Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

AGRICULTURE
The importance of agriculture in human life has been obvious since earliest times. One of the many to stress this importance is the agronomer al-Tighnarj from Granada (5th/l 1th-

6th/12th century), who writes that ”agriculture constitutes the basis of subsistence for men and animals”, so permitting ”the preservation of life and the sustaining of the spirit”. The arrival of the Arabs marked the beginning of a profound development in Peninsular agriculture, which in the last years of Visigothic rule, had regressed and decayed from the high level achieved during the Roman period.

5 Hitti, P 574
6 Jayyusi. P 943
7 Hitti, P.576

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The new arrivals encountered a land whose fertility was described and celebrated by the Arab chroniclers and geographers, and they not only quickly perfected techniques inherited from the HispanoRomans and Visigoths, but added their own specialised expertise in the fields of applied botany, agronomy, pharmacology and medicine-an expertise which, once it had been integrated and applied in practice, produced the great agricultural richness with which alAndalus was blessed.
This expertise was acquired from different sources and transmitted in various ways. The first and most important source was the Eastern Graeco-Byzantine tradition, the second source was the Latin tradition and the last was local knowledge, possibly a LatinMozarabic substratum, which was perfectly assimilated. To this collection of diverse knowledge must be added, at a later date, the learning collected and transmitted in the Nabataean Agriculture, the first great Arabic work of agriculture, which was considered at that time to represent the Mesopotamian tradition.8
In Muslim Spain, on the subject of agriculture, we may proceed with more confidence, since the history of agriculture in Muslim Spain has recently been rewritten by Lucie Bolens. First in Toledo, under the patronage of al-Ma’mum b. Dhi ’I-Nun, and later in Seville, there were, we know, several agriculturalists. Their dates are uncertain, but their activities seem to exist within the framework of the Ta’ifa period, or, at the latest, up to the beginning of that of the Almoravids. The texts which have survived are, for the most part, incomplete, since they are included in much later anthologies compiled by North African writers. We should note the works of the doctor Ibn Wafid (398/1007-467/1074) and Ibn Bassal of Toledo; of Abu ’I-Khayr and Ibn Hajjaj of Seville; and of al-Tighnari, who after studying in Seville, moved to Granada and, moreover, must have been a distinguished man of letters because his biography is to be found in a!-Dhakhira by Ibn Bassam. The last of them, Ibn al’Awwam (he lived some time between 512/1118 and 663/1265), composed his writings by a grafting process: it is a mosaic of what his predecessors had written on agriculture.
An analysis of these treatises shows that we are here faced with a mixture of agricultural traditions, the origins of which date back to Babylonian and Egyptian antiquity, and which reach the
Jayyusi. P 987
Literary & Scientific Development in Muslim Spain 659
medieval period through the Filaha nabatiyya of Ibn Wahshiyya. The Charthaginian, Roman and Hellenistic influences merge with the earlier sources as a consequence of Arabic version of the Byzantine Geoponika. The majority of quotations by authors whose names are mentioned in these Hispano-Arab works are indirect. In other words, as in the case of the astrologer Ibn Abi Rijal, these writers have not seen the original texts from which they cite. Furthermore, they mention sources like the Filaha rumiyya and the Filaha hindiyya. The first may be attributed to a certain Qustus, who is probably an imaginary person invented in the middle of the 4th/10th century by Ali b. Muhammad b. Sa’d.
The agriculturalists of Muslim Spain studied the composition of the soil and endeavoured to make unfilled land cultivable: they tried to define the characteristics of the manure best suited to each situation, and they analysed the water and examined how land could be irrigated by means of water-channels, wells, water-wheels (na’uras) and other devices. Their machinery and primitive wheels, articulated by a winding gear which was very imperfect, since it was only required to draw water in an irregular fashion, probably provided mechanics such as al-Muradi with the inspiration to develop their mechanical ”toys”-toys which would eventually become clocks.
The agriculturalists were aware of the importance of rotating crops and leaving land to lie fallow; they knew that in some cases, the mixing of manure was of paramount importance and thus they managed to raise the standard of agriculture in Muslim Spain to a level which was only surpassed in the 19th century with the development of chemistry. During the Enlightenment (18th century) the Spanish authorities became so convinced of this decline in agriculture that they commissioned a Spanish translation of the work of Ibn al-’Awwam-a work which a good many years later, was translated into French to make it accessible to French Algerian farmers.
If, from the medical point of view, agriculture reached its maturity at the end of the 4th/10th century with the work of alZahrawi, and remained at a reasonably high level in the Iberian Peninsula throughout the 5th/l 1th century, the initial influence which it.exercised on Christian Europe was slight. Here the chief influence

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was that of the Latin translations of the Salerno school made by Constantinus Africans in the 5th/l 1th century.9