Ancient garden from Babylon to Rome
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Sowing plow
© Institute and Museum of the History of Science

Sowing plow

Life-size model
Opera Laboratori Fiorentini

The Sumerian sowing plow was used contemporaneously for plowing and sowing, operations considered ritual acts that would result in flowering, synonymous with birth. In Sumerian myths, plowing and sowing are frequently used as metaphors for procreation.
Although the techniques of working farmland differ from those of gardening, it is noteworthy that, when vast suburban parks were laid out around the capitals of Nineveh and Khorsabad in the Assyrian Age, trees imported from the empire's furthest regions were transplanted there. Obviously, this would have been impossible without a good knowledge of plowing and sowing techniques.