2024-04-07 16:30:08
Researcher Amaia Arranz-Otaegui receiving grain samples from research assistant Ali Shakaiteer at the Shubayqa one site in Jordan, where remains of a loaf baked by hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago were discovered years old, the oldest trace of bread found to date. University of Copenhagen. Undated. JOE ROE / UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN HANDOUT / EPA/MAXPPP
Nissim Amzallag is a creative researcher. Perhaps due to an astonishing academic career, which first led this normal student to specialize in plant biology after a doctorate in botany, before moving towards the history of the ancient Near East.
Doctor in biblical studies, this researcher associated with the Israeli Ben-Gurion University of the Negev was already confusing with his previous work, The Forge of God (Cerf, 2020), in which he hypothesized that the Israelites did not have “invented” Yahweh, original god of monotheisms, but taken from a secret divinity born in an environment of blacksmiths of the Qenite people.
With his latest work The Seeds of the Beyond. Domesticating plants in the Middle East (Ed. de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2023), Nissim Amzallag combines his two specialties, botany and archaeology, to propose a new original thesis on the genesis of religions, by linking the domestication of plants and the birth of divinities.
How can domestication be identified as a pivotal point in human history?
Nissim Amzallag: Domestication is generally approached as the crucial event in the appropriation of the world. Strictly speaking, it designates a transformation of plants making them incapable of perpetuating themselves without human intervention (irrigation, weeding, etc.), which differs from simple cultivation.
Today, we identify around fourteen centers of primary domestication throughout the world (Middle East, China, Amazonia, West Africa, etc.) in which a similar transformation took place several thousand years ago. It is undeniable that domestic plants have contributed to arranging the world according to man’s specific needs.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers “Everything suggests that our myths about death and the afterlife are the heirs of the beliefs of the first “Homo sapiens””
Add to your selections
However, the generally accepted link between the domestication of the environment and its appropriation seems problematic to me on two counts. First, thinking of domestication in a uniform way amounts to aggregating very different events, and with very diverse consequences. For example, the domestication of plants in New Guinea did not lead to a clear break with the wild world, nor even to its reduction to the status of a resource.
Then, the link in question supposes an intentionality behind the phenomenon of domestication, a desire for appropriation at the basis of the transformation of plants. However, domestication is a very mysterious process, of which nothing allows us to affirm straight away that it was desired before bearing its first fruits.
You have 76.53% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
#birth #divinities #Neolithic #period #linked #domestication #plants #East