brown, and blue that included Threshing with Oxen (1904), Harvest (1910), and Winnowing Wheat (1914).

Vasa Family Grain Sheaf Coat of Arms, Contemporary wood sculpture from a 15th century warship, The Vasa Museum, Stockholm

The image of a grain sheaf had long been used throughout northern Europe as a symbol of prosperity and peace as prominently featured in Allegory on Peace Being Crowned by Minerva (1643) by Danish painter Willem de Poorter (1608-c. 1650). Other notable examples include Tsar Peter the Great’s Grand Sheaf Fountain (c. 1720) in the Monplasir Gardens of his grand Peterhof Palace estate overlooking the Baltic Sea near St. Petersburg. Peter designed the fountain base to resemble the wide rounded base of a sheaf with water casting forth from two tiers of jets as if arched stalks of grain. The medieval crest of Sweden’s Vasa dynasty, which derives its name from a term for sheaf, features of a central golden sheaf and crown flanked by two cherubs. The jeweled Royal Order of Vasa which also incorporates the sheaf design was created in 1772 by King Gustav II to recognize outstanding achievement in agriculture and the arts.

A Heritage Grains Adventure Through Europe, Part 1

German Grain Fields and Academy Artists

 After completing my recent trek along California’s El Camino Real and previous Mid-Atlantic exploration of Colonial heritage grains and agrarian art (see blog series here), I turned my attention to Europe as opportunity had arisen through Journey Tours of Wenatchee, Washington, to lead a group on a ten-day Baltic cruise preceded by several days in Germany. A special benefit was that my wife, Lois, was able to join me and also enjoy the fellowship of several longtime friends who accompanied us on the tour that commenced in Frankfurt, a. M. where our group convened for a remarkable summertime adventure. One of our first destinations was the Hessenpark Open Air Museum north of the Frankfurt about twenty-five miles and where over 100 historic buildings, many of them timber-frame structures dating from the 1700s, had been relocated and restored since 1974 in a substantial park covering 160 acres.  Hessenpark is divided into several village sections representing the surrounding state’s several regions, and contains several small farmsteads where heritage grains and fruits are raised. We found Kaiser Wilhelm and King of Pippin apples but I was most interested in the park’s maturing stands of ancient emmer, einkorn, and spelt, grains that are the prehistoric precursors of all heritage grains.

Hessenpark Heritage Grain Plots (left to right): Einkorn, Spelt, Emmer

The entrance to Hessenpark features a substantial art gallery that showcases paintings, etchings, and other works that depict agrarian experience in central Germany. We learned that Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, and other major German cities hosted art academies that became widely known for interpretations of nature and rural life through new approaches to subject, color, and composition. Peter von Cornelius (1784-1867) and Wilhelm von Schadow (1789-1862) served successively as influential directors of the Düsseldorf Academy spanning the decades from 1819 to 1859 when Kunstakademie artists painted finely detailed and often fanciful, allegorical landscapes that significantly influenced many prominent American Hudson River painters including George Caleb Bingham and William Morris Hunt.  Cornelius and van Schadow were among the earliest members of Lukasbund (Brothers of Luke), derisively called The Nazarenes for their close-cropped hair and pious lifestyle, who had banded together in Rome as young men in order to grow spiritually and rediscover the nearly lost techniques used by Renaissance Italian masters for monumental fresco painting.  The Nazarenes chose to paint Old and New Testament religious scenes with timeless messages and selected the story of Joseph from the Book of Genesis for their first major commission which was installed as five sections in 1817 for the banqueting hall of Rome’s Palazzo Zuccari (present Bibliotheca Hertziana), residence of the Prussian Consul-General Jacob Bartholdy. Cornelius’s Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dream features a shield of grain stalks to represent the young prophet’s explanation of the coming seasons of abundant harvests following by the lean years, and The Seven Years of Plenty by Philipp Veit (1793-1877) shows a seated maiden and children surrounded by fruit and golden sheaves of grain. Known later as the Casa Bartholdy Frescoes, the paintings and their creators became famous and in the 1880s were transferred to Berlin’s National Gallery. 

