Origin of Cultivated Plants / The International Scientific Series Volume XLVIII

by Alphonse de Candolle

The Linum ambiguum of Jordan grows on the coast of Provence and of Languedoc in dry places.[587]

Lastly, Linum angustifolium, which hardly differs from the preceding, has a well-defined and rather large area. It grows wild, especially on hills throughout the region of which the Mediterranean forms the centre; that is, in the Canaries and Madeira, in Marocco,[588] Algeria,[589] and as far as the Cyrenaic;[590] from the south of Europe, as far as England,[591] the Alps, and the Balkan Mountains; and lastly, in Asia from the south of the Caucasus[592] to Lebanon and Palestine.[593] I do not find it mentioned in the Crimea, nor beyond the Caspian Sea.

Let us now turn to the cultivation of flax, destined in most instances to furnish a textile substance, often also to yield oil, and cultivated among certain peoples for the nutritious properties of the seed. I first studied the question of its origin in 1855,[594] and with the following result:—

It was abundantly shown that the ancient Egyptians and the Hebrews made use of linen stuffs. Herodotus affirms this. Moreover, the plant may be seen figured in the ancient Egyptian drawings, and the microscope indubitably shows that the bandages which bind the mummies are of linen.[595] The culture of flax is of ancient date in Europe; it was known to the Kelts, and in India according to history. Lastly, the widely different common names indicate likewise an ancient cultivation or long use in different countries. The Keltic name lin, and Greco-Latin linon or linum, has no analogy with the Hebrew pischta,[596] nor with the Sanskrit names ooma, atasi, utasi.[597] A few botanists mention the flax as “nearly wild” in the south-east of Russia, to the south of the Caucasus and to the east of Siberia, but it was not known to be truly wild. I then summed up the probabilities, saying, “The varying etymology of the names, the antiquity of cultivation in Egypt, in Europe, and in the north of India, the circumstance that in the latter district flax is cultivated for the yield of oil alone, lead me to believe that two or three species of different origin, confounded by most authors under the name of Linum usitatissimum, were formerly cultivated in different countries, without imitation or communication the one with the other.... I am very doubtful whether the species cultivated by the ancient Egyptians was the species indigenous in Russia and in Siberia.”

My conjectures were confirmed ten years later by a very curious discovery made by Oswald Heer. The lake-dwellers of Eastern Switzerland, at a time when they only used stone implements, and did not know the use of hemp, cultivated and wove a flax which is not our common annual flax, but the perennial flax called Linum angustifolium, which is wild south of the Alps. This is shown by the examination of the capsules, seeds, and especially of the lower part of a plant carefully extracted from the sediment at Robenhausen.[598] The illustration published by Heer shows distinctly a root surmounted by from two to four stems after the manner of perennial plants. The stems had been cut, whereas our common flax is plucked up by the roots, another proof of the persistent nature of the plant. With the remains of the Robenhausen flax some grains of Silene cretica were found, a species which is also foreign to Switzerland, and abundant in Italy in the fields of flax.[599] Hence Heer concluded that the Swiss lake-dwellers imported the seeds of the Italian flax. This was apparently the case, unless we suppose that the climate of Switzerland at that time differed from that of our own epoch, for the perennial flax would not at the present day survive the winters of Eastern Switzerland.[600] Heer’s opinion is supported by the surprising fact that flax has not been found among the remains of the lake-dwellings of Laybach and Mondsee of the Austrian States, where bronze has been discovered.[601] The late epoch of the introduction of flax into this region excludes the hypothesis that the inhabitants of Switzerland received it from Eastern Europe, from which, moreover, they were separated by immense forests.

Since the ingenious observations of the Zurich savant, a flax has been discovered which was employed by the prehistoric inhabitants of the peat-mosses of Lagozza, in Lombardy; and Sordelli has shown that it was the same as that of Robenhausen, L. angustifolium.[602] This ancient people was ignorant of the use of hemp and of metals, but they possessed the same cereals as the Swiss lake-dwellers of the stone age, and ate like them the acorns of Quercus robur, var. sessiliflora. There was, therefore, a civilization which had reached a certain development on both sides of the Alps, before metals, even bronze, were in common use, and before hemp and the domestic fowl were known.[603] It was probably before the arrival of the Aryans in Europe, or soon after that event.[604]

The common names of the flax in ancient European languages may throw some light on this question.

