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We present a GAP package for computing with Schurian coherent configurations and their representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bread is a very simple manufactured article whose rise in the oven is closely related to the rise of the sun in the sky. AFRICAN VIANDS Egypt and North Africa For thousands of years after the beginnings of Mesopotamian agriculture, an abundance of game animals, lake and river fish, and wild cereals in North Africa did little to discourage a foraging way of life. Hunter-gatherer groups adopted livestock herding, yet continued to gather wild plants – especially the root parts of sedges, rushes, and cattails in riparian environments. But around 5000 bce the Sahara began expanding, an expansion that accelerated sharply around 2000 bce. Desertification ushered people into fertile oases, and especially into the Nile Valley, where periodic migrations from the northwest brought knowledge of the Middle Eastern plant complex. It was in that valley that first barley and later wheat began to flourish, although until farming took firm hold, Nile fish (particularly catfish) and root foods continued to sustain many. By around 4000 bce, however, small states and kingdoms had arisen, supported by “taxes” levied on peasant farmers on food that went directly into the storehouses of the rulers. The small principalities gradually evolved into the two large states of Upper and Lower Egypt that were fused around 3100 bce under the first of the pharaohs. Exploitation quickened of a peasantry that now had nowhere to go. Desertification had trapped them in the Nile Valley, where the Pharaoh owned all of the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We must also take into account the wheat pasta eaten in northern China and Japan, countries usually thought of as consumers of rice or pasta derived from rice. TROPICAL TUCK OF SOUTHEAST ASIA Asia, sprawling over the eastern portion of the Eurasian land mass as the largest of the world's continents was, not surprisingly, the site of many more Neolithic upheavals than those that took place in the Fertile Crescent. Far to its south and east – in East and Southeast Asia (Indochina) – parts of this vast region can claim a close second in agricultural development. Unfortunately, monsoon Asia, with perhaps the best claim, lies in the tropical belt where artifacts do not preserve well. Consequently there are considerable gaps in the archeological record of foodstuffs and much remains speculative. Banana and plantain It has been proposed that in the islands of Melanesia – especially Papua New Guinea – around 9,000 years ago, or even earlier, bananas were cultivated by Australoid peoples whose predecessors reached these Asian outposts by crossing Indonesian land bridges that were later submerged. Geographically there is no problem with this assertion. The wild ancestors of the domesticated banana, Musa acuminata and M. balbisiana, (old usage designated the domesticated banana M. sapientum – “fruit of the wise men” – and the plantain M. paradisiaca – “heavenly fruit”) were located in a region extending from New Guinea to Thailand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization. HUNTER-GATHERERS, who had previously made a living based on their solid knowledge of plant life and an understanding of animal behavior, continued to follow many of their old ways even as they engaged in agricultural activities. Consequently, the Neolithic Revolution, as we have come to call the invention of agriculture, although the most momentous of humankind's achievements, was not revolutionary in that it brought abrupt change. Rather, beginning about 11,000 years ago, grain gathering began to shade into grain cultivation in the Jericho Valley and, at about that time or a little later, hunting started giving way to herding in the Zagros Mountains. Millennia later surpluses were generated, giving rise to agricultural civilizations such as of Mesopotamia, Egypt, northern China, and the Indus Valley, and with them came more complex and stratified societies. It is probably not coincidental that all of these first civilizations emerged within a relatively few centuries of one another, despite the distances separating them. Each one was located on a river and dependent on annual flooding for moist, rich soils rather than on the vagaries of rainfall. Agriculture was simplified because there was little need for plowing or manuring and, as a result, despite occasional famines, populations grew larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]