Let us now endeavour to analyse the type of cultivation reflected in the Demiurgi steles in the 4th century B.C. The crops recorded are: barley, wheat, legumes (όσπρια), cummin, hay (sown and natural), grapes (table and wine), figs, raisins, olives and olive oil. Barley today is sown in Cyrenaica on areas far exceeding those sown to wheat, and the country is generally regarded as more suitable to the former than to the latter.[571] The yield of barley in present-day Greece is approximately double that of wheat, and the same applies to Crete. Of the ten demes recorded in the well-known Eleusinian inscription of 329/8 B.C.[572] only three devote less than sixty percent, of their areas to barley-growing, and thirteen sow barley on over seventy percent, of them. The percentage of land down to wheat may have been larger in Cyrene, to judge by the “Cereal Stele” of the years 330-325 B.C., which will be discussed below. Generally barley brought lower prices (1-2 drachmas, in the 4th century)[573] than wheat (2-3 drachmas). The Italian experts were agreed that wheat predominates on the Plateau, while barley does better on its southern slopes and in the wadis bordering on the steppe.[574] This view concurs with the ancient sources. Strabo[575] states that the silphium region, despite its dry and sandy nature, was suitable to the growing of grains adapted to resisting dry conditions; he also writes[576] that ὄρυζα was grown in the central grain-zone owing to its dryness. As ὄρυζα means rice, this word is obviously the result of a corruption of the text, and should be amended as Bonacelli has suggested,[577] to ὄλυρα, meaning emmer (Triticum dicoccum). According to Piani,[578] barley was grown in larger quantities than wheat in Cyrenaica, as it ripens more quickly and needs less rain. Bonacelli, indeed,[579] shows that the drought resistance and early ripening of barley in February and at the beginning of March, are better adapted to the hard conditions of the critical growing season in Cyrenaica.
In 1934/5 the Italian farms had 13,173 hectares under wheat, and 2,574 hectares under barley. The same year the Arabs had sown 7,809 to wheat, and 58,496 hectares to barley.[580] It is therefore clear that wheat was sown chiefly on the plateau and in the Barka Plain, where the Italian colonies were concentrated, while the natives remained preponderantly growers of barley. On the other hand in 1939 Cyrenaica grew more wheat than barley, the general yield being 234,915 quintals of wheat and 170,946 quintals of barley,[581] that is, 293,643 and 284,910 kilograms respectively. This change arose doubtless from an increase in wheat production in the expanding Italian settlement area, and it is probable that the barley-yield tends to increase in dry seasons, which are to be expected every fourth year. Piani indeed notes[582] that the unstable character of the rainfall even on the Jebel makes difficult the maintenance of fixed rotations and requires the reduction of arable areas in certain years. Accordingly it is impossible to form an estimate of the relationship between barley and wheat; nevertheless a summarization of the phenomena enables us to state, that if the two crops might be nearly equal in good years — although the balance tends permanently in favour of barley — the sowing of barley exceeds that of wheat in drought years, while barley and emmer were probably the chief grains of the small peasant interested in subsistence rather than export, as well as the peculiar crops of the Libyan, and more especially of the nomad.
The general lines of the Cyrenean farm of the 4th century B.C. may be reconstructed on the basis of the crops recorded on the contemporary steles, and on the authority of our general knowledge of the Greek agriculture of the time. Of the crops recorded and listed above, the grains were mainly winter crops, the normal practice being to alternate the sowing of grain with fallow in successive years.[583] In the Mediterranean region as a whole and in middle eastern lands in particular, where summer rain is rare or entirely absent, extensive irrigation not feasible and modern rotations and manuring not practised, it is essential to fallow the land in winter in order to conserve moisture for summer growth; soil which has borne a winter crop must therefore remain unsown during the following summer. Summer-grains, indeed, were not frequent among the Greeks except in one or two areas. They were rare even among the Romans, being limited to regions of especially fertile soil or to areas of permanent summer rainfall. In these conditions, the only solution was to divide the arable equally between crop and fallow. The sown half received wheat and barley in one season, this being clear not only from the Demiurgi steles, but also from the 4th-century Sunium inscription in Attica, which says:[584] “(the lessee must sow) half with wheat and barley, and the fallow half with legumes (ὄσπριοις); the rest of the (fallow) land he shall not sow”. The same arrangement appears in a lease from Dyaleis,[585] which divides the plot into corn (σῖτος) and legumes (ὄσπρια). A similar plan is probable in Ptolemaic Egypt, where a clause in a contract dictates[586] that “after the appointed time I shall hand over the plot leased, half under wheat, a quarter under various seeds, and the remaining quarter under fodder for cattle.”[587] Here the fodder (χόρτος) is sown on the winter fallow; the όσπρια occupying the second half of the fallow, included such crops as beans, peas, lentils, clover, lucerne and vetch, and served as fodder, or, after ploughing in, as green manure.
The advantage of the long summer-season, when no grains were sown, lay in the leisure it afforded to the Greek farmer to plough his fallow, to work it deep, and to tend his vines and fruit-trees which ripened only at the end of the summer. Pliny, as we have seen, remarked that corn in Libya required none of the hoeing or weeding normally needed in the growing season in other countries,[588] and this saved labour and cheapened the produce. On the other hand a serious loss was involved in the necessary fallowing of half the arable which remained unsown throughout the summer, and obviously the farmer sought summer crops which could be sown on or next to the areas from which the winter grains had been harvested. Theophrastus draws up a list of such crops:[589] summer wheat ripening in three months, and a variety of late-sown barley which matured after earlier varieties; also lentils, pulse, peas, vetch, chickpeas (Lathyrus sativus), beans, millet and lupin. We know too little to say how far the Cyrenean farmer of the 4th century grew summer-crops without irrigation. We read of two summer crops in ancient Cyrenaica, to wit, cummin[590] and saffron. Cummin was sown in the same season as pulse[591] and appears to have been a commercial plant used, like silphium, as a source of condiments and drugs. Apicius writes of Libyan cummin in his cookery book,[592] hence it was exported. Saffron figures among Cyrenean products in the 4th century, and in Ptolemaic Egypt was sown as a summer crop on unirrigated land;[593] it may accordingly be listed among the summer plants of the Cyrenean farmer. As to the όσπρια of the Demiurgi steles, this class seems to have connoted both winter vegetables and summer legumes, the latter being required as green fodder after the corn had been cut.[594] The growing of summer legumes is not impracticable on the Plateau, which enjoys a high dew precipitation in the hot season, explicitly referred to by Theophrastus, who says:[595] “In Egypt, Babylonia and Bactria, where the country enjoys little rain, the dew nourishes everything; this it does also about Cyrene and Euesperitae.” Real “dry farming” is possible only on the highest part of the Plateau,[596] in the region which receives over 400 mm. of precipitation annually, but here summer-sown pulse, lentils and chickpeas do well,[597] thanks to the water-retentive qualities of the red soil in the dry season.[598] The area of summer legumes, therefore, is limited to the red soils that extend between the line Tocra-al-Abbiar on the west and al-Gubba on the east; their northern limit is the escarpment of the middle terrace (the Lusaita), and their southern limit the line from Gerdes/Marawa to Slonta. But to succeed after a grain crop on the Plateau, legumes would have to be swift-growing late varieties, as the Plateau cereals were usually cut in August. It is more probable, then, that they were sown on the fallow, and this has been the actual practice down to the present in Cyprus,[599] as part of a cropping plan which has altered little since antiquity. Due to the lateness of the plateau harvest, the sowing of summer grains is improbable, nor does sowing succeed in Cyrenaica after the December rains, which are essential to the ripening of the crop.[600] On the other hand corn is cut in the southern Jebel and in the Barka Plain as early as April, hence it is possible to envisage the utilization of the very long summer for a second sowing. But it is improbable that the moisture in Cyrenaica was adequate for sowing such crops except in an unusually rainy season. Exceptional was ὄρυζα = ὄλυρα emmer, which grew in the country’s central region in dry conditions. If a three-field division was practised in ancient times on the plateau, it probably involved the growing of early barley, since this crop ripened sooner than wheat and required less moisture,[601] and could be followed by another crop.
572
574
N. Scaetta,
575
XVII, 3, 23 (838): ‘The country nurtures trees for a hundred stades; for a distance of another hundred stades there is (soil) which is suitable only as arable and grows rice (ὄρυζα — certainly to be emended ὄλυρα = emmer-wlieat) owing to its dryness. Beyond these zones (the soil produces) silphium ’
587
592
III, 105. It should however be remarked that his work is late and not dated with certainty.