The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean

The Tropical Turn

The Tropical Turn

Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean

Sureshkumar Muthukumaran

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by Sureshkumar Muthukumaran

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Muthukumaran, Sureshkumar, author.

Title: The tropical turn : agricultural innovation in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean / Sureshkumar Muthukumaran.

Description: [Oakland, California] : University of California Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022034721 (print) | LCCN 2022034722 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520390836 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520390843 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520390850 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Agricultural innovations—Mediterranean Region—History—To 1500. | Tropical crops—Mediterranean Region—History—To 1500.

Classification: LCC S494.5.I5 M88 2023 (print) | LCC S494.5.I5 (ebook) | DDC 338.1/6091822—dc23/eng/20220829

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034721

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034722

Manufactured in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. The Historical Context

2. Wool from Trees: Cotton

3. The Golden Grain: Asiatic Rice

4. Persian Apples: Citruses

5. Familiar but Foreign: Eastern Cucurbits

6. The Egyptian Bean: The Sacred Lotus

7. A Forgotten Tuber: Taro

8. Timber for God and King: Sissoo

9. How to Turn Tropical

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1. Terra cotta askos (flask) in the form of a rooster, Etruria, Italy, fourth century BCE

2. Terra cotta neck-amphora with two roosters, attributed to the Painter of London B 76, Attica, Greece, c. 570–560 BCE

3. Hematite cylinder seal with a Bactrian camel ferrying a divine couple, Syria, c. 1800–1650 BCE

4. Arachosian (Greater Kandahar region) tribute-bearers leading a Bactrian camel, northern staircase of the Apadāna, Persepolis, Iran, c. 486–465 BCE

5. Pottery disc with a double-masted (likely reed) boat, al-Sabiyah, Kuwait, c. 5500–5000 BCE (Ubaid period)

6. Copper alloy plate with reclining zebu, eastern Iran, late third to second millennium BCE

7. Red calcite figurine of a squatting monkey, possibly a rhesus macaque, Susa, Iran, c. 2400–2100 BCE

8. Indian tribute-bearer on the eastern staircase of the Apadāna, Persepolis, Iran, c. 522–486 BCE

9. Tree cotton ( Gossypium arboreum ), illustration from E. S. Ayensu, Medicinal Plants of West Africa (Algonac, 1978)

10. Asian rice ( Oryza sativa ), illustration from Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen (Gera, 1898)

11. Citron ( Citrus medica ), illustration by Pierre-Joseph Redouté in Duhamel du Monceau, Traité des arbres et arbustes que l’on cultive en France en pleine terre (Paris, 1801–1819)

12. Lemon ( Citrus × limon ), illustration from Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen (Gera, 1887)

13. Seeds of Citrus × limon recovered from a votive deposit in the Carcer Tullianum, Rome, c. 27 BCE to 14 CE

14. Painting of a fruiting lemon tree ( Citrus × limon ), Casa del Frutteto (House of the Orchard), Pompeii, Italy, c. 25 BCE to 50 CE

15. Detail of a winged protective spirit ( apkallu ) with a knobby cone, Northwest Palace, Kalḫu (Nimrud), 883–859 BCE

16. Cucumber ( Cucumis sativus ), colored etching by Magdalena Bouchard, 1772

17. Melon ( Cucumis melo ), colored engraving after Franz von Scheidl, 1776

18. Morphologically diverse bottle gourds ( Lagenaria siceraria ), northern Mozambique

19. An elongate melon, also known as an Armenian cucumber ( Cucumis melo ssp. melo flexuosus group), Bahar, Iran

20. Faience model of an elongate melon ( Cucumis melo ), Lisht, Egypt, c. 1850–1700 BCE

21. An elongate melon ( Cucumis melo ) rests against a leg of beef. Detail of a funerary banquet from the stela of the Steward Mentuwoser, Abydos, Egypt, c. 1944 BCE

22. Desiccated specimen of the sponge gourd ( Luffa aegyptiaca ) from the Jardin botanique Henri Gaussen, Botanical Collection of the Muséum de Toulouse

23. Sacred lotus ( Nelumbo nucifera ), illustration from Description de l’Égypte, Histoire naturelle (Paris, 1817)

24. Mosaic depicting Indian lotuses, including peltate leaves and seedpods, in a Nilotic scene, Casa de Neptuno, Italica, southern Spain, late second century CE

