Author: * Marie Siduri
Date: Dec 15, 2002 - 17:42

Given the complicated work of farming and irrigation, and the social organization needed to get the work done, it seems reasonable that someone would eventually have to composes a "how-to" manual. One such composition, called "The Farmer's Instructions" dates from the Ur III Dynasty (roughly 2100-2000 BCE). Samuel Kramer calls it "The Farmers' Almanac," and has an extended discussion in his book "The Sumerians," as well as a translation of it in Appendix I,* which he cautions is a provisional work, in part because of the difficulty of translating technical terms. How to render in meaningful English terms "shukin"- or "bardil-plow"?

The first thing the farmer instructs his son to do is to inspect the "levees, canals and mounds that have to be opened." The field should be watered, but not too much. (Don't want to wash away the field next to it, of course.) Areas with standing water should be fenced--cattle shouldn't roam there. (In Kramer's translation, oxen do roam there). When the water subsides the land has to be leveled with a hoe of a specific weight, and other instruments until the field is dried out.

The instruments--including the whip for the oxen--must be inspected and ready to use. There must be back-up oxen and back-up instruments. The furrows should be of certain width--no less, no more--and the farmer is told to "keep an eye" on the man dropping seeds using a seed-plow to make sure he's doing at the proper distance for the type of soil.

When the seedlings break the ground, rites to keep field mice must be performed. The crop is watered at repeatedly at certain times, but watering when fully leafed will cause leaf rust. The crop is watered again just before harvesting.

The farmer instructs his son not to wait too long to harvest, but the harvest at the right time in teams of three. Once the harvest is gathered, rites for sheaves are performed daily. It is then winnowed and measured out.

These, the farmer concludes, are the instructions of Ninurta, the "faithful farmer" of Enlil.

It is, as Kramer points out, rather unlikely that the people who did the work actually kept a copy of these instructions around the house. Literacy was restricted to a few in Sumerian society and in any event, the people working the fields were probably too busy working. Kramer's idea is that the intended readers for the work--which Postage describes as the "received wisdom of the Ur III agriculture" (p. 167)--are scribes who might be put in managing positions at various estates.

In my humble opinion, this makes sense. The degree of labor, equipment and organization required for the whole undertaking, which was intended to maximize yield to beyond what was needed for subsistence, would mean that there would be the workers and their supervisors, who might not necessarily have extensive firsthand experience in the fields.

*That's "I," not "one" for any Romans reading this

----

Kramer, Samual Noah; The Sumerians
Postgate, J.N.; Early Mesopotamia
The Farmer's Instructions (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr563.htm) from The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/index.htm)