Wheat, like barley, is an annual grass. Emmer wheat was the most important wheat of the ancient world, but is now a relict crop in mountainous areas between Italy and Turkey. In ancient times up to about the Roman period it was the principal kind of wheat. In the Mediterranean region, hard wheat (T. durum), which is similar to emmer, is still used for a pitta-style bread and for pasta, but nowadays the so-called bread wheat (T aestivum) is the usual crop for flour world-wide.
As a grass it germinates with one seed leaf (monocotyledon) and sends up one to four stems bearing several very narrow leaves. During the late spring in Egypt a green head develops on each stem. These are the ‘ears’, which are whiskery with awns, like barley but unlike most forms of bread wheat nowadays. As the grains swell and ripen, the leaves and stems turn yellow and become straw, which the Israelites had to find for their bricks when they were oppressed by pharaoh (Exodus 5:7). Several grains are grouped into small clusters (spikelets)
An ear of emmer wheat Triticum dicoccum.
Grains of emmer wheat Triticum dicoccum from Tutankhamun’s tomb, now at Kew.
Which break off from the ear on threshing (this is carried out with a flail or a sledge drawn by animals). The tough chaff (hull) that encloses emmer grains was then removed by pounding in a mortar. A symbolic flail was held in Tutankhamun’s golden effigy on his mummification coffin, as well as a crook; these were typical of Osiris as cultivator (flail) and shepherd (crook). Winnowing removed the edible kernel from the light scaly chaff.
During the time of Joseph in Egypt, Genesis 41 relates that the pharaoh, who has not been positively identified, had a dream in which he saw ‘seven ears growing on one stalk, full and good’ signifying the seven years of plenty. Although this is an allegory, in the nineteenth century there were attempts to identify this cereal, especially with rivet wheat (T. turgidum), which has a seven-headed form. But this was not known in Egypt until Graeco-Roman times and the only wheat grown during the pharaonic periods was emmer. The identity of the cereal which was not ruined by hail, mentioned in Exodus 9:32, is also a problem - it cannot be rye (Secale cereale), the ‘rie’ of the Authorized Version (the King James Bible), nor ‘spelt’ (T spelta) of other versions, but it probably was also a variety of emmer akin to the hard wheat.
World History
