Several archeological studies of the Mediterranean region and western Asia have found evidence of fig cultivation dating back millennia B.C.E. Some of these are in north Africa. The ancient Romans wrote about an African race of fig which Cato termed “Africano”, cultivated from Tunisia westward along the headlands of the Atlas mountains. According to references cited in I. Condit’s monograph, this race forms the ancestry of several figs we cultivate today, including Barnissotte, Franciscana, Reculver, and Violette de Bordeaux.
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The Phoenicians, centered in the eastern Mediterranean in the area that is modern Lebanon, traded actively in the western Mediterranean and colonized northern Africa, southern Iberia, and the nearby islands including Sicily. These colonies included Carthage, which became a huge rival of Rome.
As you noted elsewhere, Cato displayed fresh Carthaginian figs to the Roman Senate as a way of demonstrating how close Carthage was to Rome and therefore how serious was the associated threat.
It seems extremely likely that Phoenician traders and colonists brought figs to North African as well as southern Italy and southern Spain. [The Greeks undoubtedly did the same.]
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Archeological sites with evidence of fig cultivation in north Africa west of Tunisia pre-date the Phoenicians by millennia.
Not surprising. The Phoenicians weren’t the first to travel the Mediterranean from east to west. I’d like to read more – can you provide a reference?
Does the evidence say anything about whether the cultivated figs were (a) imported varieties domesticated elsewhere, or (b) local varieties domesticated locally? And I’m assuming that the words “African race of fig” are used poetically, not scientifically.
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Wait for it.
Frost, R. Compendium of U.S. Fig cultivars c. 2023
Once again, you’re just being difficult.
Are you using your posts to hype your paper(s)?
In any case, this recent paper indicates that farming came to NW Africa as a result of migrations from southern Iberia starting roughly 7500 B.C.
Of course, farming came to Europe as a result of migrations from western Asia. So the most likely path of the domesticated fig would seem to be Western Asia to Southern Europe to NW Africa.
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FWIW, these guys attribute the spread of figs across the Mediterranean to the Phoenicians. Cartage was founded by the Phoenicians in the 9th century BCE. They also say that figs arrived in Greece in the 8th century BCE.
I’ll be really interested to see the evidence of fig cultivation in NW Africa thousands of years earlier. Two thousands of years / millennia earlier would imply roughly 3000 BCE.
9781789242881_23_be6917ed4ff09eee3c8a8fd5c22be1a9.pdf (423.5 KB)
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The notion that the indigenous peoples of north Africa did not learn how to cultivate their native F. carica figs on their own seems biased to me.
It’s an empirical question. That’s why archaeological evidence matters.
Agriculture is not something that springs up automatically just because people have local species that may be amenable to domestication. If I’ve got a billion wild figs trees growing within a few miles of my village, why do I need to plant them? If my tribe migrates between winter and summer territories, picking spots to hunt based on current conditions, why should I establish a farm plot anywhere? The development of agriculture depends on helpful external conditions.
One reason might be population pressure: Those other guys in neighboring villages will pick them first unless I grow my own in a protected location.
Another reason might be climate: Rainfall has gotten scarce so these plants will die unless I grow them near a water source (e.g., the flooding Nile or Euphrates). And then I’ll have to protect them from raids by those other guys.
So hunter-gatherers may avoid agriculture forever without any implications about their capabilities, so long as population pressure is low and climate is benign. It has nothing to do with intelligence or capabilities. Agriculture is not a more intelligent way of securing food than hunting or gathering. Farmers are not inherently smarter. That’s your cultural bias. So “the notion that the indigenous people of [any area] did not [choose to] cultivate their native [plant species] on their own” is NOT biased.
Agriculture does permit population growth, however. Agricultural societies come to outnumber neighboring hunter-gatherers and then conquer them, steal their women, take their land. So the invasion of North Africa by Neolithic (agricultural) populations from Iberia would tend to lead to the adoption of agriculture. The invaders might bring their cultural practices with them. Or the indigenous population might adopt those practices out of necessity to increase food production within a defensible territory.
At any rate, I am interested in the evidence that you rely on in your statements above. To be clear, I am aware of evidence of ancient cultivation of figs in the Levant (e.g., Jericho) and in Eastern North Africa (e.g., Egypt). What I haven’t seen is “evidence of fig cultivation in north Africa west of Tunisia [that] pre-date[s] the Phoenicians by millennia.”
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This is what I’m referring to as biased:
F. carica existed as a native species in north Africa prior to hominids.
This kind of bias goes right along with the Euro-centric idea that the indigenous peoples of Africa and North America first learned to farm from white people. It’s rubbish.
You can either be patient or dig harder.
Since you never present a reference, it’s impossible to know where you pick up this garbage. Maybe you read white supremacist tracts written by non-professionals.
