238 THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
Though widely spread then throughout Europe, its gram is rare
in Bronze Age deposits ; no Iron Age examples have been found.
More important still, the grain raised in prehistoric Europe is
like that of the typical wild "species" : the grain raised in modern
Europe is like that of the wild "variety" which is confined to
Asia. The "method of elimination," supported by hints given
by Theophrastus as to its habit, suggests that this is the Greek
cereal known as τίφη, and it may be for scholars to consider
whether this was not also the Assyrian cereal named saide or
suilla, the Sumerian cereal ZAG. HI. LI, mentioned so often in
the "Assyrian Herbal." It is by no means impossible that the
large-grained "wild" variety of Syria, Asia Minor and Kurdistan
is a "spontaneous" survival from former cultivation ; whatever
the origin of the Neolithic crop may have been, the Einkorn or
Locular still grown in parts of Europe may, like Woad, be one of
the gifts for which Western civilization has to thank the early
culture of Asia Minor.
Most botanists are likely to agree that Triticum dicoccum, the
most primitive cultivated "race" of wheats with 14 pairs of
chromosomes, for which Prof. Percival uses the name Emmer, is
as old as the Einkorn or Locular. It was as widely grown as
the latter in Central Europe in Neolithic days, and continued
to be of importance, at least in Switzerland, during the Bronze
period. It was grown in Egypt by the predynastic Badarians,
and is known to have been cultivated in dynastic Egypt from
5400 b.c. down to the date of the Greek conquest ; it was the chief
cereal of Mesopotamia from at least 4000 b.c. down to the time
of the Persian conquest. If the cultivation of Emmer began in
Egypt, a point that is only doubtful because some scholars deduct
a millenium and a half from the generally accepted dates for the
first Egyptian Dynasty, it is certain that this wheat is not "wild"
in Egypt. We are indebted to a Greek author for the transmis-
sion of the Egyptian legend that Emmer was brought to Egypt
by Isis, who had found it and barley growing wild, "on a high
"mountain in Phoenicia, far away." Another Greek writer has
preserved for us, by quotation, a passage from a history now lost,
written by a priest of Babylon, which says that wheat grew wild
in the hills between the Upper Euphrates and the Upper Tigris.
In 1855 a European botanist just missed the opportunity of
making the old Egyptian myth come true : among specimens of