FECUND FRINGES OF THE NORTHERN FERTILE CRESCENT

51 CHAPTER 5 FECUND FRINGES OF THE NORTHERN FERTILE CRESCENT Bread is a very simple manufactured article whose rise in the oven is closely related to the rise of the sun in the sky. Piero Camporesi (1989) AFRICAN VIANDS Egypt and North Africa For thousands of years after the beginnings of Mesopotamian agriculture, an abundance of game animals, lake and river fi sh, and wild cereals in North Africa did little to discourage a foraging way of life. 1 Hunter-gatherer groups adopted livestock herding, yet continued to gather wild plants – especially the root parts of sedges, rushes, and cattails in riparian environ- ments. 2 But around 5000 BCE the Sahara began expanding, an expansion that accelerated sharply around 2000 BCE . 3 Desertifi cation ushered peo- ple into fertile oases, and especially into the Nile Valley, where periodic migrations from the northwest brought knowledge of the Middle Eastern plant complex. It was in that valley that fi rst barley and later wheat began to fl ourish, although until farming took fi rm hold, Nile fi sh (particularly catfi sh) and root foods continued to sustain many. 4 By around 4000 BCE , however, small states and kingdoms had arisen, supported by “taxes” levied 52 A Movable Feast on peasant farmers on food that went directly into the storehouses of the rulers. The small principalities gradually evolved into the two large states of Upper and Lower Egypt that were fused around 3100 BCE under the fi rst of the pharaohs. Exploitation quickened of a peasantry that now had nowhere to go. Desertifi cation had trapped them in the Nile Valley, where the Pharaoh owned all of the land. They worked it under the supervision of civil servants and turned over their crops to a government that redis- tributed them. It was a rationing process that allotted food to the peasants but could also withhold it. When the Nile fl ooded (late July into October), this labor force became mobile and was applied to public works projects and pyramid building. We know something of the foods consumed by ancient Egyptians from depictions in tomb and temple art, as well as hieroglyphic writing. Nile fi sh, birds, cereals, breads, fruits such as the melon and watermelon, and vegetables (some names, listed in texts remain to be translated), legumes (especially brown fava beans), and onions, garlic, leeks, and radishes (used for medicinal as well as culinary purposes) were available to even the poor- est, who mostly subsisted on bread, beer, and wild plants such as melokhia leaves ( Corchorus olitorius). These leaves, from a plant growing on the Nile fl oodplains, resemble spinach and have been turned into a soup by peasants (the fellahs) for thousands of years. Also ancient is ful medames, boiled brown beans sea- soned with olive oil. Lentils were a base of soup; barley and emmer were processed to make beer; and grapes (grown in the Pharaoh’s orchards) were turned into wine. In view of this it is not surprising that the Egyptians are credited with composing some of the world’s oldest drinking songs. 5 Flax and sesame from the Indus Valley were grown for oil, and it was probably from Egypt that sesame reached Arabia to later slip into litera- ture as that famous door opening command – “open sesame!” – perhaps, some have speculat- ed, because of the lubricating ability of its high quality oil. 6 Clearly the Egyptian diet was mostly vege- tarian, and this was so for all classes of society, although individuals in the upper strata availed themselves of greater quantities and varieties. What kinds of animal protein were consumed and by Fecund Fringes of the Northern Fertile Crescent 53 whom is more diffi cult to determine. The Egyptians failed to domesticate numerous African species such as the gazelle, antelope, ibex, and hyena. 7 They had some luck with monkeys – almost 4,000 years ago the Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty had tamed and trained, if not domesticated, mon- keys to harvest fi gs and grapes. 8 But they had the most success with those barnyard animals already domesticated elsewhere, like cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens. A problem here is the extent to which religion interfered with meat consumption. Cattle, the most highly valued of Egyptian livestock, served as draft and sacrifi cial animals and were also sources of food. Most beef apparently went to the elite including the priests, who did the butchering, although at times Egyptian priests refrained from eating beef; and from time to time there were sweeping beef prohibitions. 9 Meat and milk for the lower classes came from sheep and goats, judging from the great num- bers of their bones turned up in settlement sites. 