25. Taro ( Colocasia esculenta ), illustration from Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis (Nuremberg, 1613)

26. Chaplet of gold leaves (possibly modeled after Dalbergia sissoo ) strung on a necklace of lapis lazuli and carnelian beads, King’s Grave, Royal Tombs of Ur, Iraq, c. 2600–2500 BCE

27. Pressed specimen of Dalbergia sissoo leaves collected in Dehra Dun, Uttarakhand, India, 1929

MAPS

1. The Middle East, showing key geographic features

2. Seasonally reversing monsoonal winds in the Indian Ocean region

3. Important fourth- and third-millennium BCE sites mentioned in the text

4. Important second-millennium BCE sites mentioned in the text

5. Important first-millennium BCE sites mentioned in the text

6. The Achaemenid-Hellenistic East and northern India

7. Ancient sites which have yielded evidence for cotton ( Gossypium arboreum )

8. Ancient sites which have yielded evidence for rice ( Oryza sativa )

9. Ancient sites which have yielded evidence for citruses ( Citrus spp.)

10. Ancient sites which have yielded evidence for cucumbers ( Cucumis sativus )

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book responds to the growing demand to understand Afro-Eurasia as a cohesive and meaningful historical unit underlain by recurring patterns of connectivity by land and sea. It uses the anthropogenic mobility of cultivated plants and other biological materials as a roadmap for understanding cross-cultural exchanges and the movements of people through space and time. It is my hope that this model of writing history, which uses diverse data sets and organic materials as proxies for human endeavors, will be applied to other temporal and spatial units. It is also my intention that this publication sustain and develop ongoing dialogues between practitioners and readers of the historical, social, and biological sciences.

As a historian by training, it is also my desire that this book dissolves barriers within the field of ancient history. Too often the practice of ancient history is compartmentalized and parochialized along regional and linguistic lines. This not infrequently results in the failure to observe organic interconnections between societies, whether close together or far apart. I especially owe this book’s expansive vision of history to my undergraduate and postgraduate education at University College London.

A book attempting a synthesis of this order naturally stands on the shoulders of giants, be they my own teachers and mentors or the many gurus through space and time with whom my only contact was through the printed word. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Karen Radner (Munich) for her unstinting support as my primary PhD supervisor and her enthusiasm for all things Assyrian. I would also like to thank a number of brilliant educators and mentors I had the pleasure of interacting with at UCL, Oxford, and Yale-NUS College, including Amelie Kuhrt, Riet van Bremen, Eleanor Robson, Dorian Fuller, John Ma, Nicholas Purcell, David d’Avray, Rajeev Patke, and Pattaratorn Chirapravati. For the many fond memories of conversational Sanskrit in both Heidelberg and Varanasi, a special thanks to the Heidelberg Sanskritists, especially Ute Hüsken and Sadananda Das.

This book has also immensely benefited from the comments and assistance of its astute and kind reviewers, Robert Spengler (Jena) and Daniel Fuks (Cambridge). Many thanks to both of them. Any remaining errors of interpretation remain entirely my own. I should also like to thank Peter Palm (Berlin), who drew all the maps in this book on short notice. For trusting in the premise of the book and painlessly guiding the publication process, I am indebted to editor Eric Schmidt and editorial assistant LeKeisha Hughes. My gratitude is also due to the meticulous copyeditor Roy Sablosky, production editor Cindy Fulton, and others on the publishing team. I am especially grateful to the University of California Press for supporting the publishing process through its FirstGen program. Finally, a massive thank you to my parents, Indira and Muthukumaran; siblings, Rathika and Geetha; and friends for their unfailing encouragement.

