The history of ancient agriculture is ultimately the history of how most ancient people lived, worked, and organized their societies — and it reveals the degree to which ancient civilization was fundamentally a matter of managing the food surplus that agriculture enabled.

The basic pattern across the ancient Mediterranean world was cereal agriculture (wheat and barley) supplemented by legumes (lentils, beans, chickpeas), olives, grapes, and animal husbandry. The Mediterranean triad of grain, olive, and vine appears so consistently across the region that it reflects both ecological constraints (the Mediterranean climate favors these crops) and shared cultural preferences that shaped agricultural choice.

Irrigation was fundamental in the drier regions. Mesopotamian agriculture depended on the elaborate canal systems fed by the Tigris and Euphrates; Egyptian agriculture depended on the Nile flood and basin irrigation; the terraced hillside agriculture of the Levant and parts of Greece reflected the effort to create cultivable surfaces in rocky terrain. The maintenance of these systems required communal labor and organization that was one of the primary functions of ancient states.

The surplus that agriculture generated — and the ability to extract and store that surplus — was the material foundation of everything else we identify with ancient civilization: monumental architecture, literacy, warfare, long-distance trade, specialized craft production. The archaeological signature of the transition to agriculture (the Neolithic Revolution) — sedentary villages, storage vessels, animal bones from domesticated species — is also the archaeological signature of the beginning of the accumulation of wealth that made complex societies possible.