the vegetative mediterranean 37
modified techniques and relations of production, but would also produce more food
and wealth. Foodways and health would change, as would opportunities for invest-
ment and exploitation. Given that these changes were slow, gradual, and cumulative,
and that adoption of the novelties was uneven, spread over a period extending from
700 to 1200, one may question the revolutionary label. But not all revolutions hap-
pen in a brilliant flash, and being able to grow spinach, eggplants, rice, and cotton
certainly made a difference to Mediterranean cultivators, including those who chose
not to but operated in a context where others did (van der Veen, 2010: 8–10).
The Arab invaders of Syria, Egypt, super-Saharan Africa and, after 711, Iberia (as
well as numerous islands in between) did not, of course, sweep away previous agricul-
tural regimens. More than other barbarian invaders in late antiquity, they used what
they found, which often was rich in cultivars and techniques of cultivation. Their
revolution was not built on a desert, and several of the plants whose introduction
Watson ascribed to early caliphal ingenuity had long been known to the ancients.
Ancient cultivators grew enough hard wheat, for instance, that its presence in the
Islamic sea can have little to do with any Arab revolutions (Watson, 2008: xii–xiii;
Decker, 2009; van der Veen, 2011: 119).
Nevertheless, learned displays in Greek and Roman literature are not the same as
diffusion on the ground (Horden and Purcell, 2000: 257–263). The popularization
in the Arab Mediterranean of crops, like artichokes, that had lived mostly in the pages
of ancient agronomical manuals was an achievement that could have the cascading
social, economic, cultural, and demographic effects Watson envisioned (Sonnante
et al., 2007). Bioarcheological data indicate that in the centuries around 1000 new
plants and cultivars came under cultivation in the former Roman provinces then ruled
from Baghdad. For instance, the Romans failed to appreciate watermelons and the
occupants of Rome’s Red Sea ports in Egypt only ate them half-heartedly. By the
eleventh century, however, farmers grew new cultivars with bigger, tastier seeds both
on the Red Sea and throughout Egypt (Cox and van der Veen, 2008). Whether the
new-style melons succeeded because of medieval zeal for chewing seeds, as opposed
to pulp, or because seeds’ preservability rendered them commercial, a definite change
took place.
Though Lebanon claims the honor of having given the cauliflower to the medieval
sea, Egypt played a pivotal role in the late-first-millennium seepage of Asian (and
a few African) plants into the Mediterranean (Kingsbury, 2009: 63). Long before
Suez opened in 1869, Egypt’s coasts and commercial ports, open to both the Indian
Ocean and the Mediterranean, positioned the country to become a broker in
the Mediterranean Exchange. Throughout Mediterranean history, Africa supplied
few exotics and a botanical drift from east to west most shaped plant movements; few
introductions could come from the Atlantic before 1492, and even thereafter the
east-to-west pattern persisted for centuries. In this ancient process Egypt was always a
geographical funnel, yet an increased volume of usable vegetables entered the Roman
and Islamic empires via the coastal settlements on the Red Sea coast. In the caliphate,
such towns’ role expanded: they were filters vetting culturally- or physiologically-
unsuitable new plants, as well as admitting suitable ones. They were instrumental in
increasing the number of cultivated plants in Egypt from 61 to 90, using cultivars
from South Asia and some from East Africa (van der Veen, 2011). Neither bananas
nor eggplants became dominant cultivations, even in Egypt; nor did sorghum and