10 Pig bones were also plentiful in those sites and prior to 3200 BCE pork was regularly eaten in the north (Lower Egypt) but avoided in the south (Upper Egypt). Yet, when the south conquered the north, pork avoid- ance became broad-based. Consumption slowed, then ceased almost completely and, at best, was spasmodic for religious and political 11 reasons during the Dynastic (3100–332 BCE ) and Post-Dynastic periods. 12 When Osiris worship dominated, pigs were portrayed as unclean – even a source of leprosy – and their herders were similarly regarded. 13 Naturally enough, some have seized upon Egyptian pork avoidance to explain Mosaic pork prohibitions some 2,000 years later. Because of such vicissitudes in domestic animal consumption, Nile fi sh and wild fowl appear to have been the most important sources of ani- mal protein for rich and poor alike, although even a few species of fi sh were prohibited for religious reasons, and a dim view was taken of fi shing as a profession. 14 Both fi sh and fowl were abundant and cheap although batarekh (salted dried roe of the gray mullet) was an ancient dish that those on the lower rungs of the social ladder never tasted. 15 Great fl ocks of migrating birds regularly stopped over in the Nile Valley and many of their members were killed and eaten or captured and fattened for later consumption. During the Early Dynastic period (c. 3100–2686 BCE ) the diets of rich and poor were probably similar. However, by the time of the New Kingdom (c. 1567–1085 BCE ), society had become rigidly stratifi ed and, 54 A Movable Feast with imperial expansion that ranged from Nubia and Ethiopia to Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and the benefi ts of long-distance trade, a huge difference materialized between the two diets in both quantitative and qualitative terms. New foods such as pine nuts, almonds, pomegranates, grapes, and olives acquired from the Middle East were probably the exclu- sive property of the elite, as honey and beef had always been. And that elite doubtless was looking down on foods it had classifi ed as “low status” because they sustained the commoners. 16 Bread and beer, however, were not among them and the fertile soils of the Nile fl oodplain produced great quantities of emmer wheat and barley, surpluses that were the basis of state wealth and food for the legions employed in the construction of pyramids, tombs, and a vast array of other public works projects. Arabs in North Africa outside of Egypt found another use for wheat and barley in the form of couscous. Initially couscous consisted of a coarsely ground grain turned into a kind of bran pasta called kuskussù. But as the dish evolved, dough was employed and shaped into sizes ranging from pellets to tiny balls. These were prepared in tiered clay devices within which vegetables, and per- haps mutton were cooked on the lower level and the couscous steamed on top. From North Africa, couscous spilled out into the Mediterranean, where the pasta was regularly added to soups – a practice that gave rise to soups like Italy’s minestrone. 17 South of the Sahara Agriculture also diffused from the Middle East and Egypt to Africa south of the Sahara where, some 9,000 years ago, everybody was a hunter- gatherer. 18 It arrived initially with nomadic herders of Eurasian animals who were drifting southward to escape the increasing aridity. These domesticated animals arrived in waves from southwest and central Asia. First there were sheep and goats, and then came cattle (although as men- tioned earlier it is possible that indigenous wild cattle were domesticated in North Africa). Africa sorely needed these new animals. Although it hosted more native cereals than any other continent, this abundance was not extended to domesticated animals. In fact, Africa only contributed two animals to the growing pool – the ass ( Equus asinus) and the guinea fowl or hen (Numida meleagris). 19 And of the two (astoundingly, in view of the many Fecund Fringes of the Northern Fertile Crescent 55 large animals the continent is known for), the guinea fowl was the only one domesticated south of the Sahara. 20 The herders followed the Nile upstream to create settlements near the junction of the White and Blue Nile. These settlements were founded some 7,000 years ago, according to archeological remains from Kadero and Esh Shaheinab (where wheat and barley may have been grown at a later date). From these bases people spread out to the southeast, reaching Ethiopia between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. Sometime after 1000 BCE , chickens seem to have traveled the Nile southward from Egypt (the current fl ows north but the winds blow to the south) and early in the Common Era, Indian Ocean seafarers probably reintroduced them to East Africa. Interestingly, although it has generally been assumed that camels, domesticated in the Arabian Peninsula, entered Africa in caravans crossing the Sinai, they may instead have been transport- ed even earlier across the Red Sea to Ethiopia during Roman times, which would help to explain their apparent greater antiquity among Ethiopia’s desert nomads. 