The name lin, llin, linu, linon, linum, lein, lan, exists in all the European languages of Aryan origin of the centre and south of Europe, Keltic, Slavonic, Greek, or Latin. This name is, however, not common to the Aryan languages of India; consequently, as Pictet[605] justly says, the cultivation must have been begun by the western Aryans, and before their arrival in Europe. Another idea occurred to me which led me into further researches, but they were unproductive. I thought that, since this flax was cultivated by the lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Italy before the arrival of the Aryan peoples, it was probably also grown by the Iberians, who then occupied Spain and Gaul; and perhaps some special name for it has remained among the Basques, the supposed descendants of the Iberians. Now, according to several dictionaries of their language,[606] liho, lino, or li, according to the dialects, signifies flax, which agrees with the name diffused throughout Southern Europe. The Basques seem, therefore, to have received flax from peoples of Aryan origin, or perhaps they have lost the ancient name and substituted that of the Kelts and Romans. The name flachs or flax of the Teutonic languages comes from the Old German flahs. There are also special names in the north-west of Europe—pellawa, aiwina, in Finnish;[607] hor, härr, hor, in Danish;[608] hor and tone in ancient Gothic.[609] Haar exists in the German of Salzburg.[610] This word may be in the ordinary sense of the German for thread or hair, as the name li may be connected with the same root as ligare, to bind, and as hör, in the plural hörvar, is connected by philologists[611] with harva, the German root for Flachs; but it is, nevertheless, a fact that in Scandinavian countries and in Finland terms have been used which differ from those employed throughout the south of Europe. This variety shows the antiquity of the cultivation, and agrees with the fact that the lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Italy cultivated a species of flax before the first invasion of the Aryans. It is possible, I might even say probable, that the latter imported the name li rather than the plant or its cultivation; but as there is no wild flax in the north of Europe, an ancient people, the Finns, of Turanian origin, introduced the flax into the north before the Aryans. In this case they must have cultivated the annual flax, for the perennial variety will not bear the severity of the northern winters; while we know how favourable the climate of Riga is in summer to the cultivation of the annual flax. Its first introduction into Gaul, Switzerland, and Italy may have been from the south, by the Iberians, and in Finland by the Finns; and the Aryans may have afterwards diffused those names which were commonest among themselves—that of linum in the south, and of flahs in the north. Perhaps the Aryans and Finns had brought the annual flax from Asia, which would soon have been substituted for the perennial variety, which is less productive and less adapted to cold countries. It is not known precisely at what epoch the cultivation of the annual flax in Italy took the place of that of the perennial linum angustifolium, but it must have been before the Christian era; for Latin authors speak of a well-established cultivation, and Pliny says that the flax was sown in spring and rooted up in the summer.[612] Metal implements were not then wanting, and therefore the flax would have been cut if it had been perennial. Moreover, the latter, if sown in spring, would not have ripened till autumn.

For the same reasons the flax cultivated by the ancient Egyptians must have been an annual. Hitherto neither entire plants nor a great number of capsules have been found in the catacombs of a nature to furnish direct and incontestable proof. Unger[613] alone was able to examine a capsule taken from the bricks of a monument, which Leipsius attributes to the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ, and he found it more like those of L. usitatissimum than of L. angustifolium. Out of three seeds which Braun[614] saw in the Berlin Museum, mixed with those of other cultivated plants, one appeared to him to belong to L. angustifolium, and the other to L. humile; but it must be owned that a single seed without plant or capsule is not sufficient proof. Ancient Egyptian paintings show that flax was not reaped with a sickle like cereals, but uprooted.[615] In Egypt flax is cultivated in the winter, for the summer drought would no more allow of a perennial variety, than the cold of northern countries, where it is sown in spring, to be gathered in in summer. It may be added that the annual flax of the variety called humile is the only one now grown in Abyssinia, and also the only one that modern collectors have seen in Egypt.[616]

Heer suggests that the ancient Egyptians may have cultivated L. angustifolium of the Mediterranean region, sowing it as an annual plant.[617] I am more inclined to believe that they had previously imported or received their flax from Egypt, already in the form of the species L. humile. Their modes of cultivation, and the figures on the monuments, show that their knowledge of the plant dated from a remote antiquity. Now it is known that the Egyptians of the first dynasties before Cheops belonged to a proto-semitic race, which came into Egypt by the isthmus of Suez.[618] Flax has been found in a tomb of ancient Chaldea prior to the existence of Babylon,[619] and its use in this region is lost in the remotest antiquity. Thus the first Egyptians of white race may have imported the cultivated flax, or their immediate successors may have received it from Asia before the epoch of the Phœnician colonies in Greece, and before direct communication was established between Greece and Egypt under the fourteenth dynasty.[620]