Wheat: Did you mean...?

In ancient Egypt, the people sustained the government and the government reciprocated. Egypt had no cash economy until the coming of the Persians in 525 BCE. The people worked the land, the government collected the bounty and then distributed...

Sif is a fertility goddess in Norse mythology, wife of the thunder god Thor, best known for the story in which the trickster god Loki cuts her hair as a prank and is forced to replace it with a magical headpiece, leading to the creation of...

Silver stater from Metapontum, 520 BCE. O: Ear of wheat, R: same incuse. (Alpha Bank Numismatics Museum, Kerkyra, Corfu)

Food and drink in ancient Egypt relied on barley and wheat, the primary crops cultivated along the Nile. The Egyptian diet was based on bread, beer, and vegetables. Meat was expensive and only rarely eaten. The majority of people ate fairly...

In the second year of the Peloponnesian War, 430 BCE, an outbreak of plague erupted in Athens. The illness would persist throughout scattered parts of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean until finally dying out in 426 BCE. The origin of...

The Neolithic Revolution began between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago at several widely dispersed locations across the world, when our ancestors first began planting and raising crops. Agricultural communities sprang up almost simultaneously...

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the leader of Nazi Germany, was intent on attacking the USSR in the summer of 1941. With Western Europe subdued in 1940, Hitler could finally pursue his dream of territorial expansion in the East, destroy Bolshevism...

Madeira is a group of volcanic islands in the North Atlantic which were colonised by the Portuguese from 1420. The settlement and distribution of land rights on the uninhabited islands was a model the Portuguese Crown would copy in other...

The Azores (Açores) are a North Atlantic island group, which was uninhabited before being colonized by the Portuguese from 1439. The Azores were strategically important for Portuguese mariners to use as a stepping stone to progress down the...

The threshing floors of the Bible were outdoor stone floors, usually circular in fashion, used by farmers to process the grain of their crops. For the larger community, like watermills of the recent past, they could be gathering places bustling...