21 Camels were crucial to the Cushites – those livestock specialists in the Ethiopian highlands who later advanced across the desert to the Red Sea. 22 Other peoples, the southern Cushites, migrated with their livestock south- ward into lands that today are Kenya and Tanzania, where they introduced fi nger millet-based agriculture. 23 Finger millet ( Eleusine coracana) – so-called because the seed heads look like hands with the grain contained in the “digits” – was probably native to the highlands of Ethiopia and to neighbor- ing Uganda. 24 From there, fi nger millet agriculture also spread north and west into the Sudan while, at about the same time, Central Sudanic peo- ples, who had been growing sorghum and herding goats, sheep, and cattle on their savannas, journeyed in the other direction to enter Uganda and introduced grain sorghum ( Sorghum bicolor) cultivation. There are numerous variants of this important tropical African grass (bicolor, durra, guinea etc.) whose wild progenitor is the widely distributed race verticillifl orum – so widely distributed, in fact, that sorghum could have been domesticated almost anywhere across the African savanna on the fringes of the Sahara. Indeed, it was in this broad band that intensive tropi- cal agriculture probably began with grain sorghum and pearl millet among the fi rst African cereals to be domesticated. 25 A belt running from Sudan to Nigeria seems a good bet for sorghum’s domestication since verticillifl orum is especially abundant there – that domestication thought to have occurred 56 A Movable Feast about 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Sorghum crossed the Indian Ocean from East Africa to Asia around 200 BCE and later reached China, probably dur- ing the Mongol conquest. 26 Much later the slave trade carried it to the Americas. Teff or tef ( Eragrostis tef), which is another of Africa’s domesticated grasses, also originat- ed in and around the Ethiopian highlands, and Ethiopia is the only country where it remains a signifi cant crop today, although it is grown in surrounding countries like Yemen, Kenya, and has been carried to India and even to North America to satisfy an Ethiopian restaurant demand. 27 The tiny teff grains are ground into a darkish fl our, which is used to make a spongy, soft bread called injera. In western Africa, agriculture was practiced on the edges of the tropical forest zone some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago although West Africa’s oldest cereal, fonio ( Digitaria exilis sometimes called “hun- gry rice” and D. iburua called acha in Nigeria) is a millet said to have been cultivated on dry savannas for a much longer time. 28 But as the pace of West African agriculture grew more lively, goats, sheep, and a dwarf cattle variety increased in importance while sorghum was planted in one place, and pearl millet ( Pennisetum glaucum) in another. 29 Pearl millet – another descendent of a wild West African grass – was domesticated 4,000 years ago on the southern fringes of an expanding Sahara desert, from whence it spread into East Africa and thence to India around 3,000 years ago. It is remarkably adapted to heat and aridity, easy to grow, and more disease resistant than most other grains. Pearl millet is also versatile – the grains are cracked and eaten as a porridge or couscous; if left whole, they are eaten like rice and when ground are worked into fl our for unfermented bread ( roti). 30 Also under cultivation, at least for the past 3,500 years (if a single source can be relied upon), was African rice sometimes called “river rice.” It was probably domesticated in the fl ood basin of central Niger and has been Fecund Fringes of the Northern Fertile Crescent 57 grown ever since mostly in the southwestern region of West Africa. 31 It is utilized in the same manner as Asian rice, and is also made into beer. Well-traveled African plants include the cowpea ( Vigna unguiculata), which may have been gathered in South Asia during prehistoric times, but was defi nitely under cultivation in West Africa (central Ghana) close to 4,000 years ago, from whence it much later entered Europe and later still journeyed to the New World via Europeans and the slave trade. 