Casa Bartholdy Frescoes, Philipp Veit, The Seven Years of Plenty (1817), Peter von Cornelius, Joseph Interprets Pharoah’s Dream (1817), Old National Gallery, Berlin

One of Germany’s most prolific painters of harvest and other agrarian scenes, Hugo Mühlig (1854-1929), was born in Dresden to a family of prominent landscapists. He became a seasonal participant in the country’s oldest art colony, the Willingshäusen Malerkolonie, which had been established in the picturesque Hessian village north of Frankfurt, a. M. surrounded by rolling hills and valleys bathed in a liquid light that had long attracted artists to the area. Colony founder and Baltic German Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern (1794-1865) had come to Willingshäusen to recover from serious injuries suffered when a commander in the Russian army at the 1814 Battle of Leipzig. The Romanov family provided von Reutern a stipend and with encouragement from Goethe and Emil Lugwig Grimm, the third of the brothers Grimm, he decided to convalesce in the area and paint local inhabitants and scenery.

Landscape painter and book illustrator Hans Richard von Volkmann, a native of Halle who trained at the Düsseldorf Academy, also frequented Willingshausen. Some of von Volkman’s work anticipates Art Nouveau, and he rendered many harvest scenes in masterful sepia etchings including Field Road (1907), Harvest Time, Willingshausen (1909), and Cloudy Day (1910). Düsseldorf native Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth (1855-1928) became an influential professor of portraiture and landscape art at Weimar and Stuttgart where he painted many peasant farming scenes including The Gleaners (1888), Reapers in Bergsulza (1888), and Harvest Time (1900). Von Kalckreuth’s views are notable for the melancholy depiction of female field laborers who seem to shoulder their burdens with stoic indifference. Summer captures an expectant mother clad in blue with a white headscarf striding forth deep in thought alongside a patch of ripened grain.

Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth, Summer (1890), Oil on canvas, 140 ⅙ x 115 ¾ inches, Royal Danish Museum, Copenhagen

The Tsar’s Village and Imperial Farm at St. Petersburg

 The next destination on this summertime Baltic cruise was St. Petersburg, Tsar Peter the Great’s spectacular “Window on the West” to which he moved the imperial capital in the early 1700s and which remained the seat of the Russian government until the early 20th century. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution its name was changed to Leningrad and distant Moscow became Russia’s capital again. Since the 1990s St. Petersburg’s original name has been restored and considerable development has returned much of the city to its original splendor after considerable damage during the Second World War and economic stagnation under Communist rule. Mr. Putin is not nearly as interested in the ways of the West as was Peter the Great, but we were treated warmly by our Russia hosts and treated to unforgettable tours of Peterhof Palace west of the city, and to Catherine the Great’s legendary Winter Palace and Hermitage.

Peterhof Palace near St. Petersburg, Russia

 Catherine was a contemporary of George Washington, and has gone down in history as sympathetic to the American cause for not supporting British King George’s request to send troops to help defeat the Colonists. And while Peter the Great was greatly interested in modernizing the military and building new cities, Catherine had special interest in improving Russian agriculture. In the 1760s she issued a special manifesto inviting foreigners to settle on the vast steppes of southern Russia and supply the country and continent with grain. In this way my ancestors immigrated to Russia in the 1760s and settled in the Volga River region near Saratov where they introduced productive grains like Saxonka soft red wheat. A century afterward, in the 1870s, some of their descendants began relocating to the United States to become farmers in the Mid-Atlantic states, Midwest, and beyond. By 1920, over 100,000 of these “German-Russians” were living in the Pacific Northwest. In the process, hard red bread wheats native to south Russia and Ukraine like Red Fife and Turkey Red made their way to North America in the 1800s and became the first true bread wheats ever raised in the United States and Canada.

