Page 59 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

keep wild animals from the crops.
Now the area can be allowed to rest, the life-giving ashes
to settle into the soil. When the rains begin in May, the sowing

can start. Then it will be the women’s turn. Beginning at the
foot of the slope, they will work their way up, digging small
holes six inches or so apart with their weighted sticks and drop­

ping four or five grains of the mountain rice in each hole. Noth­
ing more is needed. Except for weeding, the rice needs no more

care until the harvest.
With the harvest there will again be a busy time for all the
villagers. The rice will be cut with flint-edged clay sickles, par­

boiled in large earthenware pots and then mixed with sand,
heated red hot in a beehive-shaped clay oven. When the mixture

is dry, and the sand removed by sieving in wickerwork sieves,
the rice will be pounded in deep wooden mortars to remove the
hulls, and then winnowed by tossing in basketwork trays. Then

the rice is ready for storage in the large pots sunk into the floors
of the houses. Another year’s harvest will be home.

Thus life goes on, with seedtime and harvest marked by the
village feasts, with offerings of fruits and flowers and rice cakes
to the gods who control the increase of the earth. It is a year

like any other.

On the Yellow River, in northern China, life is more organ­
ized. It is the time which later generations will look back upon
as the Hsia Dynasty, the first of the innumerable dynasties which

followed the reigns of the three great emperors of the Golden
Age, Yao, Shun, and Yii. But though there is an emperor, he is

but the titulary head of a loose organization of farming villages
confined to the wooded valley of the river. The villagers clear
their planting areas from the forest with stone axes and with fire,

for bronze, though known, is still rare. They plant millet and
kaoliang and breed cattle, pigs, and dogs for the pot. Had they

known it, it is a frontier agriculture similar in all respects to that
of Europe. But they know nothing of Europe. They probably
know whence came their agricultural way of life, for it cannot

have been more than five or six hundred years since their hunt-