16 THE FIG: ITS HISTORY, CULTURE, AND CURING. 
HOME AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE FIG INDUSTRY. 
The probable home of the edible fig* is in the fertile part of southern 
Arabia, where at present the caprifig is wild, and where there are no 
traditions of its introduction. From south Arabia the Bahra tribe? 
is said to have brought the fig to ancient Idumaea and to Coelesyria,* 
whence it was carried by other tribes and races to Syria and the 
Mediterranean shores. The march of the fig was slow and undoubtedly 
required many centuries to reach the shores of the Mediterranean 
coast. Once there, the facilities for transportation and the extensive 
trade and voyages of the maritime nations greatly facilitated its fur- 
ther distribution. 
But while it is probable that the home of the edible fig is to be 
found in Arabia Felix, it is even more likely that the home of the fig 
industry is to be looked for elsewhere. Nearly all the southern culti- 
vated fruits which we now possess appear to have originated some- 
where in western Asia. Almonds, nuts, apricots, peaches, olives, 
Asiatic grapes, dates, figs, prunes, ete., all seem to have been brought 
to great perfection in a country somewhere in Asia, but now unknown 
tous. The bringing to great perfection of so many varieties of fruit 
indicates a very high state of civilization of very old date, compared 
to which the Republics of Greece and Rome must be considered 
modern. Through the very latest archzeological discoveries we now 
know that such a civilization existed as far back as ten thousand 
years ago in western Asia, in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris. 
Nowhere else have archeologists been able to trace such an ancient 
and remarkable civilization; and, as the origin of so many of our 
best fruits, vegetables, cereals, and domestic animals point to a west- 
Asiatic origin, it is not too much to presume that in the most ancient 
civilization of Nippur dwelt the originators of nearly all those e:o- 
nomic vegetables, as well as animal products, on which man, in all 
temperate regions, is now dependent for his sustenance. 
From the motherland, Asia, the fig was carried over the Western 
World by two different peoples and by two distinct routes. These 
two peoples, in ancient times the great colonizers of the world, were 
the Phoenicians and the Greeks, and to both of these may be traced 
the spreading of the culture of the fig. The older colonizer of the 
two was the Phoenician. At the end of the fourteenth century* 
before Christ these thrifty merchants had finished the colonization of 
the great islands of the Mediterranean, their colonies and trading 
posts being by that time securely planted on Cyprus, Rhodes, Sicily, 
Malta, and Corsica. The further course of their trading and coloni- 
zation enterprise lay along the southern shores of the Mediterranean 
'Solms-Laubach (2), pp. 77-78. 
* Lagarde, 3 c¢., p. 383. 
2Tbid., p. 377. 
*Dunker, 74, c. v, p. 39. 
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