When you hear the word "agriculture", what comes to mind? Most people think, farming. However, this is only part-true. First, let's look at the word itself. The word agriculture, as with most words comes from a Latin word, agricultura. If we split the word down into agri, which means field, and cultura which translates into cultivation, we find that agriculture's literal translation from Latin is cultivation of the fields. This is a series of the history of the "cultivation of the fields".
Imagine a world where your entire livelihood was searching and gathering food. From sunrise to sunset, all you and your family does is hunt and gather. The nomadic nature of your family means that you move with the food, and instead of a nice 3 bedroom 2 bath ranch house, it's a tent. I mean, why build a house when you need to follow migration patterns of the animals. This is a rough way of living, and because you spend all day looking for food, there isn't enough time to really do anything else, all you do is eat, sleep, and search for food. This is what life was like in 11,000BC.
Fast forward to 8,000BC, the fertile crescent in a region of Mesoptamia, a Hebrew word which translates to "land between 2 rivers". This region is in what is now modern-day Iraq (the two rivers being the Tigris and Euphrates). People got smart about their food supply. I couldn't imagine how revolutionary it was to think, "I'm going to GROW my own food". Now, this wasn't something that happened overnight, and this revolution didn't discontinue the hunter-gatherer way of life. It did, however, allow a shift. Now, instead of hunting and gathering all day, you're able to grow food, either on the side, or in its entirety. For the time, this was a totally new idea.
Fast forward again about 2,000 years, it's 6000BC, in the Nile River Valley, what is now modern day Egypt. The area was very fertile, and was flooded annually, which deposited all sorts of debris onto the fields, but most importantly, it provided nutrition to plants. Could you imagine if your livelihood was all dependent on what we consider today to be a natural disaster? There is a reason that the Egyptians were so advanced, and that is agriculture. Think for a minute, if you are able to grow enough of your own food, and enough to feed your neighbor, then your neighbor is now free to do something else. This was another revolution. This was a shift from subsistence agriculture, a system where you grow just for yourself or your family, to supporting more and more people. Some of the people are now free to specialize. The crazy part of this story is it's repeated again and again throughout history, in Asia, Europe, even in the United States. This is the natural progression of civilization.
Agriculture is responsible for civilization itself. If that nomad didn't think to grow his own food, where would we be today? We wouldn't be able to enjoy our free time, because we wouldn't have any free time. While many of my friends hunt seasonally, it's a totally different story when you come home empty-handed and go to bed hungry.
This is the beginning of the story, I will continue going through the history of agriculture and note major events throughout the journey of people as we became more and more advanced. And it all started with a nomad that had a new idea on how to feed his family.
No comments:
Post a Comment