32 Early cultivators of cowpeas and yams made extensive use of the fruits of the oil palm ( Elaeis guineensis), a West African native whose oil nourished indigenous peoples for millennia before recorded history. The peoples in this case apparently also included North Africans because archeological evidence indicates that palm oil was available in ancient Egypt some 5,000 years ago – meaning that it was traded overland. Oil palms produce fruit in large bunches weighing twenty pounds or more, with each containing a thousand or more fruits about the size of a small plum. 33 The oil is made by pressing the fresh fruit and that oil later became an important item in provisioning slave ships destined for the Americas. It was this trade to Brazil that reunited the African oil palm with a long lost native-American cousin ( Elaeis oleifera ). Both are now important in producing American palm oil. 34 Another domesticate from the tropical forest is okra ( Hibiscus esculentus) often called “gumbo” and “lady fi ngers.” Actually a fruit rather than a veg- etable, okra’s migration out of Africa to the forests of tropical Asia went largely unrecorded. However, we know that the Egyptians used okra in the twelfth century AD and that it entered Moorish Spain at around the same time. Like the oil palm, okra found its way via the slave trade to the Americas (probably in the latter half of the seventeenth century), and today is used in most of the hot-weather cultures of the world. From Asia to the Western Hemisphere, okra is grilled, fried, batter-fried, mixed into curries, and is a chief ingredient of stews. 35 Kola ( Cola acuminata and C. nitida) or cola nuts contain theobromine and caffeine. Conse- quently they are important as stimulants. Kola trees are indigenous to the forest zone of West Africa, and their nuts (about the size of a chest- nut) joined gold and salt as important items of long-distance African trade. Much later kola trees left Africa with European colonizers – the British 58 A Movable Feast introducing them to the East Indies, and both the British and the French tak- ing the nuts in the opposite direction to their West Indies possessions. In the recent past, kola has been used to fl avor beverages and is one of the “secret” ingredients in Coca Cola, now minus the coca. 36 There are two fi nal forest products of West Africa. One is ackee ( Blighia sapida), a fruit used in West African cooking whose late eighteenth- century introduction to Jamaica is erroneously attributed to Captain William Bligh (it arrived on a slave ship). 37 The second is melegueta (or malagueta) pepper ( Aframomum melegueta) – famous as the “grains of para- dise.” Melegueta peppers are related to cardamom and pack a hot and spicy fl avor. The Portuguese encountered the spice in the fi fteenth century along a stretch of West African coast that they called Malagueta, and began importing the grains to Europe whereupon the (now Liberian) coast came to be known as the “Grain Coast.” Melegueta pepper was overshadowed by American chilli peppers after their arrival and has dwindled in importance in Africa, but remains a major component of the Afro-Brazilian cookery of Bahia, which began with African slaves. 38 Watermelons ( Citrullus lanatus) and possibly melon are African natives, with their many names in many languages indicating that they have truly traveled the world. They had a head start in such globe- trotting because of the antiquity of their domesti- cation. As already noted, melon was being grown in China, Egypt, India, Iran, and Greece during the Bronze Age. Watermelons were originally domesticated in the savanna zones of central and southern Africa where they were, and remain, a life-giving source of water. In desert oases such as those in the Kalahari Desert, for example, they still grow wild around water holes, and their presence alerts one to the existence of water below them, even if it is not visible. Watermelon seeds, a good source of oil as well as protein, were highly prized, along with the fl esh and the rind. Watermelons reached northern Africa and southwest Asia over 6,000 years ago and were cultivated in ancient Egypt about 1,000 years after that; the fruit is depicted in the art of the fi rst Pharonic tombs and its seeds are found in funerary offerings. 39 Yet, the fruit was comparatively slow to reach India (800 AD ) and China (1100 AD ). Watermelons were introduced to southern Europe by the Moorish conquerors of Spain, but were slow to Fecund Fringes of the Northern Fertile Crescent 59 spread northward where summers were not hot enough for a good yield. Watermelon seeds came to the Americas from Africa with the slave trade, and probably from Spain as well. 40 It was the yam-cultivating Bantu with origins in present-day Nigeria who established agricultural production in the equatorial forest. They depended greatly on fi sh and, around 4,000 years ago, began to enter the forest along river valleys where they planted the white yam and, possibly, the potato yam, ( Dioscorea bulbifera) in fertile soils. Other yams from Asia reached the Bantu somewhat later as they spread throughout equatorial Africa, especially the greater or water yam ( D. alata) from Southeast Asia, and the Chinese yam or lesser yam from China. 