Harinera Vilafranquina
Company specializing in flour and durum wheat semolina production
o Home  o Web map  o Contact
Origins of the raw material: wheat
 
Wooden and stone dibble, (6000 B.C..) Sha'ar Hagolan (Israel)

Sickle to scythe with serrated stone row (7500-4000 B.C.) Sha'ar Hagolan (Israel)

Charred wheat seeds (6500 B.C.) Tell Halula (Israel)

Brick with the impression of an ear of wheat (900-5500 B.C.) Jericho (Palestine)

The current economic model began with the domestication of plants and animals. This economic and symbolic revolution began to develop after the last glaciation in the Fertile Crescent   of the Near East.

This transformation occurred in the East in a time frame of 4,000 years, from 12,000 to 8,000 B.C. and in an extensive geographical area which comprised the area which now contains the states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Iraq and Iran.

 

The milder temperatures there brought about the appearance of a layer of vegetation rich in wheat and barley, grains which would change the face of the Mediterranean. In the fireside mortars on encampments, people who harvested learnt to transform this storable food. Soon, motivated by the need to control their daily sustenance they discovered the secret of agriculture. Thus commenced the world of production, accumulation and ownership, and those societies progressed from harvesting to subsistence production.

 

Dependent on the cereal which they reaped with primitive scythes, they were established with the natural reserves of grain.


With rocks, with bricks baked in the sun, they constructed the first permanent villages with houses provided with granaries and mills, the basic tools for milling.


This new way of life and thinking based on farming surplus spread over a few millennia across the entire basin and it was the origin of the first ancient states.

 

In former times cereal agriculture became sacred because the standard of living of certain people of the Mediterranean basin depended on the quality and quantity of the harvests. The nutritional values of cereal, which were sensed but not known as they are now, gave their cultivation significant value
  next >>