Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson
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respect. Borrowing the Turkic word for the sacred color may indicate respect for Turkic cultural forms in the early medieval period, when the Gök Turkic Empire ruled Mongolia and much of Central Asia.
The Altaic phylum, or cluster, bears the name of the Altai Mountains, where it supposedly originated. If it did not originate there, at least the Turkic languages apparently did. All these languages come from the cold steppes and forests of high Central Asia. The Altaic peoples emerge into history fairly late but were obviously active much earlier, having quickly acquired nomadic herding and riding, presumably from Indo-Europeans.
The Altaic peoples have shown a truly astonishing ability to build huge empires. The Mongol Empire is only the most conspicuous of many. Turkic, though not the other languages, has shown a monumental ability to flourish at the expense of local languages. Millions of square miles of formerly IE and other languages’ territory are now Turkic speaking. There are parts of Turkey that in historic times have switched from Hittite to Phrygian to Greek to Turkish—yet archaeology reveals no change in the people themselves. They were and are genetically the same lineages. They switched languages according to who had most recently conquered them.
Similar, if less complicated, language shifts are almost universal in Central Asian history, as elsewhere. Conquered peoples usually pick up the languages of their conquerors, but if the conquerors are few in number, the reverse takes place. In China, the spread of Chinese languages within historic times has led to linguistic absorption of many Thai, Miao, Yao-Mian, Austronesian, and others. Often, these older languages leave traces. Cantonese, in particular, seems to have begun as a form of Tang Dynasty Chinese spoken by Thai people; its tone system, much of its vocabulary (remember kai), and other traits reflect the massive linguistic acculturation of the Zhuang and other Thai-related minorities in historic times. This sort of linguistic acculturation guarantees that any language phylum is going to include languages spoken by very diverse peoples.
It is certain that the Chinese languages proper have expanded with the Chinese state. The core of geographic China became Chinese speaking by the Shang Dynasty. The state of Chu, in and around what is now Hunan, seems to have originally spoken various Thai-Kadai languages. It became Chinese speaking in the latter part of the first millennium BCE—first among the elite, later—slowly—among all. With the spread of the Chinese-speaking groups, several very different languages developed: Cantonese, Shanghainese (Wu), Hakka, two or more Fujianese languages, Gan, Xiang, and so on. These have often been miscalled dialects for political reasons: political leaders have generally promoted the dominant and by far the most widely spoken language, Mandarin or Guoyu (“National Language”). A dialect is, correctly, a subvariant of a language—not a language in its own right. Guoyu is now rapidly replacing local languages and their (actual) dialects. This is, demonstrably, a huge loss to local cultures, literature, the arts, and free expression.
As with the term “China” in its geographical sense, referring to the inhabitants of the region as “the Chinese” or “the Chinese people” before the Qin Dynasty is technically wrong. I try to avoid it but obviously do not always succeed. From Qin on, there is the problem of whether one is using “the Chinese” to mean the linguistic Chinese, or the people of the Chinese state, or the people of the geographical region called China. I usually try to stick with language, but consistency is simply impossible, if only because one must quote sources that use the term quite differently. The linguistic Chinese are now called the Han Chinese, from the Han Dynasty. However, many of the citizens of the Han empire were Tai, Yao, Miao, Vietnamese, Austronesian, Mongol, proto-Turkic, and so on and on. Some spoke languages now extinct and unclassified, like the language of the Xiongnu. So “Han” is as misleading a term as “Chinese.” However, it is established, and I cannot escape it.
The Origins of Agriculture
After humans managed to do without agriculture for around 150,000 years, they suddenly invented it in at least five places (perhaps more) almost at once. These were quite independent inventions. “Agriculture” is defined as food production based on domesticates, that is, plants and animals significantly changed by human selection from any wild ancestors. The selection can be deliberate or accidental, but it is usually deliberate. (Claims that inventing agriculture was an accidental or semi-accidental process are simply not credible; Asouti and Fuller 2013. The most accessible and accurate critique of theories of agriculture is Barker 2006. See also E. Anderson 2011.)
Long ago, V. Gordon Childe (1954) famously wrote of three key revolutions in human history: Neolithic, Urban, and Industrial. The Industrial does not concern us in this book, and the Urban will be treated later. As to the Neolithic: Childe followed the archaeology of his day in thinking that agriculture, pottery, settled life, and ground stone tools all developed together as part of one complex. This was suggested by the archaeology of the time. It has turned out to be wrong. Ground stone, pottery, and settled life all came earlier (and in that order). Pottery developed in East Asia at least 20,000 years ago and independently in the New World considerably later. Settled village life and ground stone tool technology have both been independently invented many times in many areas. Agriculture did ultimately revolutionize human society, but only very slowly.
Agriculture developed first in the Near East, specifically the interior Levant somewhere between south-central Turkey and central Palestine. Then agriculture was invented at least once and probably twice in China. Subsequent inventions occurred in central Mexico, highland and lowland South America (probably as separate events), New Guinea, and possibly the Mississippi Valley and western Africa.
Wheat and barley were both domesticated in the Middle East. Barley may have been independently domesticated in a few spots (D. Harris 2010: 75). The earliest wheat domesticates were two species: einkorn (Triticum monococcum, or T. urartu var. monococcum), native to Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Fertile Crescent. The development of einkorn wheat centered on the Karachadag (Black Mountain) in southeast Turkey but may have been domesticated over a much wider zone (Asouti and Fuller 2013; D. Harris 2010: 77). This species hybridized—naturally or through human selection—with the grass Aegilops speltoides to produce emmer, T. turgidum var. dicoccum, a wholly unnatural plant. Both were domesticated in southern Turkey and the western Fertile Crescent, with innovations likely occurring at various points and diffusing.
Einkorn is almost extinct today, but emmer remains a popular crop in parts of the Middle East, and especially in Italy, where it is known as farro. Thriving in cold wet mountain conditions that bread wheats hate, it remains common in the high Apennines. It also makes a superior porridge and good pasta. Much more important is a selected variety of it, durum wheat (Triticum durum). This is not really a species—simply a form of emmer with extremely hard grains. It is the ideal pasta grain, allowing good al dente preparation. It is largely confined to the Italian world and to the northern Great Plains of North America, which have ideal conditions for growing it and therefore grow most of the world supply. But it reached China early: it is described in the fourteenth-century Yinshan Zhengyao and was found uncommonly but quite widely in North China by J. L. Buck (1937) in the early twentieth century.
The real action, however, took place when emmer crossed with another Aegilops, A. tauschii, in northern Iran or the Azerbaijan region around 6000 BCE. Somewhere just southwest of the Caspian Sea, about 8,000 years ago, a woman noticed that her bread was astonishingly good. It was miraculously light and fluffy, as though the gods had inspired it to rise. Consistently, the bread made of grain from one part of her family field produced bread like this. No one else had anything so good. She and her husband thanked the gods, then carefully selected the grain from that part of the field, and saved it for seed. As neighbors and relatives learned of it, the new high-quality seed spread more and more rapidly. Eventually it took over the world: bread wheat is now the most commonly grown plant on earth and the staple food of billions of people.
Eight thousand years later and many thousand miles away, a laboratory team learned that the local wheat had crossed with a wild grass, a local form of goat-face grass (Aegilops tauschii). From that grass, the local wheat obtained a gene for a form of gluten that allows the dough to trap carbon dioxide bubbles more effectively than regular gluten. The result is light, fluffy bread.
No one knows the name of the discoverer,