Palouse Heritage Turkey Red Wheat

Palouse Heritage Red Fife Wheat

Among many other accomplishments during her long reign, the Empress Catherine the Great composed children’s stories like Tsarevitch Chlor, a morality tale set in the Russian countryside where the young man must find the right path for his own wellbeing and that of others through pursuit of virtue and application of reason. “…[T]hey saw a peasant’s hut and some acres of very fertile land in which there was every cereal: rye, oats, barley, buckwheat and others. Further, they saw pastures on which sheep, cows, and horses were grazing.” Catherine further commissioned a breathtaking project to transform a vast area near the summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village” west of St. Petersburg, into an allegorical landscape shaped by her conception of this Russian ideal. Catherine found in Orthodox priest and agronomist Andrei Samborsky (1732-1815) a teacher with the proper background to tutor her grandsons and a small circle of privileged classmates like Prince Alexander Golitsyn. After graduating from the Kiev Academy in 1765, Samborsky had studied agriculture in England and served as chaplain at the Russian Embassy in London, married an Englishwoman, and returned to Russia to begin tutoring the Russian dukes in religion and natural science in 1782.

 K. K. Schultz, Imperial Farm Cottage, c. 1835 (Tsarskoe Selo west of St. Petersburg), Views of St. Petersburg and Moscow (1847)

With the Empress’s support, Samborsky formulated plans for an Imperial Farm and School of Practical Agriculture on a thousand acres adjacent to Tsarskoe Selo (Tsar’s Village) which became an important state institution devoted to the improvement of crop and livestock production and farm management. An engraving from the time shows Samborsky plowing with an improved English implement as his distinguished Order of St. Vladimir medal hangs from a nearby tree. Open land in the vicinity was sown to wheat, rye, pasture grass, and other crops while workers labored nearby in the 1780s atPavlovsk, the splendid summer palace of Catherine’s son, Paul I, and from 1792 to 1796 on his son’s Neoclassical residence, the Alexander Palace. The first structure built at Pavlovsk was the open air Temple to Ceres (later Catherine’s Concert Hall, 1780) by the empress’s favored architect Charles Cameron (1745-1812), a colonnaded Doric rotunda that originally contained a statue of Catherine as Ceres and the painted panel An Offering to Ceres. Images of Ceres and a variety of grain and other botanical designs also adorn the magnificent Raphael Loggias commissioned in the 1780s by Catherine for the walls of a new wing the Hermitage. Austrian artist Christoph Unterberger (1732-1798) led the ambitious project of replicating Raphael’s sixteenth century originals for the Vatican Palace, where they have since been lost. Unterberger and his team worked from 1783 to 1792 to complete the meticulous and vivid designs for Catherine’s great hall using egg tempura on canvas.

Christoph Unterberger, Raphael Loggias and Grain Motif Panels (c. 1783), Winter Palace and Hermitage, St. Petersburg

The Imperial Farm as originally constructed from 1828 to 1830 under Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) featured buildings of Tudor Gothic country style designed by Scottish architect Adam Menelaws (c. 1750-1831) with a Farm Cottage built nearby as an izba containing rooms for visiting members of the imperial family. Outbuildings included a stone barn, stables, granary, and dairy, and a kitchen redesigned in 1841 to serve as a Grand Ducal School. The Cottage was expanded to three floors in the late 1850s with the addition of bedrooms, and dining and drawing rooms. An imposing two-story ocher-colored Farm Palace and surrounding gardens were then built nearby in English country style which Alexander II used as his favored summer residence for the rest his life. When time permitted, Alexander especially enjoyed his Blue Study which displayed favored paintings and fine bindings. Produce from the farm was used to provision residents and workers at Tsarskoe Selo estates.