There is zero dispute among anthropologists and archaeologists that native people around the world domesticated crops long before the appearance of white Europeans. For example, every school child knows that maize, potatoes, squashes, and tomatoes (among others) came from the New World. Pictures of the first Thanksgiving, however fanciful, include native-grown corn (maize) and pumpkins (squash). There’re even stories of the Native Americans teaching the Europeans how to plant corn.
So your outrage is either misplaced or contrived.
The authors of this article, which you evidently didn’t bother to read, acknowledge that wild figs grew around the entire perimeter of the Mediterranean (see the map in Fig. 1.1 on p. 2). But the locus of domestication is the Levant: “. . . along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean, domestication of the fig occurred centuries later. These regions had the closest wild ancestor of the cultivated fig, Ficus palmata L., which is the wild F. carica variety of the Levant, South Turkey and Aegean area. It is thought to be the most likely ancestral species of the early domesticated fig.” (p.4)
Maybe your secret sources have found evidence of cultivation of other fig species in North Africa. For example, the referenced article notes the cultivation of the sycamore fig in ancient Egypt. But if so then your attempt to relate this cultivation to modern F. carica varieties such as Violette de Bordeaux fails.
By the way, the indigenous people of North Africa are white people. So your implication of racism is based on your own stereotype that Africa always implies non-white. Whether coastal North Africans domesticated figs has nothing at all to do with race.
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Keep in mind that the language and counting system of the original Babylonians was influenced (if not initiated) by a prior neolithic culture in central present-day Ethiopia.
Fruit landrace names have been used throughout history for several purposes. For example, Malus domestica is used to designate cultivated apple hybrids, and “honey type fig” is used to describe figs that produce fruits with certain characteristics.
The ancient Romans were aware of 4 regionalized categories of fig fruits. These are mentioned in the 3 “On Agriculture” books of Cato, Varro, and Columella, plus the Agriculture section of Pliny’s “Natural History”. They (in modern terms) are African, Italian Honey, Greek Adriatic, and Anatolian. The term “Mt. Etna” used on OurFigs is a misnomer for the latter. In fact the original so-called Mt. Etna was imported to the U.S. from Abruzzo, not southern Italy.
The importance of the Roman observations should not be overlooked. They provide a window into the origins of figs we now have today.
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LOL! The Roman authors you cite wrote roughly 1000 years after the Phoenicians dominated the Mediterranean. You claim that North Africans cultivated figs “millennia” before the Phoenicians. I’ll assume that by “millennia” you mean 2000-4000 years. So doing the arithmetic, you’re claiming that the western North Africans cultivated figs 3000-5000 years before the Romans wrote about fig culture.
Whatever the truth about fig cultivation in North Africa circa 3000-5000 BC, I guarantee you that the Romans circa 0 BC (+/- a couple hundred years) didn’t know a damned thing about it.
Think about it. There are no written records from western North Africa circa 3000-5000 BC. There was no Roman equivalent of archaeology. Roman authors had no possible way to know what was going on across the Mediterranean 3000-5000 years earlier. What they did know was that they could buy figs in North African markets. But they had no clue as to the provenance of the varieties.
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You may be familiar with this already, Richard, but in case it may be useful to you or interesting to anyone else, the Perseus Project is one useful resource for locating classical texts, including agricultural texts among many others.
Link to the page for Columella, author of De Arboribus (“Concerning Trees”) and Res Rustica (“Country Matters”): PerseusCatalog
@JinMA
In my experience the Perseus Project only provides some chapter sections plus synopses of books. I’ve obtained both printed copies and electronic versions of the texts mentioned above here:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/results-list.php?search=LOEB+CLASSICAL+LIBRARY&submit=Search
and here:
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@jrd51
Unrelated to most of the above:
Are you familiar with the air blast event that occurred over the ancient Levant? It’s discovery is causing a rethinking of some of the history of that region.
I taught upper division Math History for several years. It is an elective for some math majors but a requirement for those seeking a secondary Math credential in California. I enjoyed teaching the course then and I’m happy to find it useful now. The primary text I used was Katz “A History Of Mathematics”, plus Dantzig’s “Number” to fill in some of the gaps.
is this relevant to the thread?
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I’ve documented this elsewhere but it’s worth repeating here. In the prior century, a U.S. immigrant family from Abruzzo Italy became the source of two fig cultivars now in circulation. One of them became known as Chicago’s Hearty and Hearty Chicago. Then twenty years ago a nursery in PA got ahold of them and that name shifted to Chicago Hardy. During that same period the nursery was contracting with AgriStarts for the initial TC production of a few figs, and the Mt. Etna story emerged. At the time I was an AgriStarts customer and my sales rep gave me the head’s up about the possible production and I pre-ordered – along with other soon to be fruiting plant TCs. The stories about the cultivars came later when the production was official.
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