ABBREVIATIONS

ASSYRIOLOGY

CLASSICAL AND HEBREW TEXTS

DICTIONARIES

Introduction

TRACING A GENEALOGY FOR CROP EXCHANGES

The past is perhaps most foreign in the sensory experience of quotidian life. Half a millennium ago, the world not only looked different but also smelled and tasted different. Imagine Italy without tomatoes, Australia without cattle, Florida without oranges, India without chilies, France without tobacco, Colombia without coffee, and Switzerland without chocolate. The regime of diseases afflicting humans was also markedly different. The peoples of the New World had no experience of smallpox, the now-extinct dreadful pustular rash, and other viral and bacterial infections endemic to the Old World. ¹ The Afro-European colonization of the Americas brought little short of a revolution in the biosphere, irrevocably fusing the ecosystems, agricultural regimes, and dietary habits of the Old and New Worlds. Voyaging across the Atlantic from the New World were pumpkins, squashes, maize, peanuts, pineapples, guavas, cacao, chili peppers, cashews, cassavas, tomatoes, papayas, sunflowers, and potatoes, among other crops; while wheat, barley, rice, oats, sugarcane, coffee, bananas, citruses, and other Old World mainstays traveled to the Americas to become part of a labor-intensive, often slavery-based, cash-cropping system. ² The year 1492 inaugurated a world without biological borders—and, inadvertently, one of the worst ecological-demographic disasters. The influx of peoples, livestock, and food crops also opened a Pandora’s box of free-ranging weeds, pests, commensals, and microbes (and their attendant diseases) whose impact on the native populations of the Americas was calamitous. ³ Coining a term for this pivotal biological diffusion, the environmental historian Alfred Crosby called his 1972 book, now held as one of the foundational texts of environmental history, The Columbian Exchange.

But the Columbian Exchange is only the most recent and best known of a series of intercontinental biological dialogues involving floral and faunal exchanges. Both archeologists and historians have identified major thresholds in agricultural history, marked by the introduction of new crops and modifications in labor and capital inputs, and have described them as either a revolution or an exchange. The most fundamental revolution was of course the Neolithic Revolution, which witnessed the domestication of plants and animals and the related evolution of hunter-gatherers into sedentary farmers some 12,000 years ago in multiple regions of the Old World. ⁴ The other notable prehistoric revolution was the Secondary Products Revolution, which entailed modifications in the management of domesticated animals to obtain secondary products like milk, cheese, yoghurt, ghee, wool, and leather—not to mention traction. ⁵ More recent agrarian revolutions familiar to students of modern history include the eighteenth-century British Agricultural Revolution, a prelude to the Industrial Revolution, and the Green Revolution of the 1940s to 1960s; both led to higher crop yields and considerable demographic growth. ⁶ In most cases, however, revolution is a misnomer, since these watersheds in agricultural history were often culminating points of a process long in the making or, as the archaeobotanist Marijke van der Veen puts it, a time period when changes reached critical mass. ⁷ Admittedly, there are scholars who espouse more gradualist approaches, deploying the notion of a revolution as a metonym for a seminal transitional process. ⁸

The post-Neolithic agricultural regime of the Old World was remarkably fluid, absorbing new cultivars from different biogeographic zones and adapting them to local social and cultural complexes. ⁹ The histories of anthropogenic crop dispersals are, however, as much about resistance inspired by cultural preferences as they are about absorption. Exotica were fêted in some circles, but met in others with scorn and suspicion. In most cases, the process of crop nativization was long-drawn and dictated not only by climatic-environmental limitations but also, more crucially, by conservative agricultural practices and foodways. It took two centuries for early modern European farmers and consumers to be convinced that the New World tomato and potato were not toxic. ¹⁰ Yet the very presence of new crops, and new varieties of old crops, indicates that some traditional agriculturists did experiment and innovate. ¹¹

Crop dispersals in the post-Neolithic world encompassed calorific staples like grains, pulses, and tubers; cash crops like fiber and oil plants, aromatics, and spices; ornamental plants; and non-staple calorific supplements like fruits and vegetables. ¹² Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum), an East Asian grain, reached Europe by the late second millennium BCE through the mediation of Central Asian agropastoral communities. ¹³ While Europe has a species of wild apple (Malus sylvestris), a species native to Central Asia (Malus sieversii) is the main contributor to the gene pool of the domesticated apple (Malus pumila). ¹⁴ Other surprising Central and East Asian contributions to the European agricultural landscape of the Iron Age (c. 1200–550 BCE) include apricots (Prunus armeniaca), peaches (Prunus persica), hemp (Cannabis sativa), pistachios (Pistacia vera), and carrots (Daucus carota subsp. sativus). ¹⁵

