Seeds in Ancient Southeast Asia

Continuing from the last post, Ralph Olsen in his Malay Theory for the Book of Mormon Land of Promise claims: “In support of Mala, wheat, barley, millet, rice, and other grains have long been cultivated in Southeast Asia.” He takes this information from a book entitled “Thailand, Aspects of Landscape and Life.”

First of all, Pendleton’s book is about Thailand, which extends along the east of the northern part of the Malay Peninsula, into the middle around the narrow neck, and a little south; however, the area in Olsen’s Land of Promise would be the Land of Nephi where all the grains mentioned were grown by the Nephites (Mosiah 9:9), which is far south of Thailand.

Second, in Pendleton’s book, Chapter 5, “The Agrarian Landscape: Irrigation, Rice Agriculture, and Farm Systems,” the author states: “In agriculture, rice is the dominant crop--almost to the exclusion of other field crops.” The word “wheat” is used only twice in the entire book, such as: “Thailand produces a great number of subsidiary crops, but they occupy an exceedingly small total cultivated area. Although a few crops like cassava, maize, tamarind, and vegetables are exported in small lots, Thailand finds it necessary to import considerable quantities of non-rice foodstuffs to feed her population. In recent years, imports have included wheat and wheat flour, other cereals, coffee and tea, spices, packaged foods, canned and dried milk, fats and oils, tobacco, and fruit.”

The area in white at the bottom of the Peninsula would equate to the Land of Nephi where corn, wheat, barley, neas and sheum were grown. This area is not in Thailand, and is hot, humid, and subtropical—not conducive to wheat and barley growth

Pendleton also states in his book that there is an absence of cereals in Thai Agriculture. And while numerous kinds of millet, wheat, barley, and other cereals long have been cultivated in southern Asia (China and India), they are not known to have been in Malaysia on the Peninsula. In Burma and Yunnan (along the China-Burma-Vietnam border), cereal crops are raised in forest kaingins (burning trees for crop cultivation) by wandering tribal peoples.

One of the problems Olsen seems to have, and perhaps others looking into this idea of what existed on the Malay Peninsula anciently, is the tendency of almost all scholarly and historical works to lump all of southern China, Siam (Thailand), India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Sumatra, Java and Malay, into one basic area and talk about what took place there. However, the Malay Peninsula is a unique area with a very separate history in most things, and the topography of the land is very different than that of most of these other southeast Asian countries. The fact that wheat and barley was grown in China, and even Thailand, does not suggest in the least that it was found in Malay, since the southern half of the Peninsula (Olsen's Land Southward) was and is sub-tropical, hot, humid, wet and with very poor soils. Wheat and barley simply does not grow there anymore than it grew in Mesoamerica in ancient times.

As an example, today China employs over 300 million farmers and ranks first in worldwide farm output, primarily producing rice, wheat, potatoes, sorghum, peanuts, tea, millet, barley, cotton, oilseed, pork and fish. However, in 600 B.C., production was scarce throughout China until Sunshu Ao during the reign of King Ding of Zhou (606 to 586 B.C.) and Ximen Bao (445 to 396 B.C.) set about improving irrigation techniques and systems finally engineered by Li Bing (256 B.C.) in Sichuan (south central China). By the 1st century B.C., China invented the hydraulic-powered trip hammer, and innovated the square-pallet chain pump by the 1st century A.D. By the 4th to 5th century A.D., political stability and a growing labor force led to economic growth and people opened up large areas of wasteland and built irrigation for expanded agricultural use resulting in the growth of two rice crops a year and the use of cattle for plowing and fertilization.

Summing up the entire idea of wheat, barley, and rice, the National Agricultural Institution in 1838 wrote in a report: “While the Mogul and Caucasian races of men subsist upon wheat and barley, rice and mullet form the food of the Malay

Simply put, wheat and barley are not shown in any ancient record as growing in the area of the Malay Peninsula other than possibly in the northeast in Thailand.

(See the next post, “Seeds in Ancient Malay, Part II,” for more on the so-called small seeds of Malay and Olsen’s claim that “sheum” was among these)