A section from the journey

What They Grew and Ate

Before a city can build or trade, its people must eat. The river-people were farmers first. They grew wheat and barley, kept cattle, sheep, and goats, and gathered fruits and fish. Their fields, watered by the rivers and the rains, fed the crowded cities. The grain they grew was the true foundation of everything else.

We have walked among seals and weights, ships and workshops. But let us step back, out past the city wall, into the fields. For before any of that fine work could happen, one plain thing had to come first. The people had to eat.

The river-people were farmers, above all else. Most of them spent their days not making seals but tending crops and herds. The cities we marvel at were built on the steady, humble work of the fields, and we should honour that work as the ground of everything else.

What did they grow? Chiefly wheat and barley, the two great grains. These they planted in the cooler part of the year, harvested, and stored. From them came bread and porridge — the daily food that filled the belly and the granary alike.

They kept animals too. Cattle were the most precious — they gave milk, and pulled carts and ploughs, and meant wealth. There were also sheep and goats, for milk, meat, and wool. So the farmyard hummed alongside the field.

Their table held more than grain and milk. They grew peas and sesame. They ate the fruits the land offered, such as dates and melons. They caught fish from the rivers and from the sea. Far to the east, where the land was wetter, some communities also grew rice. It was a full and varied diet.

How was all this fed? By water, as so much in this world was. The rivers flooded each year and left behind fresh, rich soil, soft and ready for seed. The summer rains came and watered the growing crops. The same rivers that filled the wells and the Great Bath also filled the fields.

Here is the deep point. When farmers grow more grain than they themselves need, that extra grain is a kind of treasure. It can feed others — others who are then free to make pots, to drill beads, to trade, to plan a city. So the quiet surplus of the fields is what set free all the dazzling skill we have admired. The plough came before the seal.

Every meal you eat began in someone's field, with patient hands and the turning of the seasons. When you next sit down to eat, can you trace the food back, in your mind, to the soil and the rain and the labour that grew it?