EARLY HISTORY OF THE PLOW 131 



of distributing corn to all the inhabitants of the earth. The 

 ancient Egyptians had progressed from the crooked stick to a 

 plow consisting of wooden beam, shank, and handle. As early 

 as 1100 B. C., two thousand years before the horse was har- 

 nessed to the plow, the Israelites, who were unskilled in work- 

 ing iron, "went down to the Philistines to sharpen, every 

 man, his share and his coulter." 



History does not give the date of the first plow nor the 

 name of its inventor. The earliest records chronicle its gen- 

 eral use in the preparation of the soil for the harvested crop, 

 but long before written history began men must have observed 

 that the loosened earth bore most abundantly. Perhaps the 

 snout of the wild boar, in its quest for grubs, suggested the 

 shape. A bludgeon sharpened to a point was the crude 

 imitation, and later a widening of the point into chisel shape 

 made the instrument more rapid in its work. The primitive 

 man the savage unused to monotonous toil, first yoked 

 his womankind to the plow, then, with forked stick and thong 

 pressed into service the cattle grazing on the hillsides about 

 him. The long end of the fork at the horns of the bull, the 

 short in the ground, the trunk as a handle, and the plow was 

 invented. The marvelous ease with which the new implement 

 loosened the soil, as compared with the muscle-straining 

 drudgery of the pointed stick, overwhelmed the devout and 

 overawed the superstitious. Plow and power alike took 

 on Olympian attributes. A writer of the last mid-century 

 suggests that the early and widespread belief in the divine origin 

 of agriculture, which discouraged as impious any improve- 

 ment in ancient processes, may have been responsible for the 

 centuries which passed without any alteration in the character 

 of the plow. Certain it is that in many parts of the world, to 

 some extent even in the very foremost agricultural districts, 

 nothing is harder to introduce than new farm methods, as 

 though the shadow of that ancient delusion still fell upon the 

 tiller of the soil. The native Egyptian plow from the valley 