41 There is uncertainty about the time that some of the Asian foods turned up in Africa because of the Malayo-Polynesians (Austronesians) from Borneo, who (incredibly) migrated some 4,000 miles across the Indian Ocean to settle Madagascar, just 250 miles off the African coast. Because this mind-boggling feat (or feats since there were apparently a series of voyag- es) has been dated to sometime around 500 AD , there is the very real pos- sibility that the newcomers introduced Asian plants, particularly bananas, to East Africa sometime during the fi rst millennium of the Common Era. 42 Alternatively, these foods may have arrived much earlier via Egypt and the Nile or with traders along the East African coast. Either way, the Asian yams, along with bananas and plantains, were an integral part of agriculture’s extension throughout the rainforest. Moreover, bananas, which grew well in forest regions not favorable to yams or millets, joined them in engineering something of a population explosion. In Africa south of the Sahara, humans increased from around 12 million in 500 BCE to some 20 million by the year 1000, to 35.5 mil- lion by 1500. 43 EUROPEAN EDIBLES By 5000 BCE , relatively few areas of the globe were totally dependent on agriculture and in those parts of Europe away from the Mediterranean, farming, where it was practiced at all, was a part-time means of supple- menting hunted and gathered fare. The Swiss lake dwellers, for example, were fi sher folk who lived in houses built on stilts and harvested wild cereal grains that they crushed to make breads, and wild apples that they dried for winter. Yet, sometime in the late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, 60 A Movable Feast although still hunting and gathering, they were also cultivating lentils, fox- tail millet, and peas. 44 Signs of the penetration of Neolithic agriculture into Europe have also been found in central Germany where what seem to have been domesti- cated peas were being grown between 4400 and 4200 BCE . Yet, by 3000 BCE or so, cereals were under wide-scale cultivation and herds of sheep and goats had become common sights on the landscape. 45 What happened to speed things up? Until that time, the various Neolithic Revolutions we have examined were gradual in their transformation of foragers into farmers. But those that took place in northern Europe and the British Isles were in fact revolutions that brought abrupt change – a signifi cant departure from the leisurely transition that had characterized earlier centers of agriculture. What happened was agricultural diffusion – a diffusion which abruptly brought much of the farming expertise devel- oped earlier in the Middle East to a heretofore remote foraging people. 46 In the British Isles, for example, domesticated animals – sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle – all arrived at the same time (around 3500 BCE ) with Neolithic immigrants from the coasts of the Continent, so that herding was instantly underway. Pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle had also diffused in Northern Europe where the horse was well established by 2500 BCE . Crops developed in the Fertile Crescent reached northern Europe through the Balkans via the Danube to blanket river valleys. These included wheat, or rather its ancestors, einkorn and emmer, barley, peas, lentils, and fl ax, the most important source of oil in northern Europe during its Neolithic Revolution. Following these waves of crops and animals, the pace of agriculture slowed down some. Spelt ( Triticum spelta) did not reach Europe until later, and it was not until the eighth century BCE that invading Celtic-speaking tribes added geese, ducks, and chickens to the barnyard. 47 But after this, the pace picked up again with the arrival of the Romans who brought new crops to tend, such as rye and oats, along with viticulture and grove fruits. In fact, the oldest groves and vineyards in Northern Europe date from the Roman period thanks to the stability induced by the Pax Romana (Roman Peace). Before the Romans, one invader after another had made life violent and chaotic and settlements were consequently short-lived, lasting only a few decades at best – such conditions making the establishment of groves and vines a forlorn hope. 48 . 5 FECUND FRINGES OF THE NORTHERN FERTILE CRESCENT Bread is a very simple manufactured article whose rise in the oven is closely related to the rise of the. Fecund Fringes of the Northern Fertile Crescent 55 large animals the continent is known for), the guinea fowl was the only one domesticated south of the Sahara.