Harvesting
The Harvest Season
The third season, known as Shemu, lasted from the end of March until the end of July. These months witnessed a change in the climate when cooler weather was replaced by the heat of summer. Far to the south of Egypt, in Ethiopia, the whole cycle started again with the arrival of monsoons in May; these gave rise to the Nile inundation, the effects of which were first experienced in Egypt at Elephantine (modern Aswan).
This was the season when crops were harvested in Egypt. Communities worked closely together during this particularly busy time of year, with the men spending long hours in the fields, cutting the corn with short sickles, and gathering in the harvest. Most New Kingdom estates were located at a single site, and this enabled the owner to supervise the different stages of harvesting (depicted in many tomb-scenes) in one place. The initial steps were carried out in the fields, where the men worked laboriously, pausing every so often to chat to each other, or drink from a communal jug of beer. Once the corn had been cut, it was bound in sheaves, packed into baskets, and taken by donkeys to the threshing floor; women used hand baskets to collect any ears of corn dropped along the way. Once the sheaves arrived at the threshing floor – a flat area in the midst of the comstack – the corn was spread out over the floor so that animals could be driven over it to tread out the grain. Donkeys were usually employed for this task in the Old Kingdom, but by the New Kingdom they were largely replaced by oxen. Once the threshing was finished, workers used large wooden forks to assemble the corn and chaff together in a large heap.
The next task involved removing any impurities from the corn: it was passed through a large sieve to extract some of the debris, but most chaff and dirt were taken out by winnowing. This process was usually carried out by women; wooden shovels or scoops were used to throw the corn up in the air to separate the grain from the chaff, and the grain fell to the ground as the chaff was blown forwards. Afterwards, the grain was scooped off the threshing floor, weighed by two estate officials, and then stored in sacks which each contained a fixed quantity of grain. Details of the contents of these sacks were recorded by officials before they were removed by road or river to the granary, a building surrounded by its own wall which stood apart from the main estate-villa. All the main elements of the estate – the family home, granary, stables, sheds for chariots and carts, cattle pens, the yard for daytime animal feeding, and the granary – were themselves enclosed within a boundary wall. The workers climbed up steps to deposit the grain through a small window positioned high up in the wall of the conical-roofed granary, and when supplies were needed, the grain could be removed through another small window lower down in the building. The final stage in preparing this vital food ingredient for the Egyptian diet was to grind the grain into flour.
The Egyptians used the straw, a by-product of cultivating barley and wheat, to make bricks, while the long stubble left behind in the fields was collected and prepared as food for cattle and horses. They also grew a wide variety of plants and vegetables in gardens near their houses and on the mud dykes. Although irrigation occurred only once a year, orchards and gardens which lay near large basins fed by a regular intake of water from the river were productive throughout the year.