CHAPTER FOUR
AGRICULTURAL
TECHNIQUES
Blahoslav Hrusˇka
INTRODUCTIOND
omesticated plants and animals became an important food source for the
populations of the Ancient Near East in the Neolithic age. They became ever
more widely used during the periods which may be dated approximately from the
eighth to the fourth millenium BC, and throughout all subsequent phases of Meso-
potamian history. Both in the alluvial plains and in semi-arid steppes, Mesopotamian
agriculture yielded surprisingly good results, and was capable of sustaining the large
populations of the first city-states and the later territorial states. On this agricultural
base, developed in the third millenium BC, the later, well-known Assyrian and
Babylonian empires emerged.
This study focuses on agricultural production during the third millennium BC,
when the chief language written in Mesopotamia was Sumerian. Our knowledge of
plant cultivation in the flood plain between the Euphrates and the Tigris is gained
less from direct archaeological evidence than from cuneiform texts.^1 Sumerian decorative
art also offers only a limited amount of relevant iconographic evidence pertaining to
cereal growing and animal husbandry, quite unlike the richly informative visual
sources from ancient Egypt. Fortunately, a great number of the early texts deal
specifically with agricultural activities. These ‘economic’ texts originate mainly from
the archives of temple and palace estates and furnish information about the management
of food production. Of great interest is the Sumerian composition known as ‘Farmer’s
Instructions’, also referred to as ‘Georgica Sumerica’ or ‘Farmer’s Almanac’ (Civil
1994 : 1 – 6 ). An experienced ‘ploughman’ gives detailed instruction on various agri-
cultural matters, such as the labouring of grain fields prior to sowing, how to sow
grain, on the maintenance of ards (including seed ards), on irrigation, on harvesting
and, finally, on the winnowing and transport of grain. The text refers to accompanying
religious rituals, as its doxology identifies it as ‘instructions of the god Ninurta, son
of Enlil, Ninurta, faithful farmer of Enlil’. The composition survives in 33 mostly
broken examples from Nippur, other fragments have turned up at Ur, Sippar and
Babylon, or come from unidentified sites. I believe that the ‘Farmer’s Instructions’
might have been transmitted orally throughout the third millennium, to be written
down in the eighteenth–seventeenth centuries BC.