With support from his influential minister and spiritual advisor Alexander Golitsyn (1773-1844), Alexander I approved creation in 1819 of the Moscow Agricultural Society which began operation three years later. The important precedent for such a voluntary association with agricultural interests had been the Free Economic Society established by Catherine in 1765, though the Moscow association was solely devoted to promotion of progress in the empire’s farming sector by influential landowners and scientists through “a harmonious fusion of west European improvements and native traditions. Through study and dissemination of rational techniques to improve production, prevent regional crop failures, and advance agricultural education, the society represented an important step in translating Enlightenment thought into practical action. Alexander II held numerous meetings at the Farm Palace on land reform and appropriately composed the Emancipation Edict of 1861 abolishing serfdom in the while residing there.

This blog post is continued in Part 2, available here.

Ancient Grains & Harvests (Part 1)

This blog post is part of a series that I (Richard) am writing about grain and agricultural themes in classic art. The research I am sharing here will contribute to a new book that will soon be published under the title Hallowed Harvests. You can read other posts in this series here.

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The advent of grain foods cannot be dated with precision, but archaeological evidence indicates humans in eastern Africa mixed crushed grain with water to form gruel as early as 100,000 years ago. Cooking on heated stones, with embers, and by other primitive means enabled the roasting and toasting of grains to enhance flavors, but the revolutionary advent of fire-resistant earthenware pots in the Middle East by the eighth millennium BC fostered a significant advancement in human nutrition, culture, and population growth. Grains boiled in water made possible a savory array of pottages, soups, and stews, with the softened food especially benefiting the very young and elderly. No culinary advance since the invention of earthenware has had such a salutary effect on cooking methods.

Enduring methods of gathering crops from the Neolithic past to relatively modern times involved use of sickles to cut stands of wheat, barley, and other grains that were harvested at least 10,000 years ago in the Karaca Dağ region of southern Turkey and throughout Mesopotamia. The oldest extant complete sickle, fashioned with sharpened flints about 9,000 years ago and found in the Nahal Hemar Cavenear the Dead Sea in the Jordan Valley, is held by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. First made of flints embedded into animal jawbones with cypress resin and honey, cast metal sickles began to appear during the Middle Bronze Age about 2,000 BC. The advent of this revolutionary tool helped spur humanity’s agricultural revolution that gave rise to civilizations by providing reliable food supplies and facilitating city life.

Cultivation of cereal grains has been integral to humanity’s advance since time immemorial. Cereals, named for the Roman goddess of fertility, Ceres, are not only nutritious but also adaptable to a wide range of climates and soil conditions. The ancestral range of modern cereal grains stretched along the Fertile Crescent from the Anatolian slopes of southeastern Turkey—where locals believe Adam first tilled the ground, eastward across the Transcaucasus and Mesopotamia to Kashmir and south to Ethiopia. This vast region is notable for long, hot summers and mild, moist winters which was ideal for the emergence of large-seeded cereals that became the principal foods sources that fueled human expansion throughout the world. The advent of grain cultivation coincided with animal husbandry as villagers sought to prevent creatures of horn and hoof from damaging grain fields by domesticating them. These developments spurred the Neolithic Revolution in Upper Mesopotamia approximately 9000 BC and represented the key breakthrough in civilization leading to food surpluses and the rise of settled, urban populations.

By 5000 BC these primitive self-pollinating plants—capable of evolving more rapidly than any other known organism, had spread along the Mediterranean coast to the Iberian Peninsula and north of the Caucasus Mountains. Some two thousand years later wheat reached the British Isles. Dispersion of cereal grains by wind, animals, and other natural processes was inexorable if slow—perhaps a thousand yards per year on average. Successive plant selections by early farmers led to earlier maturing stands. These native landrace wheats gained a foothold in central Europe and Scandinavia by about 3000 BC via the Danube, Rhine, and Dnieper river valleys. Humanity’s original farmers were most likely women of Neolithic times who tended hearth, home, and hoe while men ranged widely to hunt diminishing herds, first selected grains for kernel size and heads that were less susceptible to normal shattering.

