Common Barley—Hordeum vulgare, Linnæus.
The common barley with four rows of grain is mentioned by Theophrastus,[1858] but it seems to have been less cultivated in antiquity than that with two rows, and considerably less than that with six rows. It has not been found in Egyptian monuments, nor in the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, Savoy, and Italy.
Willdenow[1859] says that it grows in Sicily and in the south-east of Russia, at Samara, but the modern floras of these two countries do not confirm this. We do not know what species of barley it was that Olivier saw growing wild in Mesopotamia; consequently the common barley has not yet been found certainly wild.
The multitude of common names which are attributed to it prove nothing as to its origin, for in most cases it is impossible to know if they are names of barley in general, or of a particular kind of barley cultivated in a given country.
Six-rowed Barley—Hordeum hexastichon, Linnæus.
This was the species most commonly cultivated in antiquity. Not only is it mentioned by Greek authors, but it has also been found in the earliest Egyptian monuments,[1860] and in the remains of the lake-dwellings of Switzerland (age of stone), of Italy, and of Savoy (age of bronze).[1861] Heer has even distinguished two varieties of the species formerly cultivated in Switzerland. One of them answers to the six-rowed barley represented on the medals of Metapontis, a town in the south of Italy, six centuries before Christ.
According to Roxburgh,[1862] it was the only kind of barley grown in India at the end of the last century. He attributes to it the Sanskrit name yuva, which has become juba in Bengali. Adolphe Pictet[1863] has carefully studied the names in Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages which answer to the generic name barley, but he has not been able to go into the details of each species.
The six-rowed barley has not been seen in the conditions of a wild plant, of which the species has been determined by a botanist. I have not found it in Boissier’s herbarium, which is so rich in Eastern plants. It is possible that the wild barleys mentioned by ancient authors and by Olivier were Hordeum hexastichon, but there is no proof of this.
On Barleys in general.
We have seen that the only form which is now found wild is the simplest, the least productive, Hordeum distichon, which was, like H. hexastichon, cultivated in prehistoric time. Perhaps H. vulgare has not been so long in cultivation as the two others.