Marschall Bieberstein[1843] mentions Triticum monococcum, or a variety of it, growing wild in the Crimea and the eastern Caucasus, but no botanist has confirmed this assertion. Steven,[1844] who lived in the Crimea, declares that he never saw the species except cultivated by the Tartars. On the other hand, the plant which Balansa gathered in a wild state near Mount Sipylus, in Anatolia, is T. monococcum, according to J. Gay,[1845] who takes with this form Triticum bœoticum, Boissier, which grows wild in the plains of Bœotia[1846] and in Servia.[1847]
Admitting these facts, T. monococcum is a native of Servia, Greece, and Asia Minor, and as the attempts to cross it with other spelts or wheats have not been successful, it is rightly termed a species in the Linnæan sense.
The separation of wheat with free grains from spelt must have taken place before all history, perhaps before the beginning of agriculture. Wheat must have appeared first in Asia, and then spelt, probably in Eastern Europe and Anatolia. Lastly, among spelts T. monococcum seems to be the most ancient form, from which the others have gradually developed in several thousand years of cultivation and selection.
Two-rowed Barley—Hordeum distichon, Linnæus.
Barley is among the most ancient of cultivated plants. As all its forms resemble each other in nature and uses, we must not expect to find in ancient authors and in common names that precision which would enable us to recognize the species admitted by botanists. In many cases the name barley has been taken in a vague or generic sense. This is a difficulty which we must take into account. For instance, the expression of the Old Testament, of Berosus, of Moses of Chorene, Pausanias, Marco Polo, and more recently of Olivier, indicating “wild and cultivated barley” in a given country, prove nothing, because we do not know to which species they refer. There is the same obscurity in China. Dr. Bretschneider says[1848] that, according to a work published in the year A.D. 100, the Chinese cultivated barley, but he does not specify the kind. At the extreme west of the old world the Guanchos also cultivated a barley, of which we know the name but not the species.
The common variety of the two-rowed barley, in which the husk remains attached to the ripened grain, has been found wild in Western Asia, in Arabia Petrea,[1849] near Mount Sinai,[1850] in the ruins of Persepolis,[1851] near the Caspian Sea,[1852] between Lenkoran and Baku, in the desert of Chirvan and Awhasia, to the south of the Caucasus,[1853] and in Turcomania.[1854] No author mentions it in Greece, Egypt, or to the east of Persia. Willdenow[1855] indicates it at Samara, in the south-east of Russia; but more recent authors do not confirm this. Its modern area is, therefore, from the Red Sea to the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea.
Hence this barley should be one of the forms cultivated by Semitic and Turanian peoples. Yet it has not been found in Egyptian monuments. It seems that the Aryans must have known it, but I find no proof in vernacular names or in history.
Theophrastus[1856] speaks of the two-rowed barley. The lake-dwellers of Eastern Switzerland cultivated it before they possessed metals,[1857] but the six-rowed barley was more common among them.
The variety in which the grain is bare at maturity (H. distichon nudum, Linnæus), which in France has all sorts of absurd names, orge à café, orge du Pérou (coffee barley, Peruvian barley), has never been found wild.
The fan-shaped barley (Hordeum Zeocriton, Linnæus) seems to me to be a cultivated form of the two-rowed barley. It is not known in a wild state, nor has it been found in Egyptian monuments, nor the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, Savoy, and Italy.