Sub-Saharan African crops like sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), finger millet (Eleusine coracana), pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), hyacinth bean (Lablab purpureus), cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), and castor (Ricinus communis) made their way into South India via maritime routes in a piecemeal process by the early second millennium BCE. ¹⁶ The archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller and colleagues dub this process the Bronze Age inter-savannah translocations. ¹⁷ Somewhat later, in the first millennium BCE, bananas (Musa × paradisiaca), taro (Colocasia esculenta), and yams (Dioscorea alata) were transmitted in the reverse direction from tropical Asia to sub-Saharan Africa, where they remain important calorific sources. ¹⁸ These spatially and temporally distinct examples underscore the sheer scale, complexity, and multidirectionality of crop movements across the post-Neolithic Old World.

In this book, I trace the origins of and examine one pivotal trajectory within the dynamic and multidirectional Old World exchanges of crops and fauna. The Indian subcontinent encompasses a great variety of ecosystems and is extraordinarily diverse agriculturally, with native crops being supplemented by cultivars from Africa, the Middle East, and Central, East, and Southeast Asia. It is specifically the transmission of crops and fauna of tropical and subtropical Asian origin from the Indian subcontinent to the Middle East and the Mediterranean which the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt describes as the most important movement of crops before the Columbian Exchange. ¹⁹ The region of origin for the crops under consideration in this book falls in the tropical and subtropical zone extending between latitude 28° N and 9° S from Papua New Guinea to northwestern India. Broadly speaking, these crops are frost and drought intolerant and hence are predominantly summer irrigated cultivars in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Tropical and subtropical South and Southeast Asian crops collectively constitute the single largest group of introduced aliens in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. ²⁰ This biological diffusion was responsible for the creation of a unified ecological contact zone of overlapping sets of cultivars and livestock across the southern Eurasian landmass. ²¹ The growing agro-ecological coherence of Afro-Eurasia in turn abetted processes of cultural coalescence and facilitated the spread of ideas and technologies.

The movement of crops from India to the Middle East and the Mediterranean has been variously styled in the scholarly literature depending on the agency, routes, and chronology scholars have chosen to privilege. The historian Andrew Watson speaks of this exchange as an Arab Agricultural Revolution or the Medieval Green Revolution (c. 700–1100 CE). ²² The archaeologist Andrew Sherratt opts for a more neutral trans-Eurasian exchange but elsewhere describes the same process as part of the orientalization of the Mediterranean. ²³ John McNeill, a global historian, privileges the maritime routes across the Indian Ocean and names it the Monsoon Exchange. ²⁴ Lynda Shaffer, another global historian, situates the crop exchange within a broader exchange of ideas and technology and describes it as the southernization of the Northern Hemisphere. ²⁵ In terms of chronology, scholarship has mostly failed to appreciate the lengthy process of crop transfers and has unhelpfully attributed agency to one or more political actors, including the Romans, the Sasanian Persians, and the medieval Arabs. ²⁶ But this book will show that South Asian crop movements to the Middle East and the Mediterranean extend back to the Bronze Age horizon, and no single political actor can be credited with initiating and sustaining this process.

The tropical turn of the Middle East and Mediterranean under consideration here first entered scholarly purview with Andrew Watson’s groundbreaking 1974 article, The Arab Agricultural Revolution and Its Diffusion. This was followed by another article, A Medieval Green Revolution (1981), and finally a monograph, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques (1983). In these works, Watson argued for an agricultural revolution in the early Islamic Middle East and the Mediterranean (c. 700–1100 CE) fostered by the diffusion of new Indian crops and improved farming techniques. The tropical South Asian summer crop package discussed by Watson included rice, sorghum, durum wheat, sugarcane, cotton, sour orange, lemon, lime, pomelo, banana, coconut, watermelon, spinach, artichoke, taro, eggplant, and mango. Watson identified the cosmopolitan, Islamicate populations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean as the principal agents in this biodiffusion. In Boserupian fashion, he held that the privatized labor-intensive farming of the Islamic lands, which involved equitable distribution of water, enriched irrigation methods (extensive use of water-lifting devices, underground canals, dams, and so on), crop rotation, and greater application of fertilizer, enabled greater crop yields, demographic expansion, and urban development.

