Word: barley
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...years and six albums ago. Theirs is an unusual collaboration. Perry lives in Ireland, Gerrard in Australia; the two trade letters and tapes before going into the studio. "We make records because we still have a lot of demons to exorcise," explains Perry. On The Wind That Shakes the Barley, an 18th century Irish song written to commemorate an uprising against the British, Gerrard's echoing a cappella is like a cold wind blowing over unmarked graves. Yulunga (Spirit Dance) begins with ominous droning and then, adding drums, shakers and Gerrard's serpentine singing, builds until its swirling patterns evoke...
...Great, even before Ramses, the first empire the world ever knew was built by a Mesopotamian ruler named Sargon of Akkad. He conquered and subjugated dozens of cities and villages between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers more than 4,000 years ago, forcing them to pay tribute in wheat, barley and silver. For a century the regime flourished, first under Sargon and then under his grandson until suddenly, mysteriously, it collapsed. Neither the capital city of Akkad, famed for its harbor filled with vessels from distant shores, nor the imperial records, etched in cuneiform and possibly chronicling the empire...
...valleys of Central Europe toward northern Germany and Denmark, and south to the foothills of the Alps. Herdsmen like the Iceman, on the lookout for new pastures, began to move to higher ground. On the rims of lakes and marshes, settlers built wooden homes, some on stilts, and cultivated barley and peas. Communities of 50 to 200 people dotted the shores of Lake Constance and a number of Swiss lakes, with central buildings for social functions. These villagers evidently traveled across the Alps; parsley and peppermint from the Mediterranean region have been found in some of their Neolithic dwellings...
...surrounding countryside, newly developed irrigation systems nourished the barley, wheat, flax and other crops that fed the growing cities. Period drawings from Sumer, part of Mesopotamia, provide the earliest known evidence of wheels -- essentially wooden planks rounded at the ends and fitted together in a circle -- which were used on ox-drawn carts and, later, chariots. Sailing ships embarked on distant trading missions. By 3000 B.C., the world's first written language, cuneiform, had appeared on small clay tablets, replacing the strings of marked clay tokens that merchants had previously used to keep track of their transactions. And at least...
Northern Africa was a somewhat wetter place five millenniums ago, and the land was fertile in a broad swath on either side of the Nile. Many Egyptians still lived in huts made of papyrus or mud; raised wheat, barley and livestock; and paid homage to the local chiefs. Within just a few hundred years the Pharaoh Narmer would forge the entire area into the great Egyptian Empire. But recent scholarship shows that local chiefdoms were already coalescing into larger kingdoms, as they were in the neighboring land of Nubia, just upriver. As in Europe, a stable food supply created...