These prehistoric stands of grain were cut by early agriculturalists yielding bone sickles embedded with obsidian blades sharper than later serrated metal versions that date to at least 2000 BC in the Middle Bronze Age. Agricultural folklorist and artist Eric Sloan considered the crescent-shaped sickle to be “the most aesthetically designed implement to have evolved from a thousand subtle variations” over millennia. Anthropologist Loren Eiseley imagines a proto-agrarian scene—likely one of many, when immense prehistoric creatures of horn and hoof still roamed the Levantine valleys, Anatolian highlands, and beyond: “[T]he hand that grasped the stone by the river long ago would pluck a handful of grass seed and hold it contemplatively. In that moment, the golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries, would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand.”

Novelist James Michener personifies the experience, surely rediscovered separately innumerable times throughout the prehistoric Middle East, in The Source, which opens along a Galilean wadi near the Mediterranean coast in the early tenth century BC. The Family of Ur is one of six in a clan that separates in the fall for the men’s annual boar hunt while the women remain near their makeshift fictional village of Makor. Here Ur’s wife considers their recent conversation about the wild wheat that has long supplemented their diet: “By holding back some of the harvest and keeping it dry in a pouch of deerskin, the grains could be planted purposefully in the spring and the wheat could be made to grow exactly where and when it was needed, and with this discovery the family of Ur moved close to the beginnings of a self-sufficient society. They did not know it, but if a food supply could be insured, the speed of change would be almost unbelievable: within a few thousand years cities would be feasible and civilizations too.”

Through the woman’s revolutionary experience, Michener further ponders the profound ramifications of these events for world religion, social structure, and the environment. He then turns to Ur’s apprehension of his wife’s prescient labors: “In his new apotheosis as [land]owner Ur began to bring new fields into cultivation…. Men of the Family of Ur had always possessed an intuitive sense of the land, and now it was the reluctant farmer who discovered one of the essential mysteries of the earth on which all subsequent agriculture would depend….” The family’s primitive agrarian endeavors soon lead by trial and error to awareness of the grain’s need for adequate water and fertile soil. These experiences laid the foundation of an agrarian savvy that would be carried down for several hundred generations until the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution and population expansion presented farmers with unprecedented new conditions of challenge and opportunity.

These first farmers also came to prefer “free-threshing” stands that better enabled separation of kernels from their “hooded” husks.  Among several dozen other ancient plant candidates for cultivation, these transitional grain species offered other significant benefits including flavor and nutrition, availability, storage, and portability. In these ways, wheat genotypes gradually came to grow more uniformly around early settlements from Egypt and the Jordan River Valley to Mesopotamia and across the Eurasian steppe to Manchuria. Grains grew for millennia across these landscapes amidst a mélange of irregular “off-types,” wildflowers, grasses, and other plants. Yields improved significantly following the advent of the plow about two thousand years ago, and varieties that descended from these ancient grains have come today to supply nearly one-third of humanity’s nutritional needs. Earliest examples of Sumerian cuneiform dating to c. 3000 BC at tells in Iraq show pictographs that eventually led to written language. Many of these baked clay tablets are inventories related to grain harvests, storage, and transactions. Procurement and trade in cereal grains were key factors in the growth of ancient empires and the organization of Mesopotamian and Egyptian political institutions.

The earliest pictorial expressions of harvest are from Egypt’s Old Kingdom (c. 2700-2100 BC) when unification of Upper and Lower Egypt led to a flowering of culture and architecture in grand monuments like the mortuary complexes at Thebes and Memphis in the fertile Nile Valley. The necropolis of Saqqara near the kingdom’s capital at Memphis contains the exceptionally well-preserved Fifth Dynasty mastaba of Ty, an official of the royal household, whose tomb contains an exquisitely decorated chapel. The room’s north wall contains ten rows of detailed paintings with accompanying hieroglyphics that depict the sequence of the harvest season (Shemu) from March to May of flax, barley, and wheat, and subsequent grain threshing, winnowing, and storage.

“Cutting and Carrying the Harvest” (Egyptian Old Kingdom Paintings, c. 2400 BC), Henri Faucher-Gudin (after a photograph by Johannes Dümichen), Gaston Maspero, History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria (London, 1903)

The spectacular images of Egyptian harvests are significant for their literal depictions of ancient Nile harvests and grain processing, and for the more profound religious meanings represented in such art. In the case of Ty’s mastaba reliefs, which show evidence in style and colors as the work of a master, viewers can appreciate the complexity of ancient farming operations that reveal various field operations and the division of labor required to bring them to completion. In the opening barley harvest panel, eight men wield broad-bladed sickles in their right hands while clasping the stems with their left, and a worker follows to gather and stack the cuttings. The next scene more clearly shows the characteristic lighter shade and shorter stalks of barley that attest to the artist’s attention to botanical authenticity. A flutist and cantor are also seen accompanying the reapers in order to provide rhythm and pace to such strenuous labor. The hieroglyph of an upright bearded grain spike appears in the next panel of workers and sheaves to indicate harvest of emmer wheat, the most valuable Egyptian crops for making bread. The next row shows men under the watchful eye of an overseer placing the stacks of sheaves into netted bags for transport to nearby threshing floors by donkey—a beast of burden widely used in the Egyptian countryside to this day.

The brief hieroglyphic interjections that accompany these images may be the work of the artist, but may well be by another artisan. The symbols conjure thoughts of commotion and shouting more than any measured routine accompanied by clapping and music. The terms used include “beat,” “hurry,” and “drive them.” The next threshing floor scene seems chaotic as men struggle to lead separate teams of oxen and donkeys around the circle to trample out the precious grain from the mass of stalks. Coordinating the animals’ variable pace and distances, cleaning up behind them, and recurrent removal of threshed cuttings to maximize efficiency required substantial coordination and stamina. Women appear in the subsequent winnowing scene to clean the grain by tossing the threshings into the wind, while other workers scoop the kernels into bags for transport to storage silos. Most of the men are lightly clad in loincloths though some have kilt-like garments, while the women use scarves to tie up their hair and wear loincloths and transparent dresses held up by shoulder straps. The tools of harvest shown in the panels are similar to those that would be widely used throughout the world until the twentieth century—sickles, rakes, and pitchforks to reap and thresh, and sieves, brooms, and scoops to clean and store.

In a metaphoric sense, such magnificent art that decorated tombs, monuments, and public buildings in ancient Egypt also bore profound cosmological significance since the primal association between human existence and agrarian experience harkens back to the dawn of civilization. Ideas about life and eternity found expression in priestly ceremonies and sacred writings like Egypt’s agricultural Coffin Texts and book The Coming Forth by Day (also known as the Book of the Dead). The implements of cultivation, tools for harvest, and means of transport variously found in tombs at places like Memphis represent the mystical course undertaken through just living and proper burial. These stages honored since time immemorial include birth (seeding and germination), growth (hoeing and weeding), and death (reaping and threshing) to afterlife in the underworld’s flax and grain Fields of Hotep (boats to the place of “contentment”).

Death was celebrated as the ultimate “harvest of life” symbolized in ancient times by a reaper’s sickle. At the pinnacle of the kingdom’s highly stratified society, the pharaoh represented the vital pulse of this cosmic consciousness in each generation and honored throughout the seasons in agrarian-based religious rituals. Cultural patterns and religious understandings are evident in similar ways in Mesopotamia and in Greek and Roman religious traditions. Yet these ancient societies existed without proscribed moral obligations for the ruling class and landowners to care for the poor by permitting practices like field gleaning. To be sure, agricultural workers were valued for the essential labor they provided, but not in the Hebrew sense that, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1), and the Levitical code affirming the right to glean not only to the people of Israel, but to the “sojourner” (i. e., foreigners) as well.