But Watson’s work is plagued by what one reviewer calls a profound lack of interest in the pre-Islamic landscape and a host of flawed assumptions. ²⁷ Most of the crops cited by Watson were already introduced well before the Islamic period and certainly did not arrive in a package. ²⁸ Nor was there anything astoundingly novel about the hydraulic engineering of the early Islamic world, which inherited and expanded pre-existing Roman and Sasanian hydraulic technologies. ²⁹ The dispersal histories of individual crops are varied and complex. The notion that tropical South Asian crops were an "exogenous deus ex machina to kick-start change" in hitherto static Middle Eastern and Mediterranean economies is misleading. ³⁰ The diffusion of South Asian flora and fauna to the Middle East and beyond was not a linear, uninterrupted event but an episodic process with its roots in the interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age. While Watson’s study provides the stimulus for thinking about biological diffusions in the Old World, the so-called Arab Agricultural Revolution is far older than supposed and a much more gradual process.

SCOPE AND LIMITS

This book, in essence, offers an ecological reading of long-distance connectivity in the ancient world by investigating tropical and subtropical botanical transfers via maritime and overland routes, from South Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, with the aim of assessing the motivations behind and impact of this phenomenon on ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies. The discussion of individual crops will be prefaced by a detailed and much-needed sketch of the Middle East and the Mediterranean’s relations with South Asia from prehistory to the late centuries BCE. This longue durée narrative of interactions between the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and South Asia, whose full contours have yet to be appreciated by ancient historians and archaeologists alike, forms an essential backdrop to both early and later crop movements.

The textual and archaeological materials assembled in this book have yielded evidence for the introduction and naturalization of several South Asian cultivars in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean. The strategy employed here has been to maximize the available evidence while offering a selection of different types of economic plants: cereal (rice), fiber (cotton), timber (sissoo), tuber (taro), legume (lotus), and fruits and vegetables (citruses and cucurbits). Of course a good number of these plants had non-comestible functions as well. And this list of new crops is far from exhaustive. A variety of Indian millet, sugarcane, eggplant, sebesten plum, and sambac jasmine are known from pre-Islamic Middle Eastern and Mediterranean contexts, but the textual and archaeological evidence for their dispersal and cultivation is meager. ³¹ Yet crop transfers that were seemingly insignificant in their earliest phases could hold great potential in the future, as is the case with sugarcane. As our focus is strictly on economic plants from tropical Asia which were cultivated in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, the survey excludes tropical species which were available as long-distance commodities but not taken into cultivation. Dozens of spices, for instance, have been moving between South Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean throughout the ages, among them economically important ones like black pepper, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, and cassia. These will not be discussed in any detail as they deserve a separate treatment of their own.

Heading in the opposite direction, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultivars, most prominently barley and wheat, were also transmitted to South Asia in antiquity. ³² A number of commonly used spice and aromatic plants in South Asia, including coriander, cumin, black cumin, ajwain, fenugreek, saffron, marjoram, and licorice, originate in temperate zones west of the Indian subcontinent. ³³ Although coriander (Coriandrum sativum), a native of the Middle East, was already identified as seeds in a late-third-millennium BCE context in Miri Qalat in Pakistani Baluchistan, its widespread use in South Asia is probably due to culinary exchanges with the Achaemenid Empire in the first millennium BCE. ³⁴ This is suggested by the use of an Akkadian or Aramaic loanword for the plant in Sanskrit: kustumburu (Akkadian kusibirru, Aramaic kusbara). ³⁵ Similarly, almonds, walnuts, pomegranates, and apples are not native to the Indian subcontinent but derive from Central Asia and the Middle East. ³⁶ Asafoetida (Ferula asafoetida), whose pungent resin is a popular spice across South Asia, was (until trial cultivation in Himachal Pradesh in 2020) imported to India from the arid regions of Iran and Afghanistan, where it grows wild. ³⁷ The movement of cultivars from the Mediterranean and the Middle East to South Asia is, on the whole, poorly documented. While these crop movements in the reverse direction shared the same routes and mechanisms with the tropical Asian crops moving to temperate zones, the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean contribution to South Asian agriculture, diet, and culture is beyond the scope of the present book.

Like the Columbian Exchange, the tropical Indian exchange entailed the transfer of human populations, animals, commensals, pests, microbes, and diseases which left an irrevocable ecological imprint on host landscapes in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The animals transmitted to the Middle East and the Mediterranean from South and Southeast Asia included both domesticates and exotica: chickens, peafowl, parakeets, Asian elephants, tigers, mongooses, langurs, water buffaloes, caprids, and even cat and dog breeds. ³⁸ The movement of fauna had a significant impact on agricultural practice, communications, warfare, and leisurely pursuits. The westward dispersal of chickens (figures 1 and 2) ensured that egg consumption could become regular rather than seasonal as is generally the case with eggs produced by geese and ducks. ³⁹ But calorific needs were not the only motivation for the chicken’s westward march. In classical Greece, cockerels appear as important courtship gifts in pederastic relationships and were intimately connected to one of the most common modes of gambling across the Old World: cockfighting. ⁴⁰

FIGURE 1. Terra cotta askos (flask) in the form of a rooster, Etruria, Italy, fourth century BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (public domain).

FIGURE 2. Terra cotta neck-amphora with two roosters, attributed to the Painter of London B 76, Attica, Greece, c. 570–560 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (public domain).

Pests and commensals trailing humans, animals, and plants along Indian Ocean routes included the black rat (Rattus rattus), house mouse (Mus musculus), Asian house shrew (Suncus murinus), house crow (Corvus splendens), gecko (Hemidactylus spp.), and a great variety of insects. ⁴¹ Trade in grain and farinaceous products across overland and maritime Afro-Eurasian routes led to the spread of agricultural pests like the red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum), lesser grain borer (Rhyzopertha dominica) and khapra beetle (Trogoderma granarium), natives of India which are unambiguously present in the palaeoentomological records of the Middle East and the Mediterranean from the second millennium BCE on. ⁴² A number of weed species, like horse purslane (Trianthema spp.), buttonweed (Spermacoce spp.), and creeping woodsorrel (Oxalis corniculata), accompanied the trans–Indian Ocean shipment of grain. ⁴³ The other significant unintentional dispersal was that of microbial pathogenic entities like protozoa, bacteria, and viruses, which had a central role in the formation of familiar Old World diseases (like smallpox, measles, and influenza) and epidemics. ⁴⁴ The sheer complexity of this biological exchange cannot be pursued in any great depth here, and we will restrict our scope to the movement of crops (and, where relevant, agricultural pests) from South Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

It may be wise to embrace another caveat at this juncture. While I do not deny the importance of the tropical turn for the Middle East and the Mediterranean, the exceptionality of this exchange should not be exaggerated. The Indian tropical bioexchange stands out from other early crop movements not only on account of its wide geographical scope and diverse repertoire of calorifically and culturally significant crops but also because the cultures which were directly involved have bequeathed us written records, lending greater visibility to agrarian changes here compared to similar processes elsewhere in the Afro-Eurasian landmass. The stories of the latter have to be chronicled by archaeologists rather than historians. The only other ancient transcontinental Eurasian bioexchange with a comparable impression on documentary sources is perhaps the exchange of crops along the maritime and terrestrial Silk Roads between China and Central, West, South, and Southeast Asia between the Han and Tang dynasties (second century BCE to ninth century CE). ⁴⁵

SOURCES AND METHODS

Owing to the wide spatial and temporal scope of the present study, the sources consulted here appear in a range of genres and in several ancient languages, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the Prakrits. References to plants and their byproducts in ancient texts are often incidental to the work’s purpose, whether literary, spiritual, pharmacological, geographical, administrative, fiscal, or otherwise. While the diversity of sources reflects the multiplicity of applications for botanical materials, the cultivation context and modes of transmission are often invisibilized by all-too-casual references. The piecemeal nature of the surviving data is, however, compensated for by a cumulative reading of the textual sources.

The documentary sources in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Elamite, preserved on clay tablets in the cuneiform script, have rarely been privileged in discussions of ancient crop translocations despite the wealth of references to wild and cultivated plants in these languages. This hesitation is a result of the imprecise identification of ancient plant