Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.53

c12.53

Barley is a grain which has been cultivated from very early times in Western Asia; it is attested to in Tell Halaf times at Arpachiyah in Northern Mesopotamia, and in the Egyptian Fayum at a time probably contemporary with the Uruk phase of ancient Mesopotamia. The Egyptian finds include, significantly enough, the *hexastichum* (six-row) variety of barley, as in prehistoric India, and the wild varieties of the grass from which the cultivated grain was produced still grow in Turkestan, Persia, and North Afghanistan. The wild ancestors of what is known as bread wheat (with 21 chromosomes as against 14 and 7 in the other two main wheat groups) are unknown, but it is interesting to note that the most primitive forms of the cultivated varieties are grown today in Persia, Afghanistan, the region around Bokhara, Kashmir, and Western India, and there is some reason to think that the *sphaerococcum* and *compactum* forms may be the earliest forms of bread wheat, arising out of hybridization of the other wheats with kindred grasses. On botanical grounds such workers as Vavilov have suggested that bread wheat originated on the Himalayan edge of Afghanistan; others have looked to the region between the Zagros Mountains and the Caspian. The archaeological evidence is slight, but impressions of bread wheat grains of the *Triticum vulgare* group were found in potsherds from Anau I in Turkestan, and point to the early emergence of the type in regions not too remote from Western India, where the Harappā Culture evidence shows that bread wheats were being grown in the third millennium B.C.