The ancient Egyptians and the Phœnicians propagated many plants in the region of the Mediterranean, and the Aryan nations, whose migrations towards Europe began about 2500, or at latest 2000 years B.C., carried with them several species already cultivated in Western Asia. We shall see, in studying the history of several species, that some plants were probably cultivated in Europe and in the north of Africa prior to the Aryan migration. This is shown by names in languages more ancient than the Aryan tongues; for instance, Finn, Basque, Berber, and the speech of the Guanchos of the Canary Isles. However, the remains, called kitchen-middens, of ancient Danish dwellings, have hitherto furnished no proof of cultivation or any indication of the possession of metal.[3] The Scandinavians of that period lived principally by fishing and hunting, and perhaps eked out their subsistence by indigenous plants, such as the cabbage, the nature of which does not admit any remnant of traces in the dung-heaps and rubbish, and which, moreover, did not require cultivation. The absence of metals does not in these northern countries argue a greater antiquity than the age of Pericles, or even the palmy days of the Roman republic. Later, when bronze was known in Sweden—a region far removed from the then civilized countries—agriculture had at length been introduced. Among the remains of that epoch was found a carving of a cart drawn by two oxen and driven by a man.[4]
The ancient inhabitants of Eastern Switzerland, at a time when they possessed instruments of polished stone and no metals, cultivated several plants, of which some were of Asiatic origin. Heer[5] has shown, in his admirable work on the lake-dwellings, that the inhabitants had intercourse with the countries south of the Alps. They may also have received plants cultivated by the Iberians, who occupied Gaul before the Kelts. At the period when the lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Savoy possessed bronze, their agriculture was more varied. It seems that the lake-dwellers of Italy, when in possession of this metal, cultivated fewer species than those of Savoy,[6] and this may be due either to a greater antiquity or to local circumstances. The remains of the lake-dwellers of Laybach and of the Mondsee in Austria prove likewise a completely primitive agriculture; no cereals have been found at Laybach, and but a single grain of wheat at the Mondsee.[7] The backward condition of agriculture in this eastern part of Europe is contrary to the hypothesis, based on a few words used by ancient historians, that the Aryans sojourned first in the region of the Danube, and that Thrace was civilized before Greece. In spite of this example, agriculture appears in general to have been more ancient in the temperate parts of Europe than we should be inclined to believe from the Greeks, who were disposed, like certain modern writers, to attribute the